DoorDash – C-VILLE Weekly

Take us out

In an ongoing effort to support local dining establishments during the pandemic, our writers have been enjoying a variety of takeout meals
from some of their favorite restaurants. Contribute to this ongoing series by sending your own delicious experiences to living@c-ville.com.

Tavola

There are restaurants I desperately want to survive, and Tavola* is one of them. Before COVID, each time we landed a coveted table at Tavola, we sat down knowing the food would excel, the service would be top-notch, and the perfectly curated Italian wines would send me back to favorite meals in Tuscany. And if we got “stuck” waiting in the bar, the mixologists’ cocktails were out of this world. It’s a place where my loved ones and I have marked joyful special occasions and toasted friends prematurely lost. This place is very dear to me.

All that said, Tavola offers easy online ordering and curbside pick up. These days, I often start with a gimlet. Tavola bartenders make theirs with pineapple-infused Tito’s vodka, lime, cardamom, and pink peppercorn. It goes down a little too fast.

Normally I’m a creature of habit, but at Tavola I struggle over what to order. I love the carciofi, traditional fried roman artichokes, served atop whipped goat cheese and garlic aioli. I adore the spiedini di gamberi, a pancetta-wrapped shrimp on a bed of baby arugula and oven-roasted tomatoes with fresh mozzarella and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. I find myself returning to the burrata—gooey-soft and luscious mozzarella served with housemade crostini, arugula pesto, and sundried tomatoes. I often order the insalata verde, a simple local bibb lettuce salad with Meyer lemon vinaigrette, crunchy garlic croutons, and grated Grana Padano.

I’m also a sucker for the bucatini con polpette, the housemade meatballs with bucatini pasta, and the capellini gamberi raucci—sautéed shrimp, tomatoes, capers, soave, lemon, garlic, and Gorgonzola fonduta. (Ditto the pappardelle Bolognese, with housemade pasta.) But my heart belongs to the cotoletta di maiale alla Milanese—breaded pork cutlets (from my wonderful friends at Double H Farm) served over a bed of sautéed baby arugula and roasted Roma tomatoes, capers, and a creamy, buttery Meyer lemon sauce.

In my most recent Tavola takeout meal, I skipped the tiramisu. But I immediately regretted that decision, as Tavola’s compares to the best I’ve had in my many trips to Italy, finding the perfect balance of zabaglione and espresso-soaked ladyfingers. I guess that means I’ll just have to return soon.—Jenny Gardiner

Ivy Provisions

Ivy Provisions reopened in October after being closing at the beginning of the pandemic, and on a recent Saturday I ordered online to avoid weekend lines. There were no customers ahead of me when I picked up my Winner, Winner sandwich—roasted chicken, smoked bacon, lettuce, tomato, and green goddess dressing served on a baguette with a pickle spear on the side. The only complaint I had was my pickle was pitifully skinny and limp, but the sandwich made up for it with its substantial size. My favorite part was the contrast of the crispy bacon and baguette to the tender, roasted chicken. I wanted the sandwich to have a bit more kick or maybe more sauce, but that’s being picky. The green goddess dressing was sufficient. The rest of the menu is enticing too—the small sandwich joint offers immense flavors with its creations—and you can now get a free cup of locally roasted coffee with the purchase of a sandwich before 10am, Monday-Friday.—Madison McNamee

Al Carbon

When I crave something different, I turn to Al Carbon. The restaurant’s specialty, as its name implies (Spanish for cooking over charcoal), is chicken prepared in a Peruvian-style charcoal oven. The locally sourced chicken is marinated in a blend of spices for 24 hours before being slow-cooked rotisserie style. It’s served whole, by the half, or by the quarter.

While you can order online or over the phone, I opted for DoorDash. I ordered the Para Papa, which includes half of a chicken, two sides, and one salsa. The chicken was tender and flavorful. The spot offers many side choices, from French fries and mac and cheese to roasted cactus and tamales, and I selected the poblano rice and street corn. The healthy serving of rice paired well with the chicken, and the street corn, slathered with mayonnaise, cotija cheese, chili powder, and lime zest, was a perfect combination of sweet and savory. For the salsa, I chose the jalapeño cilantro, which is mildly spicy.

I finished the meal with churros, rolled in cinnamon sugar. They had just the right amount of crunch on the outside and sweet Bavarian cream on the inside.

Al Carbon also serves an array of South American and Mexican cuisine—huarache, tamales, tacos, flautas, burritos. No matter what you order, the portions are substantial—I had food left over for lunch the next day.—Laura Drummond

*Tavola is co-owned by culture editor Tami Keaveny.

Guerrilla tactics: Food-delivery services take a bite out of local restaurants

It’s a slow Wednesday afternoon at The Brick Oven, where owner Dino Hoxhaj slides into one of his brown upholstered booths and heaves an exasperated sigh as he looks around his restaurant in the Rio Hill Shopping Center.

“All the third parties suck,” he says, shaking his head.

He’s talking about food-delivery services like DoorDash and Postmates, and Hoxha, who purchased his pizza shop in January 2018, is one of dozens of Charlottesville restaurant owners who’ve become increasingly frustrated with them. The problem? These billion-dollar companies are listing local restaurants on their mobile apps as eligible for delivery, despite never receiving permission to do so.

On July 26, a Postmates driver pulled up to local Italian restaurant Tavola expecting an order of food to be ready for him to bring to a customer. Tavola, which is co-owned by C-VILLE Weekly arts editor Tami Keaveny, doesn’t accept take-out orders, so employees turned him away.

Three days later, a Postmates representative reached out to the restaurant and spoke with wine manager Priscilla Martin Curley, who asked for Tavola to be removed from the app. As of press time, Tavola’s listing is still live, and the restaurant continues to receive calls from customers complaining their orders were canceled.

“It’s crazy, I really have been trying and I can’t contact them,” Martin Curley says. “It’s really frustrating because…I have specifically said on the phone that we don’t consent.”

Brick Oven and Tavola are very different types of restaurants, but employees at both say third-party delivery services are bad for business—and they’re not alone. Postmates, which didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, also lists several other local restaurants that say they’ve never been contacted by the company, including Paradox Pastry, Lampo Neapolitan Pizzeria, and Ace Biscuit & Barbecue.

Andrew “Wolf” Autry is the manager at Ace Biscuit & Barbecue, which doesn’t participate in delivery services because he says its food is better served hot. After he turned a Postmates driver away, a company representative called to ask why.

“I told him that every Postmates order that came in here I was just gonna laugh at them and tell them no,” Autry says. “He laughed and was like, ‘Good luck with that.’”

https://www.facebook.com/375064949209461/posts/2337573012958635?s=100001820368031&sfns=mo

This isn’t an issue that’s unique to Charlottesville. In 2015, Vox Media’s food site Eater wrote that Postmates uses the personalized search-engine app Foursquare to compile lists of restaurants and businesses, and automatically uploads them to the app for users to select from.

And Postmates isn’t the only food-delivery service to do it.

In February, Paradox Pastry issued a cease-and-desist letter to DoorDash. Owner Jenny Peterson says that not only did DoorDash list the bakery on its mobile app without her permission, it misstated some prices as well. She also struggled getting in contact with the company and ultimately decided to send the letter through a lawyer.

“Apparently that’s the guerrilla tactic for these delivery services,” Peterson says. “They just put [listings] on there and show up for orders.”

Although it’s been a few months since Paradox or Lampo had any trouble, employees from both restaurants say this approach has been a common complaint across the local restaurant scene. Some worry that customers will form poor opinions of their businesses because of a bad experience with delivery services the restaurants never signed up for.

Both Paradox and Brick Oven have made agreements with GrubHub (yet another food-delivery service), which contacted them and received their approvals before including them on its app, with the opportunity to deactivate their listings whenever they like. Both owners have since deactivated their listings, and are skeptical that turning them back on would be profitable.

“At first it seems like you’re making [more] money,” Hoxhaj says. “But when I see that the delivery driver is making more money than me per order…It’s my food and my reputation and I pay the rent and everything; they’re just driving around and making more than the restaurant.”

GrubHub takes a 15 to 30 percent commission on all orders. This has become problematic for Hoxhaj because in March 2018, GrubHub signed a deal with the crowd-sourcing review site Yelp to integrate the food-delivery service’s restaurant network into Yelp’s server. Although Brick Oven’s phone number is listed on its Yelp profile, the “order takeout or delivery” button above it takes users to another screen that allows them to complete the order through GrubHub.

A similar scenario unfolds on Google, where an “order delivery” widget appears under the restaurant’s name in a search. However, the link doesn’t direct users to Brick Oven, which makes its own deliveries. It opens up another site through DoorDash instead.

Hoxhaj is planning to reactivate GrubHub when UVA students return to Charlottesville in a week, to help meet the higher demand. But between sharing his profits with the delivery service and turning away unwanted Postmates and DoorDash drivers—sometimes “five or six a day”—there’s no escaping the constant reminder that he’s not in control of how his customers order his food.

Despite his food costs being relatively low, Hoxhaj says that on “80 or 90 percent of orders, I break even.”

“This is the life we live in,” he says. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”