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Food

The Perks of Being a Couch Flower: DoorDash Food Delivery

Lately apps that make an average human sitting on a couch feel like they are living in luxury have been all the rage. With the click of a button you can have your groceries, an Uber, or a random man who has agreed to do your laundry at your door. And for people who live in a jam packed city like me, these new apps focused on instant gratification can be invaluable. It’s almost like we are living in an alternate universe where The Little Red Hen does all the work, drives through LA traffic, deals with the parallel parking and STILL lets you eat all the cornbread at the end of the day. We’ve finally made it guys.

A month ago my office was introduced to our latest red hen called DoorDash.

DoorDash is a new food delivery service that has recently expanded its services to LA, including Santa Monica. Because they saw John Liu’s foodie Facebook posts and listened to my email rants about how our coworkers love eating, they chose our office to do a free test run of their food delivery service. Another blog collaboration with John Liu? Yes, you lucky dogs. Below is his review about our experience.

JohnLiu

The Pro’s of Using DoorDash

1. It is an Online Food Delivery Service

I like that I can filter restaurants in my area by business hours and cuisine and search for specific food items instead of having to dig through a pile of menus. When I order the restaurant gets a printed sheet sent to them with my exact order on it, instead of my having to dictate it over the phone to someone in a busy, crowded place of business. I can pay with my credit card via the website, so I don’t have to read it over the phone to a random stranger, and I don’t even have to have it on hand every time. In general, ordering online is just a better experience than calling, and it’s convenient to visit one website instead of many different ones.

2. Has a great restaurant selection

For an online food delivery service to be useful, it has to have a good list of restaurants to choose from. DoorDash has a very solid selection, including several great places I haven’t seen on competing services.

3. Allows for group orders

This is a great feature that is missing from many competitors. DoorDash allows any user to create a group order, without having to sign up for a corporate account.

[Carly Bird Note: Their group ordering feature is flawless. You can create an order and send out a link to all of your coworkers to easily add what they would like to eat. It also tells you what each person has ordered and how much they spent to make it easy to break up the bill afterward. I once used a service that would time your group order and whoever didn’t add on their menu item in the 5 minute time slot would lose their chance. It was a terrifying experience for people who get anxiety making decisions or for the guy that went to the bathroom and missed out on ordering entirely. Long story short: this process is hassle free, the order doesn’t time out, and it’s easy for other people to contribute to the group order making it a nice solution for coordinating client or coworker lunches. ]

4. Great communication and customer service

Once you’ve placed your order, DoorDash updates you with text messages on the status of your food so you know when your order has been picked up and is on its way to you. One of the most annoying parts of the food ordering experience is the uncertainty of when it’s going to arrive – Doordash does about as good a job as possible minimizing that.

If you order out a lot, eventually you’ll run into some issues. The restaurant is suddenly closed and didn’t notify the delivery service. They are out of the item you ordered. There’s a huge pileup between the restaurant and your place. Doordash customer service does a great job of proactively contacting you as soon as possible and finding a good solution for you.

5. Try it for free!

DoorDash is a great service and it does comes with a price. Each order has a $7 delivery fee, plus tip (And you are a terrible person if you don’t tip). However, right now your first order on Doordash gets free delivery and you can earn credits by referring them to your friends. There’s really no reason not to try it at least once.

[Carly Bird Note: Also, because you are reading CarlyBird.com you will get another free delivery by using the code: CARLYBIRD. That’s two free deliveries. That’s two nights you can sit at home in your underwear. ]

6. Order syncing between mobile app and desktop.

There is a mobile app, and it works well, and it has live syncing between desktop and mobile. Pretty sweet.

Additional Thoughts and Joint Conclusion

DoorDash is still a new service so it has room for improvement in terms of their website and app usability. There’s certain functionality you would expect that they don’t have, like the ability to sort or filter restaurants or edit an item in your shopping cart. They also only deliver within specific time windows (Right now DoorDash only accepts orders from 11:30 AM- 2:00PM & 3:00PM on weekends- and then 5:00 PM -10:00PM. These are typically the standard times we order anyway, but thought we should mention it for those late-night foodies and early bird brunchers.) However, overall their customer service, group ordering functionality, and speed make them a top contender for food delivery in the LA area and one of our personal favorites.

Try them out and tell us what you think!

FOOD
Food

The Best Food in Los Angeles

My office is really into food. We talk about where we are going to eat lunch starting at 10:00 am. Sometimes while we are still eating breakfast. We do laps around upcoming restaurants under construction in Santa Monica and make predictions of the food before the menu has even been made public. My coworker Ellen was recently highlighted on the Tender Greens blog as their official duchess after she checked in to their Santa Monica location over 100 times. Yes, 100. Multiply that number by a work team of 30 and you will see why TG gives us free cookies and drinks on the house. Here are screenshots from John Liu’s Facebook page (another coworker) to further prove my point.

Exhibit A:

John Liu Loves Food


Exhibit B:

John Liu Loves Food


Exhibit C:

John Liu Loves Food


Now that you understand our love for food, you should also believe me when I say that this Pinterest map I made of all of our top restaurants in LA is an ongoing effort to make sure your taste buds are spoiled as much as ours. It not only shows the best restaurants relative to you, but each one links back to it’s corresponding Yelp page to give you more information. Bon Appetite.

The LA Foodie Guide ❤

Click on the board below to access the full Pinterest map showing the locations of our top foodie picks.

Follow The Carly Bird’s board LA Foodie Guide ❤ on Pinterest.

This is a public service announcement.

Image Credit: RoamingHunger.com

Fluffer Nutter Sandwich
Food, Life

Meet the Fluffer Nutter

The first time I realized my coworker was an extreme foodie was when he spent 10 minutes breaking down the elements of what makes a good popsicle. Turns out that if you want to know everything there is to know about the ideal frozen sugar-free fruit freeze, there is a foodie for that. His name is John Liu. And he graduated when he was 15. Meaning he learned how describe his upper-class palette with words like texture, umami, and froth at the same age that I was inhaling frosty covered chicken nuggets.

Since, it is not healthy to let him keep pacing by my desk and thrusting his forehead into his palms out of frustration of my eating habits, I agreed to do a food challenge. And in honor of the greatest tumblr of all time selleckwaterfallsandwich.tumblr.com, I will be illustrating the entire post incorporating Tom Selleck, waterfalls, and this weeks feature: the Fluffer Nutter sandwich. Without further adieu meet John Liu

The Foodie – John Liu

My favorite CarlyBird.com blog post is How To Fit in With a Colony of Vegetable Lovers. This post has everything – great cover image, hilarious anecdote, and then… a list of “Gasps” that I happened to be a part of.

I gasped when Carly brought her tv dinner for lunch, and again when she was so enthusiastic for McDonald’s. Not because I’m a healthy eating nut, but because I’m a foodie. I love good food – it’s really important to me that to make as many meals as possible a great experience.

The Tragedy

Meals are opportunities to delight your senses – and you only get so many of them. You’re only really in charge of your own food after you’re an adult with a stable income, and there’s always going to be times you’re just too busy or too broke. So, in reality, you only get to control what you eat for about 15,000 meals in your lifetime. To some people, that’s a lot. To me, that’s a depressing limit.

Coming from this mindset, it’s shocking to me how many people (like Carly) just throw away their opportunities to have a delicious meal, settling for something bland or generic.

The Challenge

So, we bring you the Carly Bird Food Challenge. I’m going to challenge Carly to eat a variety of different things. Some of them I expect her to like, for others “hopeful” would be a better word.

Episode 1: The Fluffernutter Sandwich

For the first week, I figured we’d start off with something easy that we could make in Carly’s kitchen that she’s almost guaranteed to like. I picked a regional specialty from where I grew up in Southern New England – the Fluf fernutter Sandwich.

Marshmallow Fluff, also known as marshmallow creme, is a sweet, spreadable marshmallow-like confection – more or less spreadable sugar. It was popularized in Somerville, MA – a small suburb of Boston – and has become a regional tradition, right up there with clam chowder, lobstah rolls, and the New York System.

and the city of Somerville responded by starting an annual Fluff festival.

Fluff is most popularly eaten as part of a Fluffernutter Sandwich – a sandwich of white bread, fluff, and peanut butter. It’s like a PB&J, except with Fluff. Sweeter, chewier, and still (kind of) delicious. These sandwiches are actually a little too sweet for my palate, but I figured it’d be a great fit for the recipient of the Choco Slurry.

The Review- Carly Bird

I don’t know how to do a food review other than saying I endorse this sandwich. It’s super easy to make and packed with sugar. The marshmellow fluff had the perfect amount of froth to make this creamy textured sandwich delish. I would give this selection a 10.

Help John Liu help me by listing any food ideas for next time below or just comment with your feelings about Tom Selleck and the Fluffer Nutter.