Have you heard of DoorDash before? You might not have as they are relatively new to San Diego. They have an app you can download (you can use a web browser too) which allows you to order food or drinks from the comfort of your home. The restaurant prepares your order, and a delivery person or “dasher” comes to pick it up and deliver it to your house. There is a delivery fee of $3.99 for DoorDash Select restaurants or alternatively it costs $6.99 for other restaurants that are not DoorDash Select. The DoorDash Select restaurants are ones that DoorDash has carefully vetted and worked out all the kinks with in order to deliver a more seamless experience. This allows them to lower the cost for everyone involved. Currently the delivery range is 4.9 miles, but it is easy to enter your address into the app to see what restaurants work in your area.
Ordering is super easy and there is a $5 credit all new customers receive when you sign up here(we get $5 too!). I have used other competitors before and noticed one difference right off the bat. There isn’t a map where you can track your delivery. Instead, DoorDash uses a step by step list of the different tasks that need to happen before you get your delivery. This is alright, but I do like to see a moving car coming closer and closer to my house. In reality though, there must be some safety concerns with a live map and being able to see where your delivery driver lives or starts their drive from. The delivery time was estimated to be 71 minutes after we ordered from Grill House Cafe. This was not a DoorDash Select restaurant and they just started service in the Mira Mesa area so the selection was not as robust as say downtown San Diego where they have been operating for much longer. When I placed this order there were about 40 restaurants available versus if I ordered in downtown I would have well over 100 to choose from.
We had a little get together with friends so we opted to order a bunch of stuff from a place we don’t normally frequent. I was shocked that the delivery came almost at exactly the estimated time of 8:17 pm. In fact the dasher actually called me a minute earlier to make sure she was at the right place. I was told that one of the things that sets DoorDash apart from its competitors is its technology. I haven’t had a chance to see it firsthand yet but I know for a fact that the other food delivery services I have tried were not there at the exact time they told me they would be there. Very impressive. So here is all of our food laid out, ready to be opened like presents on Christmas Eve. 
Weeeee! That was fun. Grill House Cafe is about 5.5 miles away from my friends place and with a 71 minute wait time, I wasn’t sure if the food would be hot still. Luckily, the dasher had a warm container much like a pizza delivery container that seemed to retain heat pretty well. The stews we got and chicken kabob plates were pretty warm and definitely didn’t need to be warmed up again.
I don’t usually shy away from going to new places or ordering things I have never ordered before, but DoorDash definitely encourages you to get whatever you want and to not feel weird about it. After all, it shouldn’t feel as awkward interacting with your phone as opposed to asking someone about a dish you never heard of in person.
In the age of instant gratification, services like these are here to stay. And if you are lucky to live or work near Supernatural Sandwiches, Carnitas’ Snack Shack, Cafe 21 or one of your my other favorite restaurants you can task DoorDash with the job of picking it up and delivering it straight to your door step. Imagine eating a pork sandwich from Carnitas’ Snack Shack on your couch watching tv. How awesome would that be!? Their delivery times are typically much shorter than 71 minutes and once they expand to the surrounding areas of San Diego I would expect it to be that much more efficient. For the convenience and efficiency alone I would use DoorDash again in the future.
Disclaimer: We were given credit to try out DoorDash, but the opinions stated are our own.
DoorDash
www.doordash.com
