An iPad app that makes ordering restaurant deliveries seamless and a new food truck from an award-winning chef are the subjects of recent USA Character Approved Blog posts.
When it comes to ordering in, I am a Luddite. Menus stuck to the fridge with magnets and the Google are my go-tos. Programming our neighborhood Chinese place and The Brown Sack into my cell phone was a technological breakthrough for me. So imagine my excitement, skepticism and trepidations when I ordered dinner on an iPad recently.
The event was a launch party for Seamless.com’s new iPad app. Rather than bring in food, Seamless turned the party into one big product demo. Guests were invited to order dinner from restaurants in the area using the app (on Seamless’s nickel, to be clear).
Ordering was, well, seamless. We chose the cuisines we were hungry for, saw menus, photos and even reviews and ratings for scores of restaurants in the immediate area. The iPad’s large touch screen made navigating easy and quickly turned ordering dinner into a social event.
Ordering food with iPhones, Androids and Blackberrys is quickly gaining ground on ordering via computer (or, if you’re like me, by phone), and Seamless is the first mobile and online ordering service to offer an iPad app. For more about the app, including a video demo and how to get it for free, check out my latest post on the USA Character Approved Blog.
Finally, some good news from Washington, DC:
José Andrés launches a food truck
In a city famous for political gridlock and everything grinding to a halt, Chef José Andrés is in overdrive. The Spanish-born, DC-based chef is credited with bringing small plates to America. He’s worked with Ferran Adrià at elBulli. And now, in addition to running his growing restaurant empire in our nation’s capital and elsewhere, he’s launched a food truck.
The already hugely popular truck, Pepe, serves foods adapted from things Andrés grew up eating. And while up-and-coming chefs use food trucks as ways to launch careers and eventually move into the bricks-and-mortar restaurant arena, Andrés sees Pepe as a way to keep his own cooking and business fresh. “I think every chef should have a food truck. It’s a good way to test the markets, to invest in meeting the future restaurant goers,” he said at a recent press interview. You can find out more about Pepe and its menu at this post on the USA Character Approved Blog.