Meal home delivery options in Pittsburgh

January 25, 2011 12:31 PM

What places are available to deliver food and/or prepared meals to a family in the Pittsburgh area?

I work as a telecommuter, as does everyone else on my team. The wife of one of my co-workers, who is based in Pittsburgh, is going through aggressive cancer treatment right now. They have children, so I imagine the burden of day-to-day activities right now is pretty heavy. We'd like to help out, and I thought the best way would be to get some food delivered to their door several times in the next few months.

None of the rest of the team are based in Pittsburgh or have any knowledge of places that might provide this sort of service there. I can google for food delivery, but I'm interested in specific recommendations, esp. with these circumstances in mind.

posted by mcstayinskool to food & drink (9 answers total)

Are you looking for grocery delivery or restaurant meals? Wheel Deliver and Meals Delivered both offer a selection of restaurants in the area to choose from. I've had good experiences with both of them.
posted by sherlockt at 12:42 PM on January 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

This earlier thread didn't get much of a response, but you might want to ask msali what she ended up doing.

Wheel Deliver has always worked really well for me.
posted by punchtothehead at 1:28 PM on January 25, 2011

Foodler has a list.
posted by IAmBroom at 1:29 PM on January 25, 2011

Note that both Wheel Deliver and Meals Delivered have restrictions on what parts of the city they service, mostly Downtown and East End areas...

As for grocery delivery, see Good Apples, which bills itself as 'the virtual farmer's market', and its parent Right by Nature, an "organic, natural and convention[al] foods" grocery; both offer home delivery, though again it's only available to certain areas (mostly central, near-East, and near-North neighborhoods). RbN is a good, though somewhat more-expensive than usual (because, again, it's mostly organic- and natural-foods and related products), but I've never used their delivery services.
posted by FlyingMonkey at 1:33 PM on January 25, 2011

Apparently there's now a new third restaurant-delivery service, Pittsburgh Delivers. I've never heard of, let alone used, them, and again they only deliver to certain areas, mostly the East End and places just over the rivers from Downtown.

Also, while Foodler apparently knows about Pittsburgh Delivers and some pizza and other places that deliver, it completely misses out Wheel Deliver and Meals Delivered, not to mention many of the pizza places, so definitely take it as a starting point, not a compendium.
posted by FlyingMonkey at 1:40 PM on January 25, 2011

Do they live in the city proper or in the suburbs?
posted by amicamentis at 2:43 PM on January 25, 2011

Appears to be the 'burbs. Cranberry Township...
posted by mcstayinskool at 2:57 PM on January 25, 2011

Cranberry - that's way up north so most likely out of Wheel Deliver's zone. (Why can't I find their delivery zone on their site?) If most of these services focus on the east end, it's probably because that's where the big universities are.

Looks like your best bet is to try contacting one of the local restaurants up there. Or to send them a gift card for their nearest grocery store. (Giant Eagles are the primary stores around here. They offer gift cards for sale online.) It would mean they'd still have to get to the store to shop, but it's still a nice gift.
posted by booth at 7:28 PM on January 25, 2011

Cranberry's a good half-hour north of town, so WD and MD aren't going to make it that far---they don't even come to me, and I live practically within spitting distance of Downtown.

McGinnis Sisters, another small local grocery chain, does gift baskets; they "offer limited local delivery and ship nationwide [via] UPS."
posted by FlyingMonkey at 7:04 AM on January 26, 2011