Who delivers to my house?

March 28, 2012 11:59 AM

How do I find out which local restaurants will deliver to my address?

I bought a house about a year ago in a fairly rural area. As far as I know, the only establishment that will deliver to our house is the local Pizza Hut, which neither my wife nor I are too crazy about, and even they won't deliver before 4 PM (which doesn't work for lunch). Invariably, if we order delivery from them, the driver will show up at the door with a "Wow, I didn't know we delivered way out here."

There are other take-out places (pizza, Chinese food) that we like better which don't deliver to our house, but if I order carry-out, they are close enough that the food is still too hot to eat by the time I get it home.

I'm wondering, aside from taking the phone book under "restaurants" and calling each and every one to ask if they deliver, if there's a way to find out who delivers and what kind of delivery food we can get. Ideally this would be some sort of website where you could punch in your address and up pops a list of places that will deliver food to your address with links to their menus. (As a test, if you punch in my address, it should at the very least return the local Pizza Hut rather than "sorry, you're SOL," because I know for a FACT they deliver to our house.)

Googling has turned up a bunch of sites that are not in my area or say something like "we don't have any restaurants near your ZIP code." As an aside to this, just the ZIP code alone is likely useless. We live in a ZIP code that covers a very large physical area which also includes portions of the closest medium-size city -- just because a place delivers to somewhere in our ZIP code doesn't mean they will deliver to our house.

posted by tckma to food & drink (13 answers total)

I doubt you're going to find this online, but I could be wrong. I'd call the largest hotel closest to you and ask them for a list. Nearly every major hotel I've been to has a list posted near the phone in the room.
posted by desjardins at 12:10 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

What you want sounds exactly like Grubhub, which is awesome, but I seriously doubt it works near you.
posted by Oktober at 12:21 PM on March 28, 2012

Just eat - great in the UK, not sure how good it is in the US.
posted by Laura_J at 12:23 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Oktober -- you are right.

Going to Grubhub, putting in my address, selecting "delivery," and putting in nothing else yields the following:

Blast! We can't find anything that matches your search.

However, we did find…

* 2 total restaurants serving your area.


If I then try to see what those 2 restaurants are, it keeps asking me to confirm my address. "Are you at this address, or at this one?" -- with both addresses identical except that one has an incorrect ZIP code for the next town over. So I never even get to see what the two restaurants are.

I should try picking the address with the wrong ZIP, as the Pizza Hut is in that ZIP code.
posted by tckma at 12:27 PM on March 28, 2012

Have you tried Foodler?
posted by eenagy at 12:29 PM on March 28, 2012

Just Eat doesn't have the US as a country to select.
posted by tckma at 12:31 PM on March 28, 2012

Especially in a rural area, you're pretty much going to have to call, and outside of urban areas, I wouldn't count on anybody besides pizza delivering. I got markedly squee when I first moved to a place with delivery Chinese, and I currently live in a place where part of the pizza places whose chain websites insist they *do* deliver to my house won't on the grounds that they aren't *really* supposed to cover my neighborhood (wtf?), and Jimmy John's insists that I'm not within their delivery area distance even when I tried to point out that if you did Google Maps it said it was under the mileage. Delivery is just a thing you sort of learn to live without when you're not in a reasonably sophisticated urban area.
posted by gracedissolved at 12:31 PM on March 28, 2012

I use eat24hours.com - you can put in your exact location and get a list of restaurants that deliver to you. Of course, you might have the same experience you did on Grubhub, but it's easy and worth a try.
posted by insectosaurus at 1:07 PM on March 28, 2012

Foodler and eat24hours turned up nothing. I get the feeling I'll have to go the hotel route or calling individual places.
posted by tckma at 1:28 PM on March 28, 2012

One more to try is Seamless.

But all restaurants seem to register on all available delivery websites.
posted by caclwmr4 at 1:35 PM on March 28, 2012

FWIW when I lived in Super Rural Ass End, RI, we used to have a bridge. The restaurants in town would meet us in the middle of the bridge, we'd hand over money, the delivery guy would hand over food, and everyone would drive back where we came.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:15 PM on March 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

My little hack (developed after having the umpteenth restaurant tell me that they don't deliver to my area) was to ask to speak to the manager and let him/her know that I realized my address was outside of their normal delivery area, but I assured them that I'd tip very well -- and I always did; way above average because they were doing ME a favor, and I appreciated it and wanted to compensate them for their trouble. Once they get you in their system as a regular and a big tipper, you're golden.
posted by LuckySeven~ at 10:19 PM on March 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

Do you have neighbours? I bet they'd be better help than the internet, at least in this particular case.
posted by vasi at 10:20 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]