I have been reflecting on some eating experience over the last few years. I do think that the growth of food delivery services such as Deliveroo and UberEATS has been a double edged sword for the hospitality industry. In some ways it means sales have increased as they are now getting more orders in, however this is having a negative impact on the in-restaurant dining experience. It has to be said most of these experiences have been at Wagamama.
I wrote back in 2021 about my experience at Wagamama in Edinburgh.
Overall we had a nice meal, the place was busy, but the service was attentive. It was noticeable though how the number of takeaway and delivery orders were impacting on the service to the customers who were actually sitting down in the restaurant. We know that there has been a huge growth in the demand for these services during the pandemic, but I am not so sure that restaurants have worked out how to manage the whole process, especially now that there are more people going out to eat in the actual restaurant.
I also wrote this about a branch of Wagamama in Bristol.
As for the service, I was less than impressed. I know at Wagamama the food arrives when it is ready, so dishes won’t be served together. Normally I am alright with this, but this time the first two dishes arrived quite quickly, the other two took much longer to be served. By the time the final dish arrived, we had nearly finished our food. We ordered some more drinks, and they spent a lot of time on the bar, before they were brought to the table. There appeared to be a fair few staff. I think part of the issue was they were being inundated with online takeaway orders which was swamping the kitchen.
Another branch in Bristol I wrote about another experience.
I was a little disappointed that our food didn’t arrive at the same time, I know that is the operating model for Wagamama, but even so the delay between our dishes was quite lengthy. My son had his dish for quite a while before my food arrived, and then there was a further delay before the final three dishes arrived. Not as bad as another table, where their side dish arrived well after they had finished their main courses. So much so they had to take it home. I think part of the issue was that the restaurant had a lot of Deliveroo type orders so was busy cooking those.
I have had similar experiences in Ealing and other branches of Wagamama.
Hedging a guess, I think the core issue is that the restaurant will have been designed around the number of covers it has to serve. In other words, there are a number of tables and seats in the restaurant. You would design the kitchen, the kitchen staffing model, the waiting staff model on that number of covers. What food delivery services do to this model is that they distort it. The orders bear no reflection on what is happening in the restaurant itself. You could have a busy restaurant and then get an equivalent number of online orders that you need to fulfil. It’s as though your covers effectively doubled. The people who suffer are those actually eating in the restaurant. The online delivery orders have to be completed and ready in a set time, whereas the diners sitting at a table can be told there is a delay. If this had happened once to me, then you could say it was a one off, however it has happened quite a few times now.
I will say my most recent experiences at Wagamama have been much better, but I think that was because I was eating at an off peak time rather than the core dining time.