What area are you in? The simple solution to that is to get local restaurants to join an online ordering site like GrubHub -- I would be surprised if you're in a major suburb and none of the restaurants are already enrolled there or on a similar site. They're the "BCC" for online-enabling restaurants.
The thing that makes it so easy is that it operates on fax. It seems antiquated, but that means any restaurant with a phone line can offer all the modern conveniences without even having a computer on-site. Small business owners are super busy and constantly being pitched to buy services they don't have time to set up, but this takes no setup -- sign this contract giving us $x for any new orders we send your way, tell us your delivery radius, put a fax machine in your store, and you're now online. GrubHub can do the hard work of putting their menu online and running the website.
When a new order comes in, the restaurant gets a fax (and fax machines confirm receipt, so GrubHub knows it got there). You, as the customer, now get online ordering, re-ordering of previous orders with just a few clicks or taps, prepay with a credit card (or not), etc.
Amazingly the restaurant I am referring to is on grubhub.
So the questions is, why didn't I know that?
Back when we were selling (in the early 90's) advertising to restaurants and shops we provided them with window decals and things for placement at the register to alert customers. This isn't happening here. Also the other place isn't on grubhub. Nor have I seen others just checked a few.
Grubhub looks good. But I was thinking of something that would be an app specifically for the restaurant. Developer writes app for restaurant (using same one that has been developed for the test market) and customer downloads app. Or an html5 page I guess would work as well hosted by the "aas" provider.
Do you know what grubhub charges the restaurant?
Next time I'm picking up I'm going to ask the owner how it is working. (They have already given thumbs down to groupon and a few other things they tried).
I've been thinking about this for various weeks and thinking about implementing something like (no, not like, it is exactly what you described) this, but everybody I ask to comment on the idea tells me about Grubhub and similar services, and they just don't understand why there would be other kind of service.
The great thing about automatically building webapps for delivery restaurants is that this can work even if you have just 1 client, while Grubhub only works because they have lots of registered restaurants (and, as you said, it doesn't work, because the restaurant doesn't tell anybone it is on Grubhub, probably because of the fees or the inexistence of a unique readable URL to the restaurant's page on Grubhub, or because if the restaurant's client go to Grubhub he will see a lot of other restaurants besides the first).
FDRAaaS (Food Delivery Restaurant Apps as a Service), is the blog service, while Grubhub is Facebook.
"but everybody I ask to comment on the idea tells me about Grubhub and similar services, and they just don't understand why there would be other kind of service."
Who is everyone?
Is "everyone" the target customer?
Are is "everyone" startup people, programmers, hackers, VC's etc?
The fact that there are already sushi restaurants doesn't prevent new ones from opening everyday and doing business and making money.
"The great thing about automatically building webapps for delivery restaurants is that this can work"
Exactly. Not everything needs to be a home run.
"probably because of the fees"
Right. And this is especially a big problem with the mentality of the small business owner. Not wanting to cannibalize existing customers.
Building the app and charging a fixed monthly fee is the way to go at least to start. And make it easy for the restaurant to make menu changes etc. In the beginning you would have to perhaps input all the items yourself because the small business won't want to take the time. And have to prototype at no charge to prove it actually has benefit.
""If a restaurant's not on Grubhub-Seamless, then their best option is to distribute paper menus around their neighborhood," Maloney says.
A lot of restaurant owners agree that is ineffective. Tom DeSimone owns the tiny RBBTS Café in Manhattan. He says the food delivery website connects his restaurant to law firms and banks. Big companies that use vouchers for websites like Seamless to reward their employees."
If this is a good reason for restaurants to stick to Grubhub and alike, then there's also an opportunity for marketing websites/communities for delivery restaurants. This must not be tied to a delivery/charging network like Grubhub.
It's a fair comment that a lot of take-out businesses are pretty behind the time technically. A pizza place I sometimes swing by on Horne way home from my office theoretically allows online orders. The first time I used it, I discovered 1. They add a surcharge to your bill and 2. They said they needed 30 minutes leeway (compared to about 10 minutes for calling it in). Oh, I noted their order PC was running Windows 2000.
I call in orders now--or just wait till I'm there; they're pretty fast.
A similar service called Delivered Dish uses the same fax conceit to provide delivery service in the Portland, OR; Denver; and San Diego areas: http://d-dish.com.
You can even order from bakeries (at least in the Portland area). I use them all the time for food delivery, and it's rare an order takes more than 45 minutes to complete.
The thing that makes it so easy is that it operates on fax. It seems antiquated, but that means any restaurant with a phone line can offer all the modern conveniences without even having a computer on-site. Small business owners are super busy and constantly being pitched to buy services they don't have time to set up, but this takes no setup -- sign this contract giving us $x for any new orders we send your way, tell us your delivery radius, put a fax machine in your store, and you're now online. GrubHub can do the hard work of putting their menu online and running the website.
When a new order comes in, the restaurant gets a fax (and fax machines confirm receipt, so GrubHub knows it got there). You, as the customer, now get online ordering, re-ordering of previous orders with just a few clicks or taps, prepay with a credit card (or not), etc.
https://www.grubhub.com/