07.28.08
SeamlessWeb is my friend
I live in a buzzer-less building, and believe me, it’s really frustrating trying to get food delivered. Since I moved down here in December I don’t think I’ve actually had takeout for that reason – except today, when I remembered SeamlessWeb. I used it a lot with the English Ex, who never met a technological advance he wasn’t ready to embrace immediately. Somehow I never thought of using it here. I have to admit – Seamless rocks. You don’t have to make yourself understood to someone who barely speaks English, you can use your credit card without ever taking it out of your wallet, and most importantly, you can make sure the restaurant knows the guy has to call when he’s outside. I can’t count the number of times FedEx has been completely befuddled by that simple concept.
Seamless is great if you know what kind of food you want, even a specific dish. You can sort by cuisine, estimated delivery time, restaurant rating, price, minimum for delivery or do a search. Unfortunately, if you’re just browsing, it’s not quite as user-friendly. The site doesn’t allow right-clicking to open a restaurant’s menu in a new tab, so when you’re clicking around trying to figure out what you want, it can get tedious going back and forth from the restaurant list. But I’ve only been annoyed by that a few times, plus I’m very finicky so it’s probably less of a problem for most people.
I really like how they’ve worked out deals so that many restaurants offer discounts, at least the first time you order from them through Seamless. There’s even a pickup option that was just added. Inside the menus themselves, you can see how people have tagged them, leave your own notes on dishes and see what the most popular ones are. It’s also good for making sure you don’t get all excited about what you’re going to order and then finding out oops, the place is closed. (That happens to me a lot. It’s disappointing how many takeout menus don’t have delivery hours on them.) Seamless never lets you order from a place that’s closed and shows a little reminder on top of the page if the kitchen is about to wrap up. Though I wish they’d make it possible to open more than one menu at a time, it’s a great system and lets me be a hermit and have food delivered to my door like everyone else.
