URBAN INDEPENDENT RESTAURANTS TURN TO SUBURBAN DELIVERIES TO WEATHER THE PANDEMIC

Rick Bayless, the award-winning celebrity chef and restaurateur whose Chicago dining rooms had long waiting lists pre-COVID, held a staff meeting recently. He told the assembled crew that just one thing was keeping business alive during these brutal pandemic winter months: a newly launched operation to deliver large numbers of orders to suburban drop-off points. 

“Without [that], we’d be having a lot of different conversations right now,” he told the staff. “That’s really keeping us afloat right now.”

“That” is a working relationship with Chicago-based DwellSocial, a tech platform launched in 2017 with the goal of aggregating neighborhood demand for home services, such as contractors and plumbers.

But when the pandemic shut down restaurants, DwellSocial CEO Allen Shulman had a different idea. 

“The concept of aggregating demand for great food was this bug in my brain,” Shulman said. 

So he reached out to one of his favorite Chicago spots, Pequod’s Pizza, and asked whether they would deliver up north, to suburban Northbrook, Ill., if he could get 10 orders at once.

“We became a home services platform with a fun feature to help people get Pequod’s Pizza,” Shulman joked. 

Then, he contacted cupcake shop Sweet Mandy B’s. A group order for 25 sold out in  less than four minutes, he said. 

“Immediately, we started realizing, there’s power in food, there’s joy in food, there’s excitement in food,” Shulman said. “We said to ourselves, ‘We have to leave home services behind and focus on restaurants.’”

Today, DwellSocial has 60 Chicago restaurants on its platform, with more joining every day, he said.