Dishes be gone.
If you're a parent who loves to dine out but can't because you'd have to contend with a whinging toddler or moody teen: Your prayers have been answered.
No, it's not free babysitting or a stun gun.
It's Skip the Dishes, a new online company that delivers food from your favourite restaurants.
Instead of just pizza and Chinese food, Skipthedishes.ca hooks diners up with more upscale eats from a roster of city restaurants. East Indian, French, Manitoba regional food, gourmet and vegan burgers, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese and Greek are headliners of the new service. Some of the participating restaurants include Stella's, Saigon Jon's, Falafel Place, Elements, Unburger and Bistro 7 1/4, among many others.
So if you can't get out, they'll bring it to you.
The new website launched in Winnipeg is early January 2013 by Josh Simair and his two brothers, in Saskatoon.
Today, four cities—Saskatoon, Regina, Red Deer, AB. and Winnipeg—have skipthedishes.ca websites. About 100 restaurants have signed up in Winnipeg so far, Simair says, and business is growing across the company by between 20 and 50 per cent each month. "Thousands" of orders are placed each month in Skip the Dishes four cities, he says.
The process is simple: diners go online to skipthedishes.ca; punch in their area code; and up pop all the restaurants available in the city. Diners can also search their city by types of cuisine. Menus are posted on site. Diners choose their dishes and place their orders with a click.
People can pay by credit card and by Interact (as long as you're set up for online banking).
The order is automatically sent to the restaurant and an automated phone call from Skip the Dishes follows. Food is delivered within an hour by drivers hired by Skip the Dishes.
The service makes the processes more convenient for diners, Simair says. Diners only have to go to one site, skip making a call and ordering by phone and pay when they order.
"It's really making it a lot quicker," he says.
Simair says the business is growing between 20 to 55 per cent each month with "thousands" of orders placed in the four cities.
Besides at-home diners, the service is popular with professionals who are charged with catering an office meeting or lunch on the spur of the moment without resorting to pizza, Simair says.
Check out Skip the Dishes here.
Ami Hassan, owner of Falafel Place, will make your favourites but he doesn't do dishes.
Get a few of Tropic of Thunder chicken burgers by Unburger delivered to your door.
