Before this year, we ate restaurant food once per month. No take out or delivery, we would go sit down for a late lunch. At the beginning of the year, I decided to make that every other week, and pick a local place we had never tried -- no chains -- and had a great reputation. I called it a surprise lunch, because hubby would never know where we were going until we had arrived.
The first one was down a dead end road off a two lane blacktop road in a rural area. The dead end road went in between two cow pastures and ended up at a metal building next to an RV park. Part of the building was a management office for the RV park along with mailboxes and showers, and the other part is a burger joint. $9 will get you a large wagyu beef burger (we could only eat half so we got a second lunch out of it), fries, and a drink. We had a lot of fun with this every other week but then the "stay at home" and no dine in put a stop to that.
Seeing what this is doing to small businesses, I decided to continue to patronize these places where we had never eaten but to do it once per week, take out only. I've seen what grub hub did to a pizza truck in Illinois. Their monthly statement showed they did 46 deliveries and that the total bill for those deliveries was over $1000. After they took out all of their fees, the business netted less than $400, not even enough to cover their costs.
So this is what we have done for takeout:
German
Burgers
Crawfish
Tex Mex
Vietnamese
Gyros
Pizza
Chinese
And the best: South African. It was a restaurant that partnered with our grocery store to do a pop-up. I had been wanting to try this restaurant because my nephew had highly recommended it, but instead of paying $30 - $60 a head off their regular menu, they had a choice of $10 boxed meals that were sooo good. I almost didn't buy them because the side was brussel sprouts and I hate them, but dayum they actually make brussel sprouts taste really good.
