Dwell at Home with Iconic City Foods

DwellSocial makes all your favorite city cuisine possible again, without the hassle.

By Maureen Callahan

Our favorite foods can transform any day into a celebration. Or just make dinner easier. If you have ever lived in the city, you know how easy it is to order from your favorite places. Many restaurants deliver, but if not, DoorDash or Grubhub do the heavy lifting.

Many of us, now living in the suburbs, miss the ease of that process. Sure, you can still order, but you’re now limited to the variety and proximity of your neighborhood restaurants unless you want to pay high third-party delivery service fees. Even then, you might be out of their zone of delivery.

Enter DwellSocial, a unique platform that offers the opportunity to order your city favorites, delivered to your door, almost completely ready to eat. While many items require a small finishing touch at home, it’s usually not beyond oven warming or nuking something. Simple instructions make it very easy to have your favorite meal hot, finished, and on your plate in no time.

Photo courtesy of Pequod’s Pizza

For example, a Pequod’s pizza. The pie starts in Pequods’ custom oven, where they form their signature blow-torched crust. As the pizza leaves the restaurant- three-quarters baked- the driver calls to announce the estimated time of arrival, along with instructions on how to heat your oven to finish baking it as soon as it’s delivered.

DwellSocial makes city favorites like Joe’s Seafood, Honey Butter Fried Chicken, Café Ba-Ba-Reeba! – and so many more – a reality again, without the hassle of fighting traffic and finding parking if you were to pick it up yourself.

For some, birthday celebrations have never been the same without Sweet Mandy B’s cupcakes. And Do-Rite Donuts used to define our weekend mornings. Welcome them to your new place in the suburbs. (Both of these come completely ready to eat, by the way).

No offense to our local dining scene, of course. We love you, too! But it’s like making new friends while keeping the old. You always want to check in with old friends, right?

So how is DwellSocial different than Uber Eats and Instacart? The company follows a business model different from that of any other food delivery service platform. It’s all arranged in advance. Deliveries are made from specific restaurants on certain days, depending on where you live. You log on to the DwellSocial app and put in your home zip code to see a list of restaurants and the days on which deliveries from each will be made in your area.

The fee structure is also different from other delivery apps. A $5 reservation fee reserves space for your order in the delivery vehicle (square footage is limited). In addition to the cost of the food and sales tax, a driver support fee of 20% of that total covers delivery.

“We figured out that if we could collect two or three orders from the same place, we would break even on the deliveries and be able to pay our drivers a reasonable amount,” said Allen Shulman, DwellSocial co-founder and CEO. “And that matters to us. We have a pool of about ten safe, reliable drivers whom we count on to keep our business running.”

Photo courtesy of Café Ba-Ba-Reeba

Customers are given a window of time to expect their order and can also track the driver’s whereabouts on the app. Not home that afternoon? No problem. Your order can be left in a cooler on your front porch.

DwellSocial’s fees are considerably less when compared side-by-side with on-demand delivery services. All in all, service costs end up being comparable to dining in at your favorite iconic urban haunt, but minus the hassle of getting there. Think of the 20% as what you would tip a server, who is, instead, the driver. Consider the hassle it saves to have your favorite food delivered to your door. It’s a no-brainer!

It’s also a different, more efficient business model. Advanced order placement gives partnering restaurants ample time to prepare the food during their downtime. Nothing is done in a rush, and you’ll taste it.

DwellSocial partners with restaurant chefs to choose foods they know will travel well when they leave the restaurant almost finished. “At this point, we know what will work for home delivery from a distance,” said Shulman. “You won’t find a burger and fries or a steak on our menus, because our chefs know those things don’t travel well. We want customers to be able to take the last step at home and have it taste like it would at the restaurant.

Shulman’s idea for DwellSocial was a pivot of a previous idea that involved hiring contractors for home services. An entire neighborhood booked a contractor to perform repairs and improvements on the same day, therefore saving the contractor’s time and money by working in the same general area.

When COVID hit, Chicago restaurants were suffering. Shulman realized the possibility of helping them while simultaneously offering suburbanites a chance at their favorite city foods. It was, and still is, a win-win idea!