I recently popped into a small Vietnamese restaurant in Brooklyn for an afternoon coffee. The ambiance was inviting, and the space was decorated with the kinds of personal tchotchkes I mourn the absence of at the corporate ghost kitchens in my neighborhood.
Dine-in traffic was light on the unseasonably windy weekend afternoon, and while there were only a few customers, the only front-of-house staffer — who was filling the combined roles of host, server, and food runner — was hustling, darting between dine-in customers and delivery workers outside by their mopeds. Inside, to the left of the register, I noticed a series of cartoonishly long receipts stapled to bags for to-go orders. “I’m so sorry, it’s been like this all day,” the staffer told me with a touch of exasperation, pointing to the fleet of to-go bags before dashing outside for another order handoff.
Over the past decade, one of the most significant changes to the dining world has been the rise of third-party delivery services such as Grubhub (founded in 2004), Caviar (2012), DoorDash (2013), Uber Eats (2014), to name just a few. A lot has been said about these platforms’ impacts on restaurants’ revenue, as well as the trials and tribulations of delivery drivers seeking fair working conditions; less has been said about the ways in which they are changing the duties of some of the restaurant world’s most unsung workers: food runners.
When it comes to assembling, packing, and handing over the endless stream of to-go orders many restaurants now receive, many food runners are feeling overwhelmed. Traditionally, the job of a food runner is relatively simple: to deliver food from the kitchen to the customer. It’s also not uncommon for runners to take additional orders from tables to pass on to servers, and occasionally clean tables to keep things moving smoothly during busy periods. According to ZipRecruiter, the average hourly wage for New York City food runners is roughly $14 an hour, and the average national income for food runners is around $28,400 (not factoring in tips). At smaller restaurants, restaurant windows, and fast casual spots (like the above Vietnamese restaurant), servers will often take on the additional duties of food runners. At larger restaurants, however, this demarcation between server, host, and food runner provides the structure to keep a larger-scale operation moving.
I spoke with a food runner named Jane (name changed upon request, so she could speak freely), who works at a national restaurant group’s Brooklyn location (the vibe: Memphis-style wall art, craft burgers, and a big brunch scene). At Jane’s restaurant, all the members of staff, with the exception of management and floor captains, are paid the hourly NYC minimum wage plus a percentage of the tip pool. Bartenders and servers are at the higher end of the tip pool, while food runners and barbacks receive the smallest percentage of those tips. This tip ratio is further complicated by the high volume of takeout orders. “I would say that a quarter of the restaurant’s daily revenue comes from the app orders,” she says, “My workload has changed a lot in the past year because of an increased Uber Eats [presence].” She says that arranging to-go orders can be a time-consuming task that disrupts her dine-in workflow demands, especially when it comes to packaging and labeling orders (especially large, complex orders for corporate catering). She hopes that runners will soon start receiving a higher percentage of the tip pool, given the additional workload of packing to-go orders and liaising with busy delivery drivers. Recently, a customer came to pick up an online order, but tipped with cash in person. Thankfully, the team’s instinct, she says, was to give a portion of that money to the runner, who went through extensive lengths to package the unique order.
The major influx of delivery orders also impacts the experience for those dining in. “It’s a lot more [intense] than you might think, and slows down service for dine-in customers, too. We have talked with management about it twice,” she says, explaining that the runners believe more compensation should be reflected in either an increased share in tips or an hourly pay bump. “Each time, [management] is sympathetic. But nothing has been done.” Instead, she alleges that management has struggled to enact the clearest short-term solution: occasionally switching off Uber Eats. “We’ll ask them to turn it off when we’re overwhelmed with orders, but they keep pushing us harder. We’ll do it ourselves, but we know they’re watching and have cameras. When the managers leave, we turn it off,” she says, adding that she especially feels for the cooks. “The kitchen also can’t handle it.”
Given the increased cost of living and recession indicators in the United States right now, some restaurant owners and operators hesitate to turn down, or simply turn off, any opportunities for more revenue. Markus Dorfmann has been overseeing operations for Aurora Restaurant Group since 2008 (notably, for the eponymous Aurora, an Italian restaurant that opened in 2003 in Brooklyn), and spoke with me about how his teams manage the balancing act of dine-in and third-party app orders. “To be honest, overloading would be great for us,” he says by phone. “Restaurants in general, we just strive to have as much business as possible. So in a way, I understand [never turning off app orders]. But when those delivery orders make everything too busy for us, the manager will just pause it for a short period of time so we can catch up. We have no problem doing that.”
When Aurora opened 23 years ago, Dorfmann says that the waterfront-adjacent Williamsburg location, now one of the most expensive and rapidly developing stretches in the city, felt like a gamble. “Back then, the rent was $2,500 a month,” he says, “The reason it has a small kitchen was because the feeling was very much, Oh man, is anyone going to come here?” But come they did: Decades later, the vine-covered, red brick corner restaurant is a neighborhood fixture. When the pandemic hit, third-party food app services were definitely helpful, but no replacement for dine-in customers and natural foot traffic. “I think there’s this idea that the apps changed everything,” says Dorfmann. “It was definitely helpful, but today it is by no means a significant chunk of the business that we do.” Over the years, Dorfmann has considered remodeling the restaurant’s dining room to accommodate higher order volumes, but says it just doesn’t seem physically feasible or necessary. “There’s only so much you can do with a space,” he says, “You set up a kitchen for a certain volume. Obviously on weekends it gets busier, but the amount of people that we have in the kitchen is always kind of the same. [Third-party] delivery apps are kind of like the icing on the cake, but not our [core] business. We have to look at our priorities.” As of right now, those priorities steer away from overloading the bandwidth of kitchen and food runners.
Aurora is just one example of a restaurant that predated delivery apps and then integrated them into its operations. But what about restaurants that opened once apps were already ubiquitous? I spoke with Kal Pant of the cozy, family-owned Indian restaurant Spice Room in Denver, Colorado. Pant opened the first of his restaurant’s four locations in 2017, and since then it’s become a local standout (as seen on Eater Denver). “These third-party apps were [clear] avenues for more sales, but also helpful for advertising,” he tells me by phone, “Then the pandemic happened, and suddenly everyone switched to online ordering.” He says that third-party app ordering peaked for the Spice Room in 2023, but that even before then, Pant was mindful of the strenuous impacts it could have on food runners, as well as dine-in customers.
For him, the solution is simple: When the restaurant is overloaded, switch the third-party app orders off. “It’s a balance. It not only is creating this extra work [for the food runners],” he says, “but [managers] should realize that when you’re telling an in-person group, ‘I’m sorry, it’s going to be a 20-minute or 40-minute wait,’ because you’re [clogged] with app orders, you’re losing the people standing right in front of you that made the actual effort to come to your restaurant.”
Pant also fears that the pandemic may have worsened a disconnect between diners and their food. “They’re used to swiping on a phone, and someone dropping it at their door. They don’t know who prepared it, or what it takes to run a restaurant. It’s why I will always give second preference to third-party app customers. I don’t want to say they’re less of a customer, but I’m very [committed] to my customers and team here at the [physical] location.” If Pant were to overlook the strains that those third-party apps have on his own team, he says that the restaurant’s service and, ultimately, customer trust would suffer. “Ignore it now, and it will catch up with you later.”
Restaurants are a complex, and at times ruthless, ecosystem. Even the most fine-tuned operation must occasionally adapt to broken equipment, budget issues, and a customer who wants you to scoop out all the insides of the bagel before you toast it. Even so, even “classic” pressures of the job are not without nuance, and require adaptation and evolution to meet changes in the industry. Food runners in this shifting landscape are increasingly in need of support, whether that means temporarily switching off apps or implementing pay increases, or beyond that, even an open-mindedness to restructuring to accommodate a higher order volume or the establishment of a ghost kitchen.
What shouldn’t happen, Dormann tells me, is a failure to seriously consider how all these delivery orders affect your team on a granular level. Part of Aurora’s decades-old success, he says, is due to the fact that it knows what kind of restaurant it is (“we’re known for our [physical] location”) and places neither its identity nor its workers in jeopardy.
In spite of her fluctuating morale, Jane remains optimistic. “I know I’m not the only food runner experiencing this in the industry. And I do think my managers mean it when they say they want to help,” she says, “But I also think they’re under pressure from their own bosses who just want more money.” In that light, perhaps this conundrum isn’t tangled up in untrodden territory; maybe it’s just another symptom of what happens a restaurant’s increasingly fraught needs for revenue threaten its brick-and-mortar, emotional center — as Pant would say, you may lose sight of the people who are standing right in front of you.
