Downtown’s stay-at-home gourmands already have a bevy of options for food delivery: back in June, we test-ran the latest of them: Munchery, Caviar Fastbite, and Uber Eats. Now Seamless addicts have yet another alternative: David Chang’s Maple service just announced that tomorrow it’ll expand to Greenwich Village, West Village, Soho, Tribeca, Nolita and Little Italy.
If you’re located in the East Village (as much of Chang’s Momofuku empire is), you’ll be bummed to hear that the service won’t deliver east of Bowery/Fourth Avenue. But a Maple rep assures us that the East Village, along with Chelsea and Midtown, is a front-runner for the next phase of expansion, to be determined via the company’s WhereToNext campaign. So, vote early and often.
The service, which launched in April in the Financial District, offers a daily menu of meals created in a commissary kitchen in Williamsburg (no word on when delivery might come to Brooklyn). To give you an idea, today’s lunch options (all $12, including tax, tip and delivery; dinner options are $15) are wild-abacore-tuna nicoise salad, lamb kofta, spicy shrimp stew, roasted mushroom and sesame salad, and herb grilled garlic children. There are also $9 bottled juices. Estimated delivery time is 30 minutes. As with Caviar, you can see a photo of each menu item, and there’s also a detailed description (the tuna, for instance, is pole caught off the American coastline) along with information about gluten, nut, and meat/dairy content.
We’re told that by the end of the year, a new Order Ahead option will allow customers to order meals up to one day in advance of delivery, within a specific time window.