Review of Takeaway.com

Recently we were invited to review takeaway service Takeaway.com. Takeaway.com is an delivery service which offers over seven thousand small restaurants the opportunity to have an online presence. They act as an intermediate between us as consumers and restaurants who want to offer a delivery service but may not be able to operate a website on the scale of a larger business offering takeaway food. The process of ordering was really simple and easy to follow. After entering our postcode, we were given a choice of restaurants offering the service in our local area. There were nine restaurants in our area offering delivery under the Takeaway.com banner. They also offered a range of food including Italian, American, Greek, Thai, Indian and British food. I suspect that it probably depends on where you live as to how many restaurants are available to order from.

We were eating with the kids, so where as our first choice of takeaway would typically be an Indian, we wanted to go for something that we would all eat, and so needed to choose something a little more child friendly. Other factors that I considered when ordering were how far away the takeaway was from the house (one restaurant was in a town further away), whether there was a minimum order for delivery and how much it was, and also what other reviews of the restaurant were like. Some restaurants had a big minimum order, and others didn't have great reviews. Something else I noted was that some of the restaurants were well set up for delivery (like the kebab and pizza restaurants) whereas others focused more on their in-house sit down trade rather than sending food out for delivery. With this in mind, we decided to go for a restaurant which was used to delivering food. I was a little apprehensive about ordering from a sit-down restaurant as I didn’t know how often they checked their online orders and how well they were set up for keeping delivery food hot, or whether it would take longer for the food to get to us.

We decided to order from “Papa Johns” which is a pizza delivery service close to our house. Ordering online was very simple, we just selected our restaurant, and then chose what we wanted from the online menu. After finalising our choices, we clicked on the order button and made our payment. I then received an email to my email account within a couple of minutes to say that the order had been received and would be delivered within an hour. In the end, our order took forty minutes to be delivered which we thought was extremely reasonable for an online delivery service - and considering it was also a Friday evening, we were impressed.

Being pretty much takeaway virgins, the kids were very excited at the prospect of food actually being delivered ready-to-eat straight to the door. Youngest was bouncing up and down excitedly screaming “pizza pizza pizza” when the takeaway guy arrived and they pretty much snatched the boxes out of his hands and rushed to get them on the table so that they could start devouring the contents.

When it arrived, the food was piping hot, we could feel the heat through the boxes. We ordered three large pizzas, four sides, and a bottle of drink. The order came to just over forty pounds. We were actually really pleasantly surprised as we started eating. The pizza’s tasted really fresh, the dough was very crispy and not too thick, the toppings contained good quality ingredients, and the portions were generous - both the pizza and the sides.

As a family, we have never ordered a takeaway for all of us, although hubby and I have indulged in the occasional Indian on a Saturday night. This experience has encouraged us to take the plunge and order online more often as it is a really good excuse to have a night off from the cooking.

We also liked that ordering from Takeaway.com means that you can order from a small independent business, and opens up more choices for takeaway food. Even though we chose Pizza this time, we are going to be more adventurous next time.

We would definitely recommend ordering from Takeaway.com as it is a good alternative to ordering from the more usual suspects offering an online takeaway delivery service. As Hubby so succinctly put it: “Ordering was simple, delivery was fast, the food was top quality” - you can't say better than that!

Disclosure: We were asked to review the takeaway.com service and our order was complimentary. All opinions are my own, and I was not asked to write this review.