Thanksgiving, Just Eat!
Right before Thanksgiving weekend, Just-Eat.ca reached out to invite me to test their new Android app. “Why not?” I thought. I like apps, especially food and restaurant apps.
Besides, we were planning on working all Thanksgiving weekend. Why not have a little fun playing with someone’s food app as a bit of a break? “Hey”, I thought, “why not order in Thanksgiving Dinner?!?”
With that, our Thanksgiving dinner plans were firmed up. No planning, no shopping, no kitchen to clean! It would be only the second or third time in 30 years that I hadn’t cooked Thanksgiving dinner, but this Thanksgiving weekend had already been earmarked for a hunker down and git’r’dun weekend I wasn’t expecting to cook anything elaborate anyway. We had already disappointed our families by saying we were staying home to work, and we weren’t cooking anything interested for them to “drop in for”. Testing the Just Eat app was the perfect way to get food, get fed and keep working (or as they say “just eat”).
Sure Just Eat is kind of compete-y with CheapEats, but only “kind of”. Besides I’ve used their online service before and been pretty happy with it. A number of our regular delivery joints are on their roster, and a number of CheapEats restaurants too.
Ordering in dinner isn’t a fast thing at our house. Restaurant food is our business after all. It’s a long negotiation complete with house rules. Yup – we ARE that couple. We’ve even built it into a game to try and make it faster and easier
So Sunday night after a long day of wrangling photos, I grabbed my cell phone and launched the Just Eat app ready to see how it worked for us.
It was fairly quick and easy. We entered our postal code which the Just Eat app uses to give us restaurants that do deliver to us. Then we went through ALL the cuisine choices, then restaurant choices. (We’re still us after all.) There was enough range and variation, and restaurants in the Just Eat rooster to keep us entertained as we started reading menus and dishes.
The app even automatically sorts the closed restaurants to the bottom of the list so you aren’t tempted by a place that you won’t be able to order from. This is a great feature! I’ve spent many a holiday (or post-holiday day) on the phone calling restaurant after restaurant trying to order dinner. Only to waste an hour because all of the places we picked were closed for the holiday.
They include info on the restaurants ratings. Unfortunately you can’t check the reviews that go with the rating for each restaurant on the app. (You can see them on the website).
Next what to order? Build a short list, then filter down to the actual night’s menu. We handed the phone back and forth a couple of times. A quick click to add the dishes we want to try into our order. Then review our order and use a quick click to remove items to narrow down our final order. (This is often a challenge with other ways of figuring out what we’re going to order!)
We got a fantastic feast from a new restaurant on the Just Eat roster – Urban Thai. Gerry liked the fact I didn’t have to remember to ask how much the total came to because it’s right on the screen. (Or it can be once he asks and you realize you don’t know and then go back to the site and check.)
Thanksgiving dinner arrived less than 30 minutes later (earlier than we expected). No muss, no fuss, just great food delivered to our door.
It was a very simple Thanksgiving at our house: just work, just eat!
Note: this post is sponsored by Just-eat.ca who gave me a credit on their system to try their new Just Eat app.
With this app, we were able to do a lot of side-by-side comparisons of menus.
Once we had settled on Thai as our cuisine of choice, we were able to really dig into the details and compare dishes and do our standard flavour deconstruction / flavour compliment thing.
I especially liked how easy it was to modify our final order, so we could just pick all the dishes we wanted to try and eliminate some of them at the end, looking at them all together.
Thai of course!
Well, yes of course 😉
alexaclark we ordered thai too! But I went and picked it up.
MolsonIsMyDog Great minds! We just kept working and let it come to us 😉 cc JUSTEATca
.MolsonIsMyDog What did you get? Cuz now I’m hungry for Thai again
alexaclark MolsonIsMyDog justeatca I totally loved that spinach stuff, by the way, Lex 😀
.wellred nice! We liked it too, it was just not exactly the “sauteed spinach” we were looking for MolsonIsMyDog JUSTEATca
alexaclark we got Young Thailand, thai spicy noodles and green curry vegetarian. They’re close to us so I picked it up while walking Molson
MolsonIsMyDog Nice! 2 birds, one vegetarian stone.
MolsonIsMyDog We got Urban Thai – the sauteed spinach, basil chicken, chicken devil and beef & oyster sauce. Enough to last the weekend!
alexaclark Thanks for trying out app and writing about it, Alexa! Great shots 🙂
justeatca we love testing tech, and if food arrives afterwards it’s like pizza after sex!
justeatca err… sorry, was that oversharing 😉
alexaclark oh yeah, that’s a lot of food! Should have wellred for dinner more often, haha.
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