Here at Grubhub, our employees are pretty obsessed with food. Every day, we’re making sure delicious food finds its way to your door…and to ours. Say what? Correct, we too order from Grubhub (so meta).
With our “What I Ate in a Week” series, you’ll get a sneak peek into the lives of actual — never not hungry — Grubhub team members. A nice benefit that happens to come with our jobs is what we call “mealperks” — our weekly Grubhub stipend. Clearly, we’re using this to get the best bites in town each and every week.
On deck, we have: Emily, a Corporate Care Specialist at Grubhub. Get the lowdown on her delivery highlights of the week and top ordering hacks.
Let’s meet Emily
Hi, I’m Emily and I’ve done about 350 food searches in the 18 months since I’ve been a data scientist at Grubhub. I’ve been living in the rivertowns of Westchester for about six years but I lived all over the US and in several countries. I spend my spare time trying find ways to sleep longer in the morning, doing aerial circus (yes, I can do a flip on a flying trapeze), attempting to pet literally every animal I see, convincing my friends to come to a wine tasting with me, and lecturing anyone who will listen about the current state of tiger habitats.
My favorite dish is one I’m trying for the first time. Maybe it will have a really interesting flavor combination that I didn’t know existed, maybe it will have a comforting texture, maybe someone will tell me a fun history about it, maybe it will be terrible and I will have learned something that day. I was a super picky eater until I lived in Japan and discovered that I wouldn’t die if I ate something I didn’t like, and that the eating experience is about more than taste. Sometimes foods are about nourishing your body and sometimes they are about nourishing your soul.
And here are my top delivery eats from last week…
Custom Plate from The Little Beet
Behold, the make your own plate from The Little Beet. Notice that it has green beans. And chopped green beans with cilantro and white beans. And green beans next to avocado with sesame seeds. Also green beans over quinoa and pumpkin seeds. All of this topped by green beans under sweet chili sauce. Did I mention that I picked green beans in this dish? Aside from the green beans which are unaccountably my favorite green, it’s pretty exciting to get an entire half an avocado. I order this all the time because it’s delicious, super healthy, eating vegetarian sometimes is great for sustainable food production, and it has as many green beans as I want. And since I’m ordering it through Grubhub pickup, I can entirely skip the thousand person long line that accumulates at the Bryant Park location.
Custom Salad from Just Salad
Sometimes you get a craving for pulled pork. Sometimes you feel like you should probably eat a vegetable or something. Sometimes you get all excited to find jicama on a menu because you literally haven’t eaten any since you lived on the other side of the country. Sometimes you realize as you are walking between meetings that your whole day is going to be crazy and thankfully you can preorder delivery. Sometimes all of those things happen at once and you randomly click on some options at Just Salad without paying a lot of attention and you end up with exactly the perfect salad. This salad showed up at precisely the time it was estimated and 10 minutes later I had shoved all of it in my face and was on to the next thing. I know I got a lot of good nutrients. I know I spent minimal time on the whole endeavor… and I definitely ate some jicama.
Chocolates from Royce
Once upon a Friday my coworker suggested that we use the split the bill functionality to group order a box of Royce Chocolates. We all agreed. The next week, someone else suggested we repeat the endeavor. We still were in consensus. This quickly became habit. Most Fridays several members of our team can be found sampling the luxury, French-inspired, Japanese-imported chocolate. It’s not often a big group of people agree on what the best chocolate in the world is, but we’ve managed to share that moment every Friday. From champagne sponge chocolate, cacao-coated marshmallow, strawberry wafers, to this week’s elevated matcha kit-kat, Royce manages to provide a perfectly balanced flavor profile with a unique texture story, and a care for presentation. We’ve added one of our product managers and our new software engineer to the “Friday Royce Group” and we are still trying to figure out our favorite. At a company built around varying food preferences, it’s a delight to see that love of great chocolate is still a shareable human trait.
Thin Rice Noodle from Zest Szechuan
L35 Thin Rice Noodle from Zest Szechuan is my current favorite dish. I order it without any protein because the savory noodles are the star of this dish and I don’t want anything to get in the way of my appreciation. (I allow the vegetables because the color contrast is aesthetically pleasing.) Aside from the great flavor and texture that makes this so appealing, this dish is the embodiment of the work that I do. At Zest Szechuan this is called “Thin Rice Noodle,” at Fu Xing its called “Fried Rice Noodle,” and if you look it up by recipe this is called “Singapore Mai Fun.” These are all the same dish but it has at least three different names that don’t have much overlap in character sequences. Because of this, it’s hard to search for all of the instances of this dish when it has a bunch of different names. Sitting on Grubhub’s search team means it is my job to make sure when you type in what you want, we find it or the next best thing and offer it to you! And most importantly, each variation is delicious and different in its own special way.
