New Seattle law requires third-party delivery apps to get restaurants’ consent to list their menus. Why this matters.

During the pandemic, restaurants in the Seattle area noticed they were receiving more food orders from different versions of their menus, sometimes dating back to 2014. Worse, when the kitchens couldn’t fulfill orders from such outdated menus, these angry customers posted negative reviews of the restaurants online or called the restaurants to complain.

Last year, Art of the Table owner and chef Dustin Ronspies said he had received to-go requests for stuffed quail and other small dishes from a menu he wrote eight years ago. His employees had to tell the delivery drivers that the kitchen did not have these ingredients in stock.

Nearby, the Manolin fish restaurant recently received a request for “black rice with squid”, a menu item so out of date that the chefs couldn’t remember when Manolin last served it in the dining room or even prepared it on the spot .

Little did these restaurants know that the third-party delivery app Grubhub was selling these gourmet to-go items and then placing responsibility on the restaurants if the chefs couldn’t reproduce those dishes for delivery, several restaurateurs who worked with the said Seattle Times spoke. Grubhub did not return a request for comment.

“You order things that we haven’t had in over a year. … It’s insane. It’s a blatant abuse of our business, ”said Manolin co-owner Joe Sundberg.

The city of Seattle will soon begin cracking down on such practices. As one of the toughest measures in the United States, a new Seattle law coming into effect September 15 requires third-party food delivery apps to obtain written consent from restaurants before listing their menus or taking orders without permission. A delivery company that refuses to “remove the restaurant from its listing within 72 hours of receiving the request” could face a fine of $ 250 per violation.

The proceeds from these fines will be used to support small restaurants with fewer than five employees, city officials said.

Seattle has been one of the most aggressive metropolitan areas in trying to curb grocery delivery practices. After small businesses and customers in the Seattle area complained last year that delivery services were “price gouging” during the pandemic, the city set a commission cap of 15% on third-party app-based grocery delivery services can demand.

The latest delivery mandate is supported by two influential restaurant organizations; the Washington Hospitality Association and the Seattle Restaurant Alliance. WHA president Anthony Anton said delivery apps harm restaurants because it is the small business owners, not the delivery services, that are the brunt of negative online reviews from failing to fulfill delivery orders from outdated menus.

Linda Di Lello Morton, board member of the Seattle Restaurant Alliance and co-owner of the Terra Plata Bistro on Capitol Hill, agreed. “It really hurts when we get a bad rating that has nothing to do with us,” said Morton.

Two years ago, Grubhub, Postmates, and other shipping app services weren’t household names in Seattle. But after Governor Jay Inslee ordered all restaurants to temporarily close their dining rooms during the pandemic, many chefs turned to takeout and delivery and relied on multiple app-based services to handle their orders.

Even restaurants that did not have contracts with these third-party apps were involuntarily pushed into the delivery ecosystem as their menus were published on apps without the restaurant’s consent.

To gain market share in the breakneck delivery services space, many third-party apps try to list as many restaurants as possible and even use old menus from Google Search to give customers more choices.

Problems often arise when delivery points publish old menus without the knowledge or consent of the restaurants: seasonal menus and prices are out of date. Also, many chefs don’t make takeout orders or offer a limited menu because many starters don’t travel well.

When a customer orders from an old menu that the kitchen can’t fill, restaurateurs, delivery drivers, and customers start pointing fingers at each other about the empty deliveries, several owners said.

Matt Storm, owner of The Masonry pizzeria in Uptown and Fremont, said his Neapolitan cake doesn’t hold up well if it’s in a pizza box for 30 minutes, so he doesn’t offer delivery and advises customers not to order pizza for Take away. However, delivery services continue to advertise its pizza on their platforms, he said.

He remembered a courier asking him to make a duck egg pizza because a customer had already paid with a credit card after seeing this outdated menu item on the delivery app.

“There is literally no duck egg here. I can’t magically pull one out of mine [expletive]”Storm recalled when he told the angry delivery driver.

Sundberg, the owner of two critically acclaimed restaurants, Manolin and Rupee Bar in Ballard, said for a year he had used his own grocery delivery staff to keep his staff busy during the pandemic. Little did he know he had a competitor: Grubhub and other delivery companies that were displaying old menus in both of their restaurants without his consent.

“We had a customer [who] ordered six items, five of which we haven’t had in about a year, ”said Sundberg. “I have approached these companies in the past to remove our names, logos, and menus from their websites because there were three to four of them [to-go orders] one week. … We cannot carry out these orders. “

Any time he contacted delivery services to move his stores away from their locations, his menus would be “back available in six or eight months,” he said.

Other restaurants that have signed an agreement with delivery services say it is difficult to end the partnership. Uttam Mukherjee, co-owner of the popular Indian street food counter Spice Waala on Capitol Hill and in Ballard, had originally signed with Grubhub to handle the delivery. But in February, when drivers repeatedly showed up 90 minutes late to deliver fries and wraps that had gotten cold and mushy, Mukherjee urged Grubhub to stop delivering his food as it hurt his restaurant’s reputation.

“I called her twice to turn us off [and said] “You are not allowed to use our menus without our knowledge,” he recalls. “They said, ‘Sorry, we didn’t know.’ And a few weeks later we got another order from Grubhub. ”