Viewed through one lens, ordering delivery food is a personal failure. It’s the most expensive food that you can buy: Once tips, fees, and minimums have been factored into the equation, it’s more expensive than restaurant food. And while you get to enjoy it in the restful splendor of your own kitchen or living room, you miss the experience of either cooking for yourself (and potentially learning something) or leaving the house and experiencing the cities that we live in.
More seriously, delivery food is often disappointing on the flavor front. We’ve ordered all up and down the Grubhub and Bitesquad menus and regularly encountered sad, soggy, muddy-tasting, stingily portioned, indifferently prepared stuff that wouldn’t pass muster in even a lazy restaurant. Several orders have gone straight from the box to the garbage.
With that context, it’s important to celebrate the places that actually nail the delivery experience. Not surprisingly, they lean toward spice and curry sauces. Flamingo‘s food is generously portioned, richly flavored, and it holds up well over the course of the journey. Copper Pot is an old reliable standby, and it’s hard to top their dosas. And an undercelebrated Malaysian place, Peninsula, puts out some lovely dishes that hold up remarkably well to being transported (including the best chicken fried rice you can find around here via delivery, to my knowledge).
That chicken fried rice is probably worthy of its own story at some point (few dishes are potentially so comforting and wonderful yet more routinely abused than chicken fried rice), but here we’re talking about something a little farther off the beaten path: Roti Telur ($6).
Six bucks gets you an almost entree-sized collection of soft, layered flatbread rolled around a soothing mixture of scrambled eggs, onions, and red peppers. This by itself is a delivery food miracle — but wait, as they say, there’s more. There’s also a rich, potent, spiced-to-your-tolerance curried chicken and potato dipping sauce that gives these pleasingly mellow little rolls another dimension of heat and spice.
So, what have we got? We’ve got a dish that’s:
a) comforting
b) exciting
c) a great value
d) highly travel resistant
It doesn’t get better than that. (Or does it? Comment! Tweet! Let us know.)
Peninsula on Bitesquad, 2608 Nicollet Ave, Minneapolis; 612.871.8282