Everyone likes to order in now and again, but takeout choices can get stale pretty quickly. Enter Main Line Delivery, the brainchild of 24-year-old Bala Cynwyd native Rich Siegel and partner Dan Ritterman. In less than a year, the pair have signed up 20 Main Line restaurants for their online ordering service — which means you no longer have to flip a coin to decide between Palace of Asia and Domino’s. Here, some details on how it works. — Noelle Kearns

Why did the Main Line need this service?
Well, there’s such an abundance of places to eat. My business partner and I saw services like this popping up in other areas. He went to Penn State and I went to Washington University in St. Louis, and we didn’t think we would have any real competition around here. We’ve been working on it for about a year now, and we’ve been up and running for ten months.

How do you convince restaurants to participate?
We charge them no fees to sign on except a small percentage on every order we bring them. It’s really the best possible form of advertising for them, because it’s free until we bring them the business.

What are your geographical boundaries?
We do it by zip code, and we just opened up to Bryn Mawr. We go to Ardmore, Wynnewood, Narberth, Merion Station, Bala Cynwyd, Haverford, Manayunk, and 19131 and 19151 in Philly.

How many restaurants did you start out with?
Only three — Sam’s Grill, Bravo Pizza, and Chung Hing Chinese. Now we have 20.

Which restaurant do you want that hasn’t signed on yet?
Shangri La Inn in Bala Cynwyd. We’ve been trying, but the owner keeps refusing. I think we could really bring them a lot of business. Our main goal is to have every single restaurant in the area eventually.

How many drivers do you have?
We have six on staff right now. We started out with just me and my partner running the first 1,000 deliveries by ourselves.

How are residents responding?
People love it. The website is cute and bubbly and fun, and really made for Main Line moms. We even get kids and 87-year-old women who love it and can use it easily.

What if a customer wanted to order, say, say a burger from Ruby’s Diner, a burrito from Qdoba, and a panini from DuJour?
If you order from more than one restaurant you have to pay the flat rate for each one, but we never inflate the prices of what you order. Everything is the same in-house price the restaurant charges.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 10:19 am and is filed under News, Takeout. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted by Ashley Primis on 9/29/09 in News, Takeout 9 Comments »