DoorDash is continuing its play for on-premise restaurant sales, this time with the opening of a food hall in New York City.
The Downtown Brooklyn location, part of the restaurant aggregator’s DoorDash Kitchens initiative, offers foods from five restaurant brands both local and national, the company announced Monday (May 2). The space includes a small seating area, and the food hall also fulfills pickup and delivery orders.
“New York is one of the many hubs for noteworthy dining experiences, and we’re proud to bring DoorDash Kitchens to Brooklyn in partnership with Nimbus, adding even more options for food-lovers to choose from in their neighborhood,” said DoorDash Kitchens Senior Director Ruth Isenstadt in a statement. “While this location is delivery-forward in nature to enable the growth of restaurant partners, we’re looking forward to offering a dine-in area for upwards of 20 guests — a first for DoorDash Kitchens.”
The DoorDash Kitchens initiative began in 2019 with a pickup- and delivery-only location in Redwood City, California, and in 2021, the company opened its second such location in San Jose, California. So far, these locations have launched only with brands with brick-and-mortar locations, placing DoorDash kitchens in competition with virtual brands on the platform. However, this dynamic could shift if future locations include virtual merchants, turning the relationship into a collaborative one.
Read more: DoorDash Opens Second Virtual Kitchen
“We take pride in providing diners with fresh, delicious sushi whether they’re dining in or ordering to-go,” Chef Brian, executive chef and co-founder of DOMODOMO, a restaurant at the Brooklyn food hall, said in a statement. “Partnering with DoorDash Kitchens is enabling us to meet customer demand in Brooklyn without fully committing to a second brick and mortar location.”
The news comes about two months after DoorDash made another major play for consumers’ on-premise spending. The company announced at the start of March that it is set to acquire contactless ordering and payment technology provider Bbot.
See more: DoorDash Aims to Capture in-Store Restaurant Sales With Bbot Acquisition
“The in-store ordering software space is fairly fragmented,” Tom Pickett, chief revenue officer at DoorDash, told PYMNTS in an interview. “Vendors tend to focus on one subset of the problem — at-table QR code ordering, serving as a full POS or serving only enterprise merchants or small and medium-size businesses. Bbot understands not only the software, but also in-store onboarding, implementation and deployment … With Bbot, we’re able to offer immediate value to merchants while integrating with their existing software.”
Read more: DoorDash Says Bbot Tech Brings Digital Convenience to On-Site Dining
Nearly a quarter of consumers order from DoorDash each month, according to research from the March/April edition of PYMNTS’ Digital Divide series, “The Digital Divide: Regional Variations in U.S. Food Ordering Trends and Digital Adoption,” created in collaboration with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) customer experience management (CXM) solutions provider Paytronix.
See more: New Research Shows That Regional Dining Quirks Matter in Tailoring Restaurant Offers
The study, which drew from a survey of more than 2,500 United States adults in February, found that 32% had used an aggregator in the previous 30 days, and of those, 71% had purchased from DoorDash, suggesting that 23% of consumers order from the aggregator in a given month.
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