Caviar

Below is my original review. I no longer use caviar because it’s usually a minimum of hour and a half, that is definitely the low side. After eating at a couple of the restaurants that I used to order from, I find absolutely appalling that the prep for the food is usually at least 60 minutes at these restaurants. I was in and out 10 minutes, and I ordered at the restaurant. Caviar usually puts the prep at this restaurant at at least hour. You would think that for all the fees Caviar charges, they could hire some more drivers and get your food to you in a decent timeframe and while it’s still hot!
Caviar does allow you to order from restaurants that don’t normally deliver. But the problem is Caviar typically sets a 90 minute delivery window. It then updates you on when the order is placed, preparation is supposedly started, and when the your food starts delivery. Unfortunately, caviar tells you that preparation is going to 10 – 20 minutes. Then you watch your order not update for better than hour with no progress. I’m not sure if it’s the restaurants fault or Caviar waits until the last minute to send a driver for pick-​up. I just received an order that is barely warm. The app said the food would ready in 10 – 20 minutes, but it was 80 minutes before it was sent out for delivery. When the food arrived cold, this was Caviar’s response:
I’m so sorry to hear that your food wasn’t hot upon arrival.
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our delivery methods to ensure meals are as fresh as possible. Thank you so much for your patience as we perfect this process. I’ve refunded half of the subtotal for you. I’ve also attached a $ 5 credit for the inconvenience.
Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.​
Johnny @ Caviar
50% of the subtotal. Ha, that means caviar keeps its order and delivery fees!
If I was at the restaurant, the food would have gone right back to the kitchen. Stick with ordering direct from restaurants or try EAT24. They actually take some accountability for issues with their restaurants.

OK Caviar has the best food for sure, but you should note 1. Couriers get no tips, (don’t believe the ‘gratuity’ part. 2. Any mistakes are the restaurant’s fault. I mean ask yourself if you want a courier opening and checking every item in your order –eeeew! and 3. They should always bring it all the way up to your door. Some don’t. If you’re gonna pay extra for better food, demand extra service.

I’ve been a frequent user of this service for over a year. They are really an excellent delivery service, but they have an embargo in place for downtown deliveries during Super Bowl week. Really strange. They suggest that if you live in one of these downtown zones, you arrange to have the food delivered OUTSIDE of the zone, and go and meet your driver to collect the delivery. Needless to say, none of us were willing to do that since that sort of defeats the purpose of… well…delivery.
We don’t quite comprehend why Waiters on Wheels, Munchery, and Spoon Rocket are continuing their deliveries with no embargoes. Longer waits, yes (WoW mentions that wait times will be longer right on their ordering page), but they’re still managing to get here. So, during this festive lead-​up week, we and our neighbors have given WoW a whopping amount of business.
Truly perplexed by Caviar’s decision. Especially since they have the better restaurants and wider cuisine range. We’re not sure what to make of their bail-​out while other services kept a stiff upper lip. We’re rarely disappointed with Caviar at all, but two stars off for treating the downtowners like ex-​patriots for a week.

Best delivery app. Food always comes within an hour. They have the best selections.
In Dallas, I mostly use it for Cane Rosso, but I’ve also ordered successfully from Ellen’s Southern Kitchen.

I wanted to give Caviar a try and placed an order for Hard Knox in San Francisco. Not only are the prices jacked up (fried chicken at the restaurant for $ 9.99 was $ 15.99) but when I requested 2 pieces of THIGHS, I wound up with 2 drumsticks — my least liked part of the chicken! And all the juice from the collard greens spilled in the bag and got the corn bread sopping wet and mushy. The delivery guy was pleasant enough. No complaints about him. I even gave him a $ 5 tip, which is not required. Unfortunately, I will not be ordering through Caviar ever again. Very disappointing.

DOODE! I love thems… The couriers they use are super awesome and food selection is pretty decent… I’ve been using them for our office lunches for the past few months and they’ve always done a great job!
Thank you, Caviar!

Their delivery people and customer service are atrocious.
The delivery person never rang the doorbell but instead called my cell phone when they arrived at the house. Since I didn’t have my cell phone on me in the house, I missed the call and she left without delivering the food. It would have taken 3 seconds extra to get out of her car and ring the doorbell, which I would have heard.
When I called the delivery person back, she said she’d return with the food. She never did.
After 30 minutes more of waiting, I called customer service wondering what was going on. The person was rude, did not apologize, and did not acknowledge any mistakes were made. They kept repeating that I was at fault for not being there to pick up the food. I was there.
Blaming the customer for your mistakes is never OK.

Caviar’s been amazing to me so far. Ordering is a little pricier due to delivery, but the restaurant selection is fantastic (Spice House, Mission Chinese, Brenda’s, Delfina, Ice Cream Bar, need I say more?), service has been superb (they let me add something to my order 15 minutes after the fact with zero hassle).
Delivery is always relatively quick, fastbite is crazy convenient, and just every experience I’ve had so far has been top notch.

Caviar San Francisco is unlike other food delivery services (eat24, grubhub). They partnered with popular restaurants (Tony’s Pizza, Ike’s, Z&Y, R&G Lounge, Brenda’s and many others) that normally do not offer delivery service. It’s very convenient. I have ordered from them a few times without any issues.
The reason it’s only getting 3 stars because it’s expensive. Delivery fee ($ 1.99 within 1mile or $ 4.99) + 18% service fee.
If you would like to give it a try, I’d appreciate if you can use my referral link:
You’ll get $ 15 and I’ll also get $ 15.
Use this code for another $ 10 off: DISH$ 10
$ 5 off your next delivery: OGXRTI5

I ordered food from caviar and by mistake placed an additional order I didn’t want. I got the food I did want, but then another delivery person knocked on the door with the food I must have mistakenly ordered. I told her it was a mistake and she told me that they wouldn’t charge me, and then she left with the food. I noticed the second order never was refunded so I called customer service. The customer service department is SO unhelpful and told me that they were going to charge me anyways.
If I had known that I wouldn’t be refunded I would have just taken the food. It’s ridiculous that they have no way of dealing with situations like this and I will NEVER order from them again.

Ridiculous. The food is priced higher than seamless to begin with, and then they tack on both a 4.99 delivery fee AND a service fee. With a $ 20 off coupon, I still paid $ 9 for $ 16 work of food.

I use Caviar quite a bit, so I’d consider myself a bit of a fan. But, you should probably know that Caviar has a limited menu for most of the restaurants. Most restaurants do not have all of their menu items up on their Caviar page. Once you know that, it makes more sense. Another thing is the website is not super friendly. When you try to find the support number, it’s a mix and jumble of online FAQs and email form. Click «Contact Us» and the number should be there.
While the prices veer towards the obscene, I do generally appreciate Caviar because they have been helpful when orders go wrong. Unfortunately, this week, for some reason– they got two wrong orders missing food in a row. :/​Yikes! They need to work on their communication with the restaurants, especially since this happened twice in a row throughout the week. However, I will commend them for their efforts in customer service when it happened the second time. They promptly re-​ordered the items on their dime, and then called again (see my review for Destino for the details) when the restaurant claimed that they no longer had the item I wanted to ask if I still wanted the food delivered. I said no, and they also offered me a $ 10 credit for my troubles. (If it had been one item missing, I probably would have asked for a refund, but TWO items missing? Come on, that’s OK to reorder, right?) They also refunded me for the items I never received, and were extremely communicative and kind throughout the process. A good thing about their customer support team is that they’re readily available and I was able to reach someone without having to stay on hold, unlike other delivery services like GrubHub or Seamless (which don’t seem to be too popular here in the Bay Area anyway.)
Anyway, while I’m still not a huge fan of Caviar, I use it because it’s convenient. I may start to phase them out a bit more because of all the mistakes they’ve been making recently, but they were very sweet and apologetic about their mistakes.

I shouldn’t be giving Caviar a five-​star review, because I have a huge problem with its delivery radius: it doesn’t deliver to Vancouver! But even I have to cut them some slack on that front, at least until teleportation makes it possible to travel a few hundred miles with hot food or cold ice cream.
If you are so lucky as to be within their delivery radius (and with a healthy income) this is the food delivery of your dreams. All those restaurants you couldn’t get a reservation for? Caviar brings them to you. Can’t get your kids to eat spicy food? Feed the kids their plain noodles, and order a real meal for yourself.
We ordered two meals from Caviar — one from Nopalilto, and one from Tacolicious — and they both arrived hot and delicious. What’s not to love?

My scenario:
a) I was ravenous for a salad (think Rapunzel’s mother and how, in the original fairy tale, she was craving greens so goddamn badly, she felt she would die if she didn’t get her veggies).
b) Too lazy/​busy to leave my desk at work.
I saw that Café Underwood in Oakland had a nice offering of a vegan salad, with a $ 4.00 option of adding on smoked trout. I love fish, so I added that.
Thanks to a $ 5 code that expires on August 2, 2015, (CAVIARAUG5), my total, including tax and service fee, was $ 17.00.
It was an estimated one-​hour delivery, with me ordering at 11:28 AM. They sent me updates on my food preparation and when it was being picked up and being delivered to me, which is standard for food delivery apps. But I was pleased that it arrived to me at 11:59, in half an hour instead of one hour.
It arrived in a paper bag by a gentleman who came in through the front door of the office and said he had a delivery for me. Sure, he seemed nice, but I was confused by why he wasn’t wearing a Caviar shirt. I mean, other deliveries like DoorDash and Bento wear shirts with their logos. Why wasn’t this guy?
I was kind of disappointed by how small the box of salad was. Even more disappointing was when I opened the box and saw the tiny amount of trout I got.
$ 4.00 for smoked trout, and it was truly dinky! I would NOT pay $ 4.00 for that small amount of trout. Complete rip off.
For what would normally cost $ 22.00, I expected a large salad. On the bright side, the salad was fresh and flavorful, with delicious avocados. But that is the one and only thing I was happy about when it came to the food. Also, I wanted larger portions (shhhhhhh, shut up about me being a fatty, I like my veggies and antioxidants, okay?).
Would I try Caviar again? Maybe if I can find a coupon code, and if I’m too busy/​lazy to leave my desk again.
One word to sum up my experience: OVERPRICED

It has a nice interface, and features great restaurants. That is all it has going for it. There are other delivery services that are faster and cheaper, but I’m only posting this review for the following reason.
I don’t know about the company, but the customer service representative I spoke to, and it seems from the reviews that a lot of them in general, act like children. The person on customer service JUST NOW just made fun of me when he thought I couldn’t hear, imitation voice and everything, when I was «on hold», while his coworker laughed. He made fun of my voice, insinuated that I was an idiot, and then came back from being «on hold» and acted friendly again. NOPE. So what if I shouldn’t have used my card on my roommate’s account previously? I was ordering for me this time, so I made a new account, so I wanted to keep the accounts separate. Instead of listening to why, he just put me on hold to make fun of his interpretation of events (apparently I sound like a teenage girl) and then got back to me, presumably to tell me that his supervisor said there was nothing he could do. NOPE.

The roommate and I have used Caviar on two occasions.
The first was from Tony’s pizza napoletana on Thursday, June 4^th. I ordered around 5pm and our order arrived around 6:30pm. I live far from North Beach (in Outer Richmond) and it was during one of the Warriors finals games, so understandable that it took an hour and a half. I did some price comparison and Caviar prices of the items we ordered were 15% higher than the menus online. We got the Meatballs (+$ 0.90), Picante pizza (+$ 3) & The new yorker (+$ 4.20). Driver was very sweet and we enjoyed our pizzas.
Second time was from Nick’s crispy tacos on Sunday, July 5^th. We ordered around 11:45am and the food arrived around 12:30pm. Prices at Nick’s averaged about 4% higher than online menu prices. The only item price that was exactly the same was adding guacamole to our Carnitas burrito. We ordered: Carne asada taco +$ 0.15 (+3.8%), Nick’s way +$ 0.05 (+4%), Grilled fish taco +$ 0.20 (+4%), Camarones taco +$ 0.20 (+4%), Carnitas burrito +$ 0.35 (+4.1%), Pescado burrito +$ 0.35 (+3.8%) & Elote +$ 0.15 (+$ 3.8%). Our driver also delivered sides of salsa which was much appreciated.
Our first order had no delivery fee since it was our first time using Caviar. Second order, delivery fee was $ 4.99, but I was emailed a coupon code for $ 5 off, so essentially the delivery fee was free.
Tax and service averaged about 26.76% for each order, so service/​tip is about 18% since tax is 8.75%.
I also looked up Caviar’s Menu Pricing Information just to see how they decide how much money to add to each menu item.
«Menu prices are set at the discretion of restaurant management. We do our best to ensure our online prices are the same as they are in-​store. Additional mandatory fees are included in the price of some menu items (for example, the 4% Healthy SF Tax required by law in San Francisco). For these cases, we add the incremental amount directly to the menu price rather than as a new line item on your receipt page, resulting in slightly higher prices online.»
With Nick’s, it seems to make sense. But with Tony’s, they are upcharging each item by 15%, so I’m not sure what else is being added to the 4% SF Health tax.
Depending on which restaurant you are ordering from, Caviar can be a good deal since you’re paying the 8.75% tax, an 18% service fee and a flat $ 5 delivery fee. Nothing more is expected on top of this. So essentially, it’s like going to a restaurant to eat and just paying $ 5 to have it in the comfort of your own home.
I will probably do more price comparisons before I decide which restaurants to order from, but I like the selection of restaurants that Caviar offers. Just make sure the restaurants don’t also do free delivery themselves as I saw a couple restaurants listed that provide their own free delivery.

Estos tipos son ridículos y baratos prometen pagar una cantidad a los drivers y ni siquiera llegan ala mitad son una bola de rateros y lo peor de todo se quedan con las propinas de los costumers que dejan para los drivers son arrogantes y abusivos .los restaurantes se quejan de ellos por que ni siquiera le mandan accesorios ni bolsas que les prometen para los clientes .ala hora de ordenar deberían usar otra compañía y no apoyar a esta bola de delincuentes mentirosos

Update: Caviar flagged my review to have it taken down? Can’t take the heat or what? Good to know you’re trying to stop the truth. No problem, I’ll repost it, and share it everywhere I can.
When they did deliver to me, the food arrived cold and congealed, something I would have sent back in a restaurant their fix? $ 5 credit. I ordered $ 50 plus of bad food and you’ll give me a fraction of that?! Superb. Not.
Then I stopped getting the chance to get food at all because they delivers to all areas of SF cept the low income ones and tries to act transparent when they USED TO BE CITY WIDE. I’ll be happy to watch this bs company fall because apparently this app doesn’t think Outer Mish, Portola, Visitacion or Hunter’s Point need to eat. On their IG they are still advertising on media like they’ll service all of SF. #haters @trycaviar
Anyone that supports them doesn’t think all areas of SF deserve to eat. Living up to your pretentious name. #donttrycaviar #foodequality

Used Caviar for the first time this weekend to get deep dish pizza delivered in Oakland. Worked fine. Nothing special.
The restaurants menu was truncated (and it’s not for deliverability reasons) but maybe that’s the restaurant’s doing. So I won’t hold my Brussels sprout disappointment against Caviar.
Not as cute and fun and as Eat24. Just a normal UI that basically got the job done.
I did not see a place to insert delivery tips, which would have been SUPER HELPFUL to the poor confused delivery driver. That’s why I’m going with four stars.
Also, I didn’t see any mechanism by which the driver could keep four hot. So I would be more inclined to use Caviar to order hot food from only a five or six-​minute driving radius. Why order delivery at all? Because parking here at home is hell. Which makes delivery options very interesting and important.
It was really great to get deep dish at home. That’s never been a realistic option before (that I know of.)

New app that will deliver for select restaurants near you.
I use Postmates quite often and gave them a try.
I like the menu. Plenty of pictures and few hot items to choose from.
I like that there is no awkward «please sign and don’t forget to tip» when you receive the order. They just give you the order at your door and take off.
Postmates — Delivery Fee + Service Fee (9%) + Tip (you decide)
Caviar — Delivery Fee + 20%
I prefer Caviar’s method because I don’t have to feel guilty. Über/​Lyft does it this way too.
I’ve used Postmates many times so it’s not fair to compare, but postmates have been a hit or miss. Sometimes drivers get lost, they sometimes hand you the food bag sideways, sometimes looked like coffee was spilled or sipped from, etc.
The two deliveries I had so far have worked out perfectly.

STEER CLEAR OF THIS SERVICE THAT BRINGS YOU OTHER PEOPLE’S EATEN FOOD!
Caviar HAD a lot of potential: local delivery service, low fees, using car (so efficient), and have some good restaurants.
Unfortunately, they not only missed the mark on my first delivery but also on customer service– barely apologizing after I reached out to them.
My first delivery was delivered without a word (what if I wasn’t the recipient at the apartment door?), it was very cold when it arrived and worst, I received SOMEONE ELSE’S LEFTOVERS in my delivery.
When I complained for a refund because of how gross it was, they simply put the blame on the restaurant and asked me to contact them. Good Luck Caviar.