Chefs Love Wonder, the Latest App Trying to Disrupt Delivery. Will Diners Follow Suit?

A few weeks ago, chef JJ Johnson launched a new restaurant concept in downtown Brooklyn. It’s called Bankside, with a menu that includes peel-and-eat shrimp, clam chowder, crispy cod sandwiches, and a lobster roll.

Like Johnson’s fast-casual rice bowl restaurant, Field Trip, the food at Bankside was developed with delivery in mind. But unlike Field Trip, Bankside by Chef JJ was launched in partnership with Wonder, a restaurant delivery and takeout concept dreamt up by an internet billionaire.

“We went through a very intense recipe testing phase, which was new to me,” Johnson says. “They locked me in a kitchen for two weeks and we measured the product out to the microgram.” “Locked in the kitchen” is hyperbole, but the micrograms aren’t. A microgram is one millionth of a gram, and Johnson says he’d never used this exacting measurement for ingredients like salt and spices before. “It’s why the recipes are so perfect,” he adds.

Wonder, which operates 11 locations mostly in New York City and its adjacent suburbs, is intent on rethinking restaurant delivery. It enlists well-known chefs and restaurants from across the country to contribute recipes from their restaurants, or, as in the case of Johnson, partners with them to create exclusive concepts. Bobby Flay, Michael Symon, Marc Murphy, José Andrés, and others have developed new brands for Wonder. The chefs develop the menu and recipes, lending their famous names. Then Wonder’s culinary team works to modify the dishes, without compromising looks or taste, so they can be prepared quickly using only a rapid-cook oven, a water bath, or a fryer. Kitchens in Wonder’s food halls can be as small as 750 square feet, and each location can serve food from up to 30 — 30! — restaurant concepts. A diner can walk into a Wonder location and pick up a pizza from Di Fara and a fried chicken sandwich from Marcus Samuelsson at the same time.

Three months after creating his menu, Johnson returned to the kitchen and Wonder’s chefs served him their version of his food. “I was shocked they got it to be that good,” he says. “It’s going to be very successful, because they’ve done the groundwork.”

It’s tempting to lump Wonder into the spate of ghost kitchen or delivery-only concepts that have come and gone since before the pandemic, but its partner chefs say this business is different. Wonder controls the entire experience, from recipe to fulfillment, and the company has spent $60 million so far on intellectual property — recipes and restaurant concepts — from its partner chefs. Wonder has also shown a savvy curatorial eye, tapping beloved local restaurants and effectively launching them in the competitive New York market. It serves fried chicken from Mississippi legend Mr. D’s 1,200 miles from its roadside restaurant; hummus, shawarma, and kebab from Washington, D.C.’s Maydan, once named among the best new restaurants in the country by multiple media outlets; and brisket and pork ribs from Tejas Barbecue, a one-time side project from a chocolatier-turned-pitmaster outside of Houston.

“Not just any restaurant can sign up for it,” says Ben Johnson, an owner of Fred’s Meat and Bread, an Atlanta sandwich shop. Before signing with Wonder, Fred’s actively avoided third-party delivery apps until the pandemic forced their hand. But Johnson, like the others, was impressed by what he calls Wonder’s outsized ambitions to change delivery. “It’s a very curated list of restaurants they’ve put together, which I think elevates their brand, and helps elevate our brand as well,” Johnson says.

In other words, proximity to the likes of Bobby Flay and José Andrés is a tacit endorsement of Fred’s Meat and Bread. It’s the same selling point as the early days of delivery app Caviar, when it offered a premium product — takeout from higher-end restaurants — in a marketplace that’s otherwise about unlimited options, not curation. (Caviar, of course, was purchased by competitor DoorDash in 2019, ending that air of exclusivity.) And in controlling the entire experience, from recipe to fulfillment, Wonder says it can offer exclusive menus with the sort of high-quality, thoughtful dishes that aren’t usually associated with delivery.

Wonder debuted in December 2021 as a network of tricked-out Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans serving a few affluent New Jersey suburbs. The vans were outfitted with kitchen equipment and loaded with partially prepared food; drivers parked outside customers’ homes and fired, finished, and plated dishes in the back, delivering meals to diners’ front doors as soon as they were ready. It was a wild, expensive, and ultimately impractical idea, and in early 2023 Wonder ditched the vans in favor of brick-and-mortar locations, the first opened in February 2023 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Customers place orders on the Wonder app for delivery or pick-up.

Instead of driving mobile kitchens to its diners, Wonder deploys a mix of employees and third-party couriers to deliver food in a tight radius — between six to eight minutes away in the city and 10 to 12 in the suburbs. In early April 2024, Wonder seemed to invest in its in-house delivery operations even more by acquiring Relay, a New York City-based delivery service, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Relay maintains its own fleet of contracted bike couriers, assigning restaurant deliveries and paying a predetermined hourly wage, not the more common per-delivery rate. A Wonder spokesperson declined to offer details of the deal, but did confirm it will help Wonder deliver orders quickly, accurately, and affordably.

“After a year-long partnership, Wonder and Relay have agreed that Relay will become part of the Wonder team, with plans to transition its tech infrastructure to Wonder. There are no anticipated changes to Relay’s courier network, operations, or restaurant partners,” they said.

For chefs, the benefits to Wonder feel obvious. Meherwan Irani, owner and executive chef of the Chai Pani Restaurant Group in Asheville, North Carolina, remembers his first phone call with Wonder as a seriously unusual proposition. As it does with other partners, Wonder offered him a cash payment plus equity in the company to sign on, a compensation structure that’s common in tech startups but not in restaurants. There are no royalties, meaning chefs aren’t paid a percentage of their concept’s sales. If Irani ever felt Wonder’s food quality slipped, Chai Pani was free to pull its menu and walk away.

It was an offer Irani couldn’t refuse, especially since Chai Pani was already planning an East Coast expansion. He’s not concerned about cannibalizing his audience; even if Wonder gets to a location first, he says, local diners will recognize Chai Pani.

To appeal to a broad audience, Irani did have to make one concession: Wonder asked him to include some “classic” Indian dishes not available on Chai Pani’s menu, like chicken tikka masala and saag paneer. At first, he pushed back. “We’re an Indian street food restaurant,” Irani told them. “The reason we’re on the map — the reason you reached out to us — is because people know us not for those items, but for things that are fun and crunchy.”

Armed with data from its diners, Wonder promised that the dishes would help introduce new customers to an unfamiliar concept. It wasn’t a wholly unusual request. In the Asheville restaurant’s earliest days, some diners requested the same classic dishes — and then some. “Shit, we had people come in and ask for Thai iced tea when we first opened, too,” Irani says. (This has since stopped as restaurant-goers have come to understand more about Indian street food, he says.)

So Irani acquiesced. “If they want a tikka masala, let’s make the best dang chicken tikka masala that we possibly can,” he told his culinary director. He doesn’t have sales figures to share, but says that Chai Pani was among Wonder’s most successful early concepts in the days when its vans served only suburbanites.

“Any to-go food, any delivery food is some degree of compromise,” says Johnson of Fred’s Meat and Bread. To Johnson, Wonder is an attractive partner because the restaurant never considered expanding outside of Atlanta otherwise. “We come from an independent restaurant. We don’t come with the idea that we’re going to come up with a concept and replicate it,” he says, adding, “That is probably a more lucrative avenue in the restaurant industry than what we do.”

He’s not wrong. Marc Lore, Wonder’s founder and CEO, is a serial entrepreneur best known for building and selling Jet.com to Walmart for $3.3 billion in 2016; he’s reportedly committed $300 million of his own money to the effort. Wonder acquired meal-kit brand Blue Apron last September for $103 million. Wonder has managed to raise a whopping $1.5 billion to date, and Lore recently told the New York Times that he’s planning for an initial public offering (IPO) in the next five years with a $30 billion valuation. (For context, it took Shake Shack 14 years to move from its New York City hot dog cart to a public company; it’s currently worth $4.6 billion on the New York Stock Exchange.)

Back in Brooklyn, chef JJ Johnson is happy to work within Wonder’s parameters. Wonder will test Bankside’s menu for a few more weeks before adding it to the menu mix in more locations. The culinary team will probably have some suggestions and recipe tweaks based on sales and diner feedback. But they’ve otherwise stepped out of Johnson’s way.

“I think a lot of chefs go in and do these licensing deals or partnership deals, and at the end of the tunnel someone on the other side is like, well, that’s not what people want,” he says. “But it’s like… but you want a business with me. And I think that is why you see the caliber of chefs on the platform that you see.”

Johnson calls the partnership mutually beneficial. Both sides ask questions, and share ideas, insights, and growth strategies. Wonder managed to modernize the entire ordering, cooking, and delivery process for a new era of restaurant business, with plans to grow to 100 locations in the next two years. Based on the chefs’ collective experience, it’s hard to untangle Wonder the platform from the success of Lore, its storied founder with his sights set on big success.

“It’s something I talk to Bobby Flay about all the time,” Johnson says. “He’s like, ‘JJ, I wish I had a Marc Lore at your age.’”

After years of contentious relationships with delivery companies, the chefs on Wonder talk about this partnership differently. They cite the time, effort, and cash the upstart has poured into replicating their dishes to serve them to the masses. But will the masses come? Is keeping chefs happy enough to keep diners happy? Wonder’s $1.5 billion bet says yes, but its ultimate success requires diners to put their money where their mouth is, too.

Kristen Hawley writes about restaurant operations, technology, and the future of the business from San Francisco. Tomekah George is an artist based in the UK who creates handcrafted colorful illustrations.