—three at lunch, three at dinner—with an option for vegetarians and the gluten-free. On a recent weeknight, for example, the three options were chicken fajitas, pork chili verde, and bean and cheese enchiladas. Each dinner entrée costs $10, with an additional $2 delivery fee on top of however many meals are ordered.
On the night I gave it a try, I went for the Sicilian chicken and Calabrese sausage entrée. Less than 25 minutes later, a woman named Venessa showed up with a compostable container of the chicken dish, plus sizable portions of broccoli and roasted potatoes, as well as a small truffle for dessert. The food was solid, if not amazing, and showed up hot to my door. I’d go for chicken and veggies over pizza or Chinese any day, and in San Francisco, $12 bucks for a sizable portion of something I didn’t regret later seemed like a reasonable deal to me.
Sprig also launched lunch service this week, delivering another three selections between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. So far, the service is limited to the financial district SOMA, Mission Bay and Dog Patch, but conveniently reached my office. A kale and quinoa salad for $9 (plus that $2 fee) showed up to my door in about ten minutes, certainly an easier way to get lunch than fighting the lunch crowds on the street. Other options that day included a barbeque chicken sandwich and a pork banh mi with slaw.
So far, it’s been popular; 50 percent of people who ordered lunch in the first two weeks of its trial run ordered it more than once, and Sprig has found that some people were clearly ordering lunch for the whole office. Though Sprig has an eight-item limit per order, there’s no limit on the number of orders one person can put in, so some people were simply ordering in multiples of eight. Though Sprig happily delivers to offices, it has no plans yet to make a specific platform catering to businesses.
In addition to Keller, the rest of the culinary team is filled out by pastry chef Jessica Entzel (responsible for those truffles) and advisor Kyle Connaughton. Connaughton is an expert in culinary science who has worked for three different Michelin three-star restaurants and as a consulting chef for Chipotle. During that first six months of testing, Connaughton worked with Keller to reverse engineer all of their entrees, making sure that they could withstand delivery by Sprig’s drivers. One of Biyani’s favorite dishes, the steak au poivre, benefitted from all that fake-delivery testing. “We’re one of the only places in the world that you can get delivery steak,” he says. “The reason you can do that is because of Kyle and his steak testing.”
