Wayland restaurant take out grid online here.

As a Town, Wayland has great local restaurants, but they’re struggling, especially now that indoor seating has been limited to 25% capacity, very few people want to dine inside anyway, and cold winter months make outdoor dining impossible.  Restaurant service workers are bearing the brunt of a very tough COVID economy.

How can we help?  Wayland Economic Development Committee (EDC) is encouraging Waylanders to keep local restaurants in mind, if they can, and whenever they can, to help make a difference.  Many restaurants around the Commonwealth have permanently closed their doors.  We can actively support our local restaurants to help them survive the cold winter, by ordering takeout and delivery during the next few months – and we can enjoy great food to boot.  Mangia!

To help get the word out, EDC has collected all the ordering information for Wayland’s 12 sit-down restaurants into a convenient grid online here.  It also includes helpful hints as to how your order can have the best impact.  Cut it out, tape it to the fridge, keep the link handy, share it with friends and neighbors.

Some ways of ordering help restaurants more than others. Savvy diners know most delivery apps, while convenient for ordering, are expensive for restaurants. Grubhub, UberEats, Doordash and other apps take a large fee, usually 20-30%, up to 40% of the order, eating up all the restaurant’s profit and more.

Filling app delivery orders can mean a restaurant is selling at a loss, just to keep the lights on. So to help local restaurants the most, Waylanders should aim to do takeout whenever possible, and try to pick up their own food orders. Ordering online makes it easier than ever to pick up dinner on the way home from errands or work – or even just as an excuse for a quick trip to get out of the house, which we all can use these days.

If you do need delivery, which we all do now and then, aim for restaurants that have their own delivery, or use ChowNow or SliceLife delivery apps which charge significantly less to the restaurant than others. Last resort is to use the regular delivery apps – better that than nothing, but just know that your dollar can go a lot further for the good of the restaurants, by ordering direct and picking up.

Only a few short months stretch between here and Summer 2021, so bring a little light to your hibernation. If you’re able, order weekly, or even more often if you can. Add wine, drinks and dessert, treat yourself — or even make it an evening and Zoom-dine with friends or extended family. Try a restaurant that you’ve never tried before, it may become a new favorite. And do your heart good by tipping generously, for all the staff and crew who are affected personally by the lack of full dining rooms.

We can all pitch in – and enjoy good food to boot — to help our favorite hometown spots still be there
when we get back to normal down the road in 2021.