David Chang's Delivery-Only Restaurant Ando Will Soon Offer Pick-Up Option

David Chang is changing things up again with his delivery-only restaurant Ando, including a new menu, new delivery zone, and a revamped business model that will include a pick-up option. In an email this week to its customers, the year-old restaurant announced the changes made since hiring Ando’s current CEO Andy Taylor (Pret, Hale & Hearty).

First, Ando has done a complete revamp of the menu, swapping out chicken tenders, and egg rolls for new dishes like a Thai chicken salad sandwich, vegetable banh mi, and a chicken Caesar salad. Ando is also expanding its delivery zone farther downtown, touching neighborhoods like Chelsea and the East Village with the help of a new downtown kitchen.

Soon, Ando will also have an option to let people order ahead and physically pick up their their meal at the downtown kitchen, part of a new strategy for the restaurant that makes it no longer delivery-only. The downside is that people above 45th Street can no longer order Ando. Starting next week, they will no longer be delivering from the Midtown kitchen at all. “We built our downtown kitchen specifically for our needs and can accommodate pick-up there as well, while in Midtown we simply cannot,” the email says.

In an interview with The Ringer earlier this year, Chang admitted Ando’s mistakes and that the team still needed to figure things out. “At the end of the day, it’s really hard,” Chang told The Ringer. “It’s an extraordinarily difficult business that someone is going to win, and it’s something that I’m really fascinated by.” Despite the rush in the last few years for people to get into the delivery-only game, many businesses have found that there are no easy fixes.

Chang and Momofuku launched Ando in May 2016, with the help of a few investors that surprisingly include Jimmy Fallon and Aziz Ansari. In November, Eater’s Ryan Sutton reviewed the delivery restaurant, noting that it wasn’t worthy of being added into a lunch delivery routine.

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