The Cocotte restaurant in London’s fashionable Notting Hill is, as one would expect, a temple to good taste. All exposed brickwork and reclaimed wood, it boasts that the rotisserie chicken it specialises in comes from a farm in La Chapelle-d’Andaine in France, where the birds roam free, snacking on vegetables and corn.
When they finally meet their end, they are marinated for 24 hours in a secret recipe of herbs and spices devised by chef and founder Romain Bourrillon, a man who learnt his trade in Michelin-starred restaurants.
Alongside the poultry, customers can choose from truffle mac and cheese, potatoes roasted in chicken dripping and a battery of freshly-made salads.
And if some of the restaurant’s devotees can’t make it in person to its chi-chi West London premises, well — there’s always Deliveroo, the online food delivery service whose distinctive light-blue branded mopeds, motorbikes and bicycles are a common sight across every large city in the country.
Expectation: The Cocotte restaurant in London’s fashionable Notting Hill is, as one would expect, a temple to good taste
It’s been hugely successful, utterly revolutionising Britain’s takeaway market in just four years — so much so that the company is thought to be worth as much as £1.1 billion.
How? Its mission statement is simple: ‘Your favourite restaurants, delivered fast to your door.’
Where once the only choice might have been between pizza or curry, Deliveroo has deliberately partnered with independent and chain restaurants that do not have a delivery service to offer customers a range of cuisines.
Now working with 20,000 restaurants and more than 30,000 contract riders, last year its orders grew by a staggering 650 per cent, a boom almost entirely due to this tempting promise: that if you can’t make it to your favourite restaurant in person, it will bring your favourite restaurant to your living room — and all at the click of a button.
Logging on to its website, consumers can peruse the menus of local restaurants, place an order and pay, and have it delivered to their doorstep by a Deliveroo driver in a matter of minutes.
But how would people feel if they were to learn that the food did not, in fact, come from the restaurant itself — but from a metal box the size of a shipping container plonked on an industrial estate?
Take Cocotte. While Deliveroo customers living close by will receive their food from the restaurant kitchen proper, those further afield will instead be serviced by a satellite kitchen in a car park in the altogether more edgy South London borough of Camberwell, some six miles south of its actual premises.
And Cocotte is by no means alone in choosing these metal containers to act as alternative kitchens. Other restaurants churning out Deliveroo orders from this rather grim-looking car park include Busaba Eathai, a chain with 14 restaurants in London and St Albans that serves Thai food, and Motu Indian Kitchen, set up by the family behind the Gymkhana restaurant in Mayfair — one of the world’s highest rated Indian restaurants.
Pizza joint Crust Bros and Gourmet Burger Kitchen have also taken premises there.
While meals emerging from the car park kitchens are flagged up online as coming from a ‘Deliveroo Editions’ restaurant, how many of its customers actually know what that means?
But this, apparently, is the future for Deliveroo. It is determined to expand into areas that have so far been restricted due to their distance to High Streets.
In a programme being rolled out across the country, it is setting up hubs of multiple kitchens in areas that are currently poorly served by the sorts of restaurants it knows to be popular with its customers.
Reality: Deliveroo Editions kitchens on an industrial state in Camberwelll
And these Deliveroo Editions bases — dubbed ‘dark kitchens’ — will, in some cases, be like the one on Valmar Road in Camberwell: little more than metal huts in the car park of an industrial estate.
Restaurants will then rent out these spaces to produce food solely for delivery.
Of course, more sales means more cash for Deliveroo. As well as a £2.50 delivery charge, it takes a hefty commission on each meal sold (reported to be as high as 25 per cent).
But there are significant problems with this new model — not least that it seems rather contrary to Deliveroo’s promise to bring your favourite restaurant direct to your front room.
‘We all thought Deliveroo delivered food from restaurants,’ says one campaigner against the South London hub. ‘We didn’t know it was delivered from a metal box at the back of a warehouse.
‘No doubt it must be very profitable — it does not have to build a restaurant, the staff are all disposable and the customers don’t have a clue what is going on.
‘It is like setting up a container at a festival and selling food all day without any of the normal overheads. And what happens to all the restaurants nearby on the High Street — surely they will suffer?’
Regardless, the march of Deliveroo’s dark kitchens goes on. There is another cluster of them in the east of the city, serving the financial district of Canary Wharf.
A line of eight metal boxes sits in the corner of a car park next to a busy A-road and beneath a railway bridge.
Last week, as the traffic rumbled past, passers-by could see in through the back door of one unit where three men were busily preparing food, the smell of Indian cooking in the air.
Outside stood a pallet loaded with large tins of Tropical Sun chickpeas.
Meanwhile, in Wandsworth, South London, there is a third hub. The kitchens here are situated within a number of units on an industrial estate.
Neighbouring businesses include a car repair workshop and a landscaping business, while helicopters buzz overhead as they prepare to land on a helipad next to the River Thames.
Outside of the capital, a hub has recently opened in Hove and another in Reading.
Consumers can peruse the menus of local restaurants, place an order and pay, and have it delivered to their doorstep by a Deliveroo driver (pictured) in a matter of minutes
Staff are being recruited for imminent launches in Leeds and Birmingham. And last week, Deliveroo announced that, in London alone, it was to create a further six — in Whitechapel, Islington, Crouch End, Swiss Cottage, Bermondsey and Wimbledon.
Residents who have the misfortune of living near these new hubs should prepare themselves for some sleepless nights — because by concentrating multiple ‘restaurants’ in one small area, the impact of deliveries to and from them has been multiplied.
Throughout the summer in Camberwell, the residents of Valmar Road have grown used to nightly disturbances: the din of mopeds and motorcycles that zip along the once-quiet street seven days a week, every evening, until after midnight.
‘There are up to 20 of them,’ said one fed-up homeowner. ‘They honk at each other, and their drivers talk and shout at one another. It’s so loud that people have had problems putting their children to bed.’
And it’s not only the delivery mopeds. The kitchens have to be serviced by food delivery vans, while the smell and rubbish from their bins has been unpleasant, too, say local homeowners, and attracted rodents and foxes. It all seems thoroughly out of kilter for a residential area.
‘We can’t even sit in the garden and enjoy a cup of tea any more,’ said Georgina Aza, 71, who lives on Valmar Road with her 75-year-old husband Michael.
‘All you hear is motor- bikes, in and out, in and out. It’s a danger. There will be an accident one day and they will kill someone — we have a school opposite.’
Neighbour Patricia Moise added: ‘It’s continuous —every 30 seconds. You hear these motorbikes all night long. When they come out of the entrance, they don’t care. Twice I’ve nearly been knocked down.’
And down on the South Coast in Hove, it’s the same story.
Over the past few weeks, residents’ peace and quiet has been shattered by the loud vroom-vroom of moped engines.
Again, the hub has kitchens for five different restaurants — all housed in a converted building on a busy street near to an industrial estate.
At peak times this week, half-a-dozen scooters could be seen queuing up outside, waiting for their orders. ‘There are scooters careering round the corner at all hours, day and night,’ said Hadyn Edwards, 53, a teacher. ‘At weekends, it’s totally crazy.’
Questions are now being asked as to whether these are suitable locations for such a business.
The Camberwell residents have complained to Southwark Borough Council, claiming that Deliveroo should not be operating from the industrial estate, which has planning permission only for business and storage purposes.
The council, it seems, agrees. Last week, it told the Mail that ‘the use of land for preparing and delivering food to order does not fit within these use classes’.
Deliveroo has deliberately partnered with independent and chain restaurants that do not have a delivery service to offer customers a range of cuisines
It intends to issue an enforcement notice against the unauthorised use within the coming days. This would compel Deliveroo to either comply with the current planning permission granted for the site, or apply for appropriate planning permission to operate there.
But, seemingly undeterred by the problems in Camberwell, Deliveroo remains busily focused on rolling out the concept across the country. In April, it announced it intended to open 30 hubs across ten cities in the UK, creating 1,000 new jobs.
It claimed that some partner restaurants in the trial London bases had seen delivery revenues increase by 500 per cent.
‘At a time when soaring costs are forcing many independent restaurants off the High Street, Deliveroo Editions gives restaurateurs the chance to launch, expand and test new innovations with delivery-only offerings in cities across the UK, creating in excess of 1,000 new restaurant jobs,’ it said in a statement.
‘Using its own technology, Deliveroo can identify specific local cuisines missing in an area, identify customer demand for that missing cuisine and hand-pick brands that are most likely to appeal to customers there.’
Deliveroo’s statement continues: ‘The roll-out will see Deliveroo provide restaurant partners with the infrastructure — including bespoke kitchens, local marketing support and fleets of riders — that allows them to launch delivery-only menus catered to local tastes.’
Asked about the problems experienced by those living near to the new hubs, a spokesman said: ‘Deliveroo will work with all our stakeholders, including councils, restaurants and the local community, to ensure we are offering the best service possible.
‘Deliveroo takes all complaints extremely seriously, which is why we work closely with local councillors and residents to improve our operations, cut noise and ensure riders respect residential areas.
‘We have taken action in both Camberwell and Hove and will continue to do whatever we can to address any concerns.’
He said that delivery workers in Camberwell had been warned not to exceed 5mph while on the trading estate and told to be considerate to those living locally, adding that the company ‘believes’ it is operating under the correct planning permission.
As for the restaurants that have taken space in the hubs, they claim that customers are getting as good quality food from them as they would from the restaurant.
Cocotte’s Mr Bourrillon said he personally visits the Camberwell kitchen every week to ensure standards are maintained. Staff there are trained in the restaurant and work across both sites.
‘It is like a restaurant, we have our kitchen there, our staff and our suppliers, so we are producing our food in the same way as our restaurant in Westbourne Grove,’ he said. ‘It is very important to keep the quality, but it is the same product and the same staff. They cook exactly like they would in the restaurant. We have a lot of repeat customers — I am very happy.’
Unfortunately, it is a sentiment not shared by those with the misfortune to find themselves living next to this new take on the Great British Takeaway.