Are the Dishes Any Good at the Fastest-Growing Food Delivery in New York? - Eater NY

I was a fan of Bobby Flay’s cooking early on, when he was chef at Miracle Grill in the late 1980s, bringing Southwestern flavors to the East Village for the first time, and later at Mesa Grill near Union Square. I followed his career over the decades as he built a restaurant empire, and become a major TV personality with 17 shows to his credit. Having missed several of his restaurants along the way, I was intrigued to hear that his Bobby Flay Steak was represented as one of the chef options at the new Wonder ghost kitchen and food hall at 128 W. 23rd Street, near Sixth Avenue, in Chelsea.

With an emphasis on restaurant delivery and takeout, food hall and ghost kitchen Wonder, from entrepreneur and former president of Walmart e-commerce Marc Lore, opened its first locations in 2023 and has already opened 12 in all, six in New York City, five in New Jersey, and one in Pennsylvania. It’s the first of 100 expected to open by 2025. After spending $60 million dollars on recipes and restaurant concepts from partner chefs, including Marcus Samuelsson and José Andrés, it describes itself as “a new kind of food hall — iconic chefs and top restaurants.” With no stalls and very little seating, they are more akin to ghost kitchens with their focus on delivery, with staff responsible for around 200 dishes from multiple menus, from what I saw at three different locations.

Bobby Flay Steak resides among nearly a score of restaurants available in the Chelsea location, with a menu that includes three steaks and a handful of apps, salads, and sides. Intent on enjoying the full steakhouse experience, I ordered the appetizer called thick cut bacon ($11); a rib-eye steak of 16 ounces ($34), specifying medium rare; adding creamed spinach ($9) and mushroom mashed potatoes ($9) as sides. The total, with tax, came to almost $72.

My $72 steak dinner at Bobby Flay Steak.

The order arrived at the pickup counter packaged in foil containers 13 minutes later. The steak itself was big and boneless, and had been cooked rare rather than medium rare. It was a good piece of meat, nicely fatty, with a textured bark upon the upper surface like a black potato chip, eventually flaking off. The bacon app was awful, fibrous and gooey; the creamed spinach almost as bad, awash in cream with crunchies on top; the potatoes were good but salty, with hard-to-identify grated mushrooms. The meal had seemed like an SNL skit, at almost the same price as a sit-down regular steakhouse, minus service and booze.

The East Village Wonder, across from the NYU dorms.

The delivery counter at the Chelsea Wonder.

Folding Di Fara boxes in the ordering area of the Hoboken Wonder.

The dine-in area of the East Village Wonder.

The Chelsea branch is a cramped space tastefully done in somber gray and forest green. A rack of 15 or so menus beckon on one side of the room, with touchscreens adjacent to a counter where delivery workers pick up orders. Across Wonder locations, it seems that about half of the establishments (15 of 29) are associated with celebrity chefs, while others offered generic things like wings, sushi, or hamburgers.

I decided to investigate the offerings at other locations, visiting three branches of Wonder — East Village, Chelsea and Hoboken — concentrating on the restaurants and chefs whose food I’ve eaten elsewhere, albeit with more cooking equipment at the food hall than just “a rapid-cook oven, a water bath, or a fryer,” according to reporting on Eater.

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Chicken and waffles at Streetbird.

M’s fried chicken & waffle at Streetbird by Marcus Samuelsson ($13)
Cut into two pieces, the breaded and fried breast had a tough coating, and the waffle was cold and small. Grade: B

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Classic brisket sandwich from Tejas.

Classic brisket sandwich at Tejas Barbecue ($13)
The bun, the pickle, the raw onions were all fine, but the brisket, said to be smoked over oak by this Houston chocolate factory and barbecue, tasted old and rubbery. Grade: D

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Seafood paella for two.

Paella de mariscos at Jota by José Andrés ($27)
This paella for two was a generous serving with plenty of seafood, though the squid rings were brown and didn’t taste fresh. Moreover, there was a large quantity of liquid in the bottom of the container. Grade: B

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Cavatelli with sausage and mushrooms.

Cavatelli with sausage and mushrooms at Walnut Lane by Jonathan Waxman ($18)
This, too, had thin liquid sloshing around in the bottom of the container, but the pasta was unimpeachable, the sausage profuse and tasty, layered with two kinds of mushrooms. Grade: B+

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The promised eggplant dressing was virtually undetectable.

Spicy pepper & feta sandwich at Yasas by Michael Symon ($10)
After seeing Symon on numerous food competition shows, it’s weird to find him concocting what might be the world’s most boring sandwich, chopped raw vegetables and crumbled cheese on a pita so stale it might serve as a catcher’s mitt. Grade: D

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The Di Fara pizza comes with a narrative — mentioning basil, but no basil.

Original square pizza from Di Fara Pizza ($27)
The thick and crisp crust is exemplary in this Dom DeMarco replica Sicilian pie, the sauce piquant, the cheese a bit weird (the menu says burrata), but the shake of Romano typical of DiFara — though the fresh basil he tossed on all his pies was omitted. Grade: A-

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Saag paneer.

Saag paneer at Chai Pani by Meherwan Irani ($17)
This tasted good and might have gotten a better grade except for a dearth of spinach, sauce way too thin, and the fact that it was delivered stone cold. The basmati was excellent, though. Grade: B-

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And that $72 order from Bobby Flay Steak? It’s a B-.

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