As a resident of lower Manhattan, it always baffled me that–despite my apartment’s proximity to excellent and authentic Chinese cuisine in Chinatown–there seemed to be an endless amount of bad Chinese restaurants in the area delivering the same cold, terrible dishes. As it turns out, there may be a strange reason for that: Tribeca Citizen reports that it has uncovered a network of fake restaurants operating on Seamless, the online food delivery platform, that actually all funnel back to one supremely awful restaurant called Lily’s Japanese & Chinese Restaurant.
Restaurants like Joe’s Noodles and AAA Asian Food, which boasted their own Seamless menus, were actually sending orders back to the kitchen at Lily’s, reports the Tribeca Citizen. This means that hypothetically you could order from a handful of different restaurants on Seamless and end up with the same food made by the same kitchen.
Eater reached out to Grubhub/Seamless and they supplied the following statement:
As I write this email, our team is taking steps to correct the situation. GrubHub Seamless takes measures to ensure that every restaurant is correctly represented on our services and invites diners to report inaccuracies to our customer care team.”
Wonder how many of Seamless’ offerings are actually fake?