Wonder Is Everywhere, But What Is It?

Our critic’s lunch delivery from his local Wonder. Photo: Matthew Schneier

Slowly and then all at once — isn’t it always the way? — we’ve been blanketed by Wonder. On the Upper West Side and the Upper East, in Downtown Brooklyn and Park Slope, in Chelsea and the East Village, Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, and Astoria, not to mention Hoboken, Scarsdale, Teterboro, as far afield as Providence, Rhode Island, and Quakertown, Pennsylvania, the swoopy, green not-quite-script of Wonder’s logo has appeared. You could, as I did, overlook it until you couldn’t overlook it anymore. There were 11 Wonders in March of this year, when the company announced an additional $700 million in funding, raised from the likes of Bain Capital, the investment bank Jefferies, Amex Ventures, and Nestlé; there will be 35 by the end of the year, and 90 are planned by the end of 2025. Marc Lore, Wonder’s founder and CEO, a dot-com zillionaire who co-founded diapers.com and once headed up Walmart’s e-commerce, told the Times that he believes Wonder could be “the Amazon of food and beverage.” As Carrie Bradshaw would put it: I had to Wonder.

What even is Wonder? Founded in 2018, it is, according to its own marketing copy, “a new kind of food hall.” More of a Potemkin food hall, really. Under its green shingle, Wonder comprises some 30 “restaurants,” which are really more like sub-brands. At Wonder’s brick-and-mortar locations, or on the Wonder app, you can order from most any of them, as many as you want, which is really its entire pitch. Some of the restaurant names are existing and well known, like Di Fara or SriPraPhai; others are branded “concepts” from celebrity chefs, like Jota by José Andrés and Walnut Lane by Jonathan Waxman. Yet more are Wonder’s own proprietary pseudo-establishments, like Limesalt, which makes Mexican in a build-it-your-way Chipotle style, or Bellies, a kids’ menu turned into a restaurant. Or not turned into a restaurant. What even is a restaurant? At Wonder, the boundaries blur. Browse around the Wonder app and you’ll start to notice that the traditional borders between establishments wiggle and dissolve. Bellies offered kids’ mac ’n’ cheese on its menu, but so, I noticed, did every other restaurant, regardless of whether it was a steakhouse, Mexican cantina, or one of Michael Symon’s Greek-Mediterranean concepts. Kids’ mac ’n’ cheese followed me wherever I went, like a cheddar-drenched drone.

Wonder began opening physical locations about 18 months ago, rebalancing from its delivery-only roots. (Delivery now accounts for about 50 percent of its orders.) However a customer wants to eat, Wonder handles everything in-house. The road to your door is long, and then, hopefully short: The company partners with chefs or restaurateurs for an up-front fee and equity, and its team of “culinary engineers” works with the chefs for months to develop a scalable, deliverable menu. New ideas are then piloted at a Wonder location — Downtown Brooklyn and Westfield, New Jersey, are both pilot stores — after which the food is rolled out to many more. Once items make it to the larger menu, they’re prepped in a centralized commercial kitchen in New Jersey and sent daily, mostly as kits, to Wonder’s stores, where everything is finished to order. (Not for nothing, Wonder acquired the meal-kit service Blue Apron last year.) It’s not heat-and-eat, as Blue Apron is, or even reheated, Wonder’s CMO, Daniel Shlossman, assured me, but it is true that all of the finishing can be done in the restaurants’ all-electric kitchens by non-chef staffs, which are outfitted with quick-cooking ovens, hot-water baths, and electric fryers. There are no flames in Wonder kitchens.

I placed an order this week. Seeking variety, I ordered a tofu pad see ew from SriPraPhai, some spanakopita from Michael Symon’s Chios Taverna, and a brisket sandwich from Tejas Barbecue. My food theoretically came from two real restaurants 1,600 miles apart (SriPraPhai in Woodside and Tejas Chocolate + Barbecue in Tomball, Texas) and one restaurant-flavored brand (Wonder’s proprietary Michael Symon taverna), but it all actually came from one storefront on Schermerhorn Street. Twenty-seven minutes after I’d ordered it, my meal sat steaming on my doorstep. I had the slightly uncanny feeling of DM-ing lunch to myself.

The results were mixed. The sandwich was not bad: barky, decently marbled brisket on a squishy potato bun. Not New York’s best barbecue, but not a sandwich I’d turn my nose up at. (As it turns out, Tejas is one of the company’s longest-running menus; it’s had time to iterate.) The spanakopita was so-so: crisper and flakier than I might’ve expected, but with a mushy feeling that had an unavoidably boiled flavor. The loser was SriPraPhai’s pad see ew. It had been reduced to bare essentials — just noodles, tofu, and a few desultory sprigs of Chinese broccoli — with a fishy, bitter sauce and none of the heat or tang you would get at the restaurant, or even from my less august local Thai delivery place. (Noodles are an especially challenging delivery item, Shlossman told me.)

For suburbanites, the appeal of Wonder is clearer. Expanding the blast radius of Jonathan Waxman’s chicken with salsa verde — a Barbuto classic, adapted for Walnut Lane — to the burbs is a value add, of a sort. But for New Yorkers, Wonder’s wonderies cast more of a pall as they bubble up, plush with funding, in what seems like every available rental space. Central Harlem and the Financial District open this week; the Lower East Side, Flatbush, and Jackson Heights are due by the end of the year.

Wonder, to be fair, is only the latest twist in the city’s ongoing appification. Some apps become verbs (we Caviar, you Seamless), while others go belly-up. Think of Getir, the app that was to optimize bodega delivery (essentially) that once popped up in every neighborhood but has now pulled out of the U.S. and European markets to focus on its core business in Turkey, leaving a passel of unpaid rent bills in its wake.

Though the aim of Wonder is to expand the reach of real, individual places — Shlossman guessed, correctly, I’d never been to Tomball, Texas — it’s hard not to think about the real, individual places that won’t ever open at all as a better-funded emporium competitor hoovers up available retail space. Those restaurants, before they franchise or partnerize, make a ballsy, even hubristic claim: You should try what we want to make. At Wonder, the customer is always right: You want it, they got it, wherever. I did notice that when Wonder CEO Marc Lore had a reporter to lunch for that Times profile, what he served came not from a kit but from a chef — a private one, at that.