Table 22, a restaurant subscription platform for fancy at-home dinners, launches in Philly

There’s not much to miss about the early days of the pandemic, when it was hard to find everything from booze to groceries — if you had the nerve to leave the house, that is. But there was a bright spot from that time: fancy takeout. At one point, you could score multi-course take-home meals from the likes of Palizzi Social Club, Friday Saturday Sunday, Pumpkin, and many more.

Such gourmet dinners to-go have grown less common, for good reason: Delivery and all that goes with it, from packaging to fees, can be a logistical headache for restaurants.

Table 22, a dining-subscription platform, tries to mitigate that pain point by handling “all the tricky parts, the stuff they don’t want to do,” says founder Sam Bernstein. The New York-based service works with restaurants nationwide to offer monthly packages to local subscribers. In Philly, you can sign up for regular deliveries from chef Ange Branca’s Kampar Kitchen (two three-course meals, plus extras and educational notes, for $115 a month), or chef Ari Miller’s Musi BYOB (a monthly meal for two for $95), or from Messina Social Club’s Little Noodle Pasta Co (pasta kits plus provisions for $65). Other Table 22 partners in Philly include High Street and Roy-Pitz Barrel House; Kalaya launches a subscription in August.

The Inquirer spoke with Bernstein about Table 22′s service and how it might benefit restaurants as well as fine diners content to eat in.

Table 22 allows consumers to participate in really amazing subscriptions or membership experiences from some of their favorite local restaurants and food merchants. Our partners are sit-down restaurants and bakeries, specialty grocers, butcher shops, wine stores — a broader swath than just restaurants. Typically, the [subscription] experience is centered around physical products: cooking kits, wine clubs, butcher boxes, a lot of the stuff you’ve probably seen from direct-to-consumer subscription businesses like HelloFresh. We’ve developed this operating system that allows merchants to create this new part of their business or run it in a more streamlined way. Our role is to help them be successful.

We have subscriptions that are weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even annual, so it runs the gamut, but monthly is the bread and butter. A restaurant could do a monthly product drop or experience for the consumers participating in the paid subscription. In Philly, that could be something like meal kits from the rotating group of chefs at Kampar Kitchen, pasta kits from Little Noodle Pasta Co., or a seasonal pack of interesting beers from Roy-Pitz, where you also get on-premise benefits like a discount when you dine in at the taproom.

We want to help restaurants generate meaningful incremental revenue that’s stable and allows them to deepen relationships with their most important customers. Restaurants are keen to get off some of the delivery marketplaces. So what we try to do is extract away all of the software and logistics complexities so the restaurant can develop an amazing offering, bring it to market effectively, and then each month create a great menu, food share, or box for the customer. The primary way that consumers hear about it is the restaurants themselves market the offerings directly to their email list or their Instagram. What we actually hear from our restaurants is that they see subscribers start to come in more frequently because they feel like a deeper connection and sense of loyalty to the restaurant. We handle billing, software, payments, tools for reporting, fulfillment.

The further and further away from the worst of the pandemic that we get, it’s clear that the scope has to be as narrow as possible in terms of what we ask our restaurants to worry about. Doing deliveries is not something they have the staff capacity or desire to do in our experience, so we need to support that. We let them focus on what they do best, which is hospitality, great beverages, and great products. What we hear from our partners across the country is that even as they’ve seen deceleration in online ordering or meal kits a la carte or whatever other e-commerce they were doing, they’ve seen their subscription bases continue to grow. And it’s really because they’re forging these deep customer communities that are going to endure beyond the pandemic.

Around the U.S., the range is anywhere from a couple hundred bucks a month to our top-earning restaurant, which is doing $80,000 of incremental monthly [revenue]. But the average restaurant on Table 22 is probably earning somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000 [of extra profit] a month.

We take a percentage of their top-line sales, which is typically 10%. And that’s it, we don’t have other fees.

An example of consumer segment that tends to do really well with us is young parents with kids who really want to feel connected to the local restaurant scene but it’s hard to get out as much. People also subscribe for the curation and learning; if you’re participating in a wine club or you’re learning new recipes, you’re getting some curation from and expanding your culinary horizons with someone you really trust, whether it’s a sommelier or a chef. I also think there’s a durable desire for consumers to feel like they’re supporting local businesses.

I like to say these subscriptions are a more fun and delicious experience than DoorDash or cooking, but they’re cheaper than actually going out to the restaurant. We try to provide a really beautiful home cooking experience for $50 or $60. It’s a more economical way to engage with one of your favorite local restaurants at a more regular cadence.