Tokyo Food Apps Bring the Restaurant to Your Door

Feb 27, 2020

Tokyo Food Apps Bring the Restaurant to Your Door

At some point it will happen. Even though you’re in Tokyo, one of the world’s best cities to dine in, you’ll eventually either run out of meal ideas, or simply want to stay home and chill. Luckily for you, life in the big city means almost anything can be delivered right to your front door. But that language barrier though… What’s a non-Japanese speaker to do in these situations? Quick, to the download-inators and our problems are solved!

Rakuten Delivery

Japan’s home-grown home shopping giant Rakuten also has a food delivery service as well. Theres a large service area and you’ll need to punch in your postal code to get an idea of what places in your area use Rakuten Delivery that will come to you. They not only hava restaurants in the roster but also have other services like scheduling a handyman to fix a loose doorknob or getting a few knick-knacks from the local Lawson as well; it just depends on your location. And it goes without saying that you’ll need a Rakuten account set up to use the app, but you can take care of that in the app as well.

delivery.rakuten.co.jp

Uber Eats

Yep, the same Uber famous for turning ordinary folks and their cars into an on-demand taxi, has re-purposed their app for food delivery services in Tokyo. If you’ve already set up an Uber account, then things will look similar for you when you log in, aside from the menu, complete with the GPS tracking of your delivery to your home. All of central Tokyo, most of Tama, some of Kawasaki and Saitama are covered, but sadly I’m just outside their coverage zone… But that could change since their service area is getting larger all the time.

www.ubereats.com/tokyo

LINE Delima

LINE proves it’s the app that does it all this time by embedding a food delivery service into it. Line Pay is required to settle payments, but that also means not only credit cards but bank accounts and of course LINE Pay can be used. Plus they always seem to have coupons that help to make the delivery fee free in most cases, so you have nothing to lose by trying their service.

delima.line.me

Demaekan

This app boasts over 10,000 stores linked to its system; not just restaurants but services such as handyman and cleaning can be ordered, making it the app with the most amount of services (or so it’s advertised). They’ve tied up with Amazon Pay here meaning you can use your Amazon account and those handy Amazon prepaid cards found in most convenience stores to pay for things. The iOS version also lets you use Apple Pay as well.

demae-can.com/navigate/sumaho/?orderTyp=0

 

 

— by Jason L Gatewood

Image “Panning” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Sushicam