This post is by my Dad, Isaac Seliger.

It’s hard to be first at anything in America, but yesterday I was the very first Uber Fresh lunch delivery customer. Uber, which is of course taking on the taxi cartels with reasonable success, is trying to become something like a local Amazon–delivering restaurant meals, late-night rolling papers and condoms, for example, or taking the dog to the groomer, and so on. Since no one—including Uber or Amazon—actually knows how to do this, Uber chose this week to test the lunch delivery market in my neighborhood, Downtown Santa Monica.

Downtown SaMo,* as we locals call it, is Santa Monica’s version of the East Village, where Jake lives now, Capitol Hill in Seattle, where he once lived. Which is to say, the area is composed of lots of apartment buildings occupied either by young hipsters like Jake or geezers like me, but few people in between, since the in-betweeners are in prime family time. In Santa Monica, lots of earnest bars selling hand-crafted $12 cocktails ($15 in the East Village), $20 small plates of roasted beets and kale, and $5 cups of pour-over coffee. The tragically hip Funnel Mill coffee shop two blocks from me actually sells $90/cup Kopi Luwak Civet Shit coffee, which Jake and I did not try when he last visited.

In short Downtown SaMo is perfect to test Uber Fresh. This week Uber is testing is a single lunch selection from a local restaurant each day, starting yesterday, which is delivered for $12—including the Uber driver’s cut. At 11:30 AM I placed my order using the Uber app and, as promised, the Uber guy showed up within ten minutes. That’s a big improvement on most delivery, which can take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to never.

Unlike ordering from Eat24 or GrubHub, however, the Uber driver won’t come upstairs, so I met him at the curb. To me this is a big negative: by the time I overcome inertia sufficiently to get myself together to go downstairs, I might as well continue out the door to the dozens of takeout places within a few blocks of me. Death to inconvenience! That could be the rallying cry of a lot of modern consumer-facing startups. It’s not a bad tagline for my own company, Seliger + Associates.

Anyway, the driver turned out to be the typical Uber driver with an an odd, vaguely Eastern European name and accent, accompanied by an Uberette in her late 20s. She popped out of car with a big smile and a free cookie and declared I was the very first Uber Fresh delivery! It helps that the Uber Development Office is nearby.

But how was the food? The lunch was from Tender Greens, an LA-based salad bar chain, which is okay but not exciting. This described lunch, which consisted of a cup of tepid chicken soup, an ordinary Caesar Salad, and, in my case, a very tasty cookie. The best part the container: a nifty black Uber bag. Sort of a party favor or “party favorite,” as Jake’s younger sister used to call them when she was about four.

Although being Customer Numero Uno was interesting, I wouldn’t rush to order Uber Fresh again anytime soon. The food was kind of meh, fairly expensive at $12 and, since I had to go downstairs anyway, I could have walked to about 20 lunch places in ten minutes. As a business, the single-meal option is interesting but also problematic given the target demographic, since just about every resident of SaMo (or the East Village or Capitol Hill), except me, has some kind of food concern/issue, and most will want a vegan/gluten free/non-GMO or something alternative. Jake doesn’t like simple carbs, for example. But, as Joe Bob Briggs likes to say, you might want to check it out.

* [Jake’s note: They do?]