Who Knew: Wonder No More

‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market.

I never write bad reviews. If a restaurant isn’t for me, I say so privately and move on; taking public shots at a small local business seems cruel when umpteen other forces stand ready to shutter an eatery any given day. Today, though, I’m making an exception, because what has quietly arrived in Stamford, dressed in the language of convenience and community, is not a small local business. It just plays one on a screen near you.

Warning: I’m about to sound like Andy Rooney. If you don’t know who that is, congratulations on your youth! Wear sunscreen! It’s happening more often as I hurtle toward 50; each time I spot a rogue eyebrow or start a sentence with “I miss the days when,” I gasp, catching myself. Will it be long until I spend Sunday nights narrating a tidy diatribe against Daylight Savings Time, answering machines, or the amount of air in a Doritos bag? Only time will tell.

My gripe today is legit. Hailed as a “category-disrupting, vertically integrated food technology company,” Wonder masquerades as a restaurant chain. There are 100-or-so locations across the Northeast, and over the past two years, the company bought Blue Apron, Grubhub, and food media company Tastemade, assembling what founder Marc Lore calls ‘the super app for mealtime.’ Investors, including Google Ventures, NEA, and Accel, have valued it at $7 billion. Last year, Wonder opened new locations at a roughly one-per-week cadence, and there are, I kid you not, robotic kitchens on the way. 

It’s all a bit Wall-E. 

Wonder (the closest location to me is on High Ridge Road, and a Darien outpost is imminent) bills itself as a “New Kind of Food Hall.” This sounds charming enough–who doesn’t love Chelsea Market, Pike Place, and the like? But beware the sleight of hand of a branding agency; this is neither hall nor, in my experience, food. A traditional food hall is a collection of independent vendors gathered under one roof. You’re one degree of separation away from the tamale lady, say, or the goat cheese guy. You’re not in a strip mall storefront, formerly a Pet Valu, with two employees, a couple of booths, and a cavernous, largely automated, industrial rewarming kitchen. 

The selection appears striking in its breadth on the Wonder site, with a celebrity-chef-studded list of 21 restaurant concepts, including recognizable businesses like Di Fara Pizza and Marcus Samuelsson’s Street Bird, as well as some in-house brands that, on the surface, seem credible. The practical pitch for customers is straightforward: get a burger from Burger Baby, a bowl from Hanu Poké, and a side of spiced fries from the Middle Eastern concept Maydan, all in a single order. As Wonder’s EVP of restaurant operations has put it, “When you think about why you go on Amazon, it’s because you can get anything there.”

Hold up. Is Amazon’s efficiency-first culture really something we seek as eaters? Or is it just an attractive comparison model for an investor pitch, slick VC shorthand for commas in one’s net worth? It’s no secret that Amazon’s takeover of Whole Foods has been ruinous for Whole Foods’ perceived quality metrics. Why would this EVP ever utter this comparison aloud?

Maybe he said it because, like Amazon, Wonder loves a warehouse. The food, sold under deceptively discrete “brands,” is all par-cooked in a commissary kitchen in Parsippany, N.J., then heated and finished on-site when a diner places an order. According to Wonder’s hypemen, its culinary team works directly with chefs and their teams to develop scalable menus featuring dishes that withstand transport, reheating, and light customizations.

An airplane meal comes to mind, for sure, but so far, this is all… fine? Most U.S. consumers have known fast food all our lives, and nobody’s slamming a Big Mac under the illusion that it was locally sourced or even locally cooked. But, given that Wonder was founded by a “serial entrepreneur” best known for launching Diapers.com, the cash grab endemic to late-stage capitalism is very much the vibe. The insight is real, I guess. We’ve all experienced the dreaded deadlock of “I want pizza/ You want fries/ Guess we have to get divorced now,” and this model can solve that. I’m not mad at Wonder… yet.

The food is where this brave new future falls apart. 

Scrolling through the site’s colorful, uniform thumbnail photos, I started with a Greek salad from the in-house pseudobrand “Royal Greens.” Innocuous enough, right? Greek salads are menu perennials; you know what’s in them, and they’re pretty hard to make terrible. With tomatoes, red onions, feta, cucumber, and oregano, a good Greek salad can be a delicious, cooling, summertime staple. In March, though, made by conveyor belts and venture capital, my Greek salad was a 5-inch-deep pit of despair. 

 

The toppings seemed good enough–I added Zhoug chicken for some protein–but when I inverted the cardboard clamshell into a salad bowl to toss it with the provided dressing (generic Balsamic; not canonically Greek), I was greeted with an eyeful of rusty, inexplicably wet chopped Romaine hearts. I did my best to pick out the most visually offending pieces, but since the eye eats first, my disappointment was hard to choke down. 

 

What I wish I’d eaten instead: the Healthy Greek Salad from Greens on the Go. Their salad greens are always visibly, impeccably fresh, the ingredients are carefully selected and cut precisely, and the team is friendly. Plus, the lemon-shallot vinaigrette GotG makes in-house lends brightness and pep to the dish.

 

 

Next, we sampled a spicy chicken sandwich from Marcus Samuelsson’s Street Bird. This is one of the only Wonder offerings with brick-and-mortar locations: Marcus has one at Yankee Stadium and one at the Rosewood Baha Mar. How does a strip mall in Stamford belong in such a pantheon? Unclear, but here we are. The chicken wasn’t spicy; it had very clearly never been in the same zip code as anything one could describe as proper seasoning. The pickle chips were oddly tall. The whole thing could have easily come from Burger King, and if it had, it would have been about ⅓ the price and a little tastier. But my husband and I both ate our halves fairly complacently. It‘s fried chicken on a bun; there’s just not much to argue with. 

 

What I wish I’d eaten instead: A Sando, medium heat (I may be genetically Cajun, but I’m not masochistic enough to go hotter) from Darien’s Birdcode. This Connecticut-based hot chicken chain grants you a heap of crunchy slaw, comeback sauce, and appropriately scaled pickles. Everyone wins. 

The nadir of our order was a burrito. I had a sense it wouldn’t satisfy, and, maybe spoiling for a fight, ordered it anyway. The burrito purported to hail from Limesalt, Wonder’s in-house Mexican concept, which has all the dimension of a sombrero emoji. Barbacoa, when done right, is one of human civilization’s crowning achievements. Slow-braised, deeply spiced, falling-apart beef that rewards patience and skill. In our burrito, flavorless, greasy wads of beef the size of a child’s fist turned up from time to time. Other bites were nothing but pickled onions or a fat tranche of insipid, off-color guacamole. 

 

The whole thing was, again, mysteriously wet, like it had been assembled in a torrential downpour. And, oddly enough, I was given two identical burritos despite ordering only one. Because I didn’t interact once with another human being from ordering through pickup, which is very much the brand’s intention, there was no opportunity to point this out. As the old adage goes, two terrible burritos in hand are worth literally nothing because all I have to show for them is a guilty conscience about wasting food.

What I wish I’d eaten instead: Anything and everything from Taco Guy and Tacos 203, both in Norwalk. If you’ve been in the same room as me at any point in the past three years, you’ve heard me howling from the rafters about Cristian Hurtado’s culinary genius. GO. GO. GO. More exhortations in that direction will come in a later column. 

I know Wonder has fans. Local friends have repeatedly told me to give it a try. I may be an implacable monster, a fussy midlife toddler, or just bad at ordering from a menu that dresses one kitchen’s output in 21 different costumes, but my review stands: this could be good, but it’s not. 

Getting food from different cultures under one roof can be kind of great–like those workaday salad bar delis in New York, where, if you so desire, you can serve yourself wings, chow mein, and minestrone but only stand in line once. I just don’t love that Wonder constructs the illusion of a grand culinary adventure only to deliver such sodden disappointment. It’s on me for willingly spending $41 on something that has been described as “the AI slop of food”: I knew it wouldn’t be Le Bernardin, but I didn’t know it would be quite so lifeless, so bland, such a committed resident of the uncanny valley between what we know to be food and a 3D-printed photocopy.

Oh god, my Andy Rooney spirit is coming out. Someone needs to get off my lawn. 

As I brush my teeth for the third time to get the taste of pickled onions out of my mouth, the thing about Wonder that I keep coming back to is its total lack of a reason to exist, save for yet another late-stage capitalism “disruption” plot. Every dish on the menu has a better version within a 20-minute drive, made by someone who gives a damn, who might be sharing their country or their family’s food traditions with a new audience, who’s employing members of our community, not focusing primarily on efficiency and cost-cutting but on being a sustaining and galvanizing reason for human beings to get together.

I know I sound insufferably preachy here, but as consumers, we do have the choice to reject what big corporate interests want to feed us, and there’s a certain moral obligation to do this. To go across the street, say, to family-owned (and TRULY excellent) Middle Eastern food from Layla’s Falafel instead of settling for its hatched-in-a-boardroom facsimile. 

As machine learning, robotics, and our increasingly digital lives convert us into data points, floating in space, I crave an analog connection. Guacamole with recent history as an avocado. A diner waitress who calls me “honey” and writes down my hashbrown order on a little notepad. Just one burrito, but good. 

These are the experiences that make a neighborhood a neighborhood, and they operate on margins thin enough that a well-capitalized interloper, opening at an eye-watering clip and subsidized by billions in venture funding, can quietly hollow our favorite institutions out before anyone notices. 

Wonder’s great innovation is the pretense that you’re still getting something real, like a Bobby Flay steak or a Marcus Samuelsson chicken sandwich, when you’re actually getting is the faint suggestion of a chef you’ve seen on one screen, algorithmically delivered to you through your interactions with another.

If this is a simulacrum, I miss the days when I didn’t know what a simulacrum tasted like.

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