In 2024, nearly three out of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant, according to data provided to me by the National Restaurant Association, a trade group. The share of customers using delivery specifically, as opposed to picking up takeout or going to a drive-through, more than doubled from 2019 to 2024. In a recently released poll by the association, 41 percent of respondents said that delivery was “an essential part of their lifestyle.” For Millennials and Generation Z—the apex consumers of today, and of tomorrow too—it’s apparently even more essential: More than half of adults under 45 use delivery at least once a week, and 13 percent use it once a day. Five percent use it multiple times a day. But the delivery boom isn’t confined to young people or to urbanites: About one in eight Baby Boomers uses delivery once a week, and so does about one in five rural dwellers. We are a nation of order-inners. A world, really—earlier this year, DoorDash announced a deal to acquire the British delivery service Deliveroo for $3.86 billion; the new, combined company will have 50 million monthly active users, spread over more than 40 countries.

For as long as fast-food and pizza joints have existed, certain restaurants have been defined by, and designed for, takeout and delivery. But delivery has now come for what industry analysts call “full-service restaurants”—that is, the types of places where a server guides you through your meal from start to finish, or at least used to. These days, 30 percent of those restaurants’ orders are consumed somewhere else, according to the National Restaurant Association. The fanciest, most famous restaurants are still doing mostly table service, but just about every other establishment has been conscripted into the army that ferries hot food out of professional kitchens and into American mouths 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Meanwhile, the longtime industry analyst Joseph Pawlak told me, “you could shoot a cannon” through many dining rooms on a Tuesday night.

In effect, delivery has reversed the flow of eaters to food, and remade a shared experience into a much more individual one. If communities used to clench like a fist around their restaurants, now they look more like an open palm, fingers stretched out as far as possible, or at least to the edge of the delivery radius.