In the height of Winter Quarter’s discontent, an order of spicy wings from Buffalo Joe’s, 812 Clark St., can seem a lifetime away.
By next year’s first snow, however, that bucket of wings might only be a phone call away.
Planned for this fall, Wildcat Express Delivery will offer students the option to have food delivered from Evanston restaurants that don’t offer delivery services. For a fee of approximately $2, students will be able to place an order online from a select group of restaurants and have a student driver pick up and bring them their food.
The service is a student-run business that operates under the parent company Northwestern Student Holdings, which solicits and develops new student business ventures at NU. Past Northwestern Student Holdings projects include the Chicago guide book Chicago Unzipped.
Louise Huterstein, the business’s president, said it was a natural decision to bring a food delivery service to NU’s campus.
“There’s definitely this sub-optimal issue that’s happening, where the restaurants want more business and the students want the food,” the Communication sophomore said. “We’re basically just bringing the two together.”
Chipotle, 711 Church St., and Buffalo Joe’s are the first restaurants the business expects to have available when its service begins. As the business develops, Huterstein said they plan to add more restaurants to the delivery service’s roster every quarter.
“We feel it’ll start out with the two people wanted the most, because we need to get brand recognition,” Huterstein said.
When the service begins, credit cards will be the only payment option available, but Huterstein said they will work with NU’s administration and hope to eventually add NUCuisine’s point system as a method of payment.
Co-CEO of NU Student Holdings Ravi Umarji said he and co-CEO Nihar Shah, a Weinberg sophomore, researched the student holdings companies at comparable universities before proposing the delivery service and NUTutors, a tutoring service for middle and high school students staffed by NU undergraduates.
“We didn’t want to take a huge risk when we’re trying to start our organization,” said Umarji, a McCormick sophomore. “We knew it had been successful elsewhere and we knew that there’s a demand here, and so we thought it would be a fantastic way to start.”
The delivery service has used online surveys to garner student input as organizers develop their business plan, Huterstein said. The ongoing survey on Wildcat Express Delivery’s Facebook group page gauges students’ opinions of desired restaurants, prices and delivery times.
As of now, the service’s approximate hours of operation will be from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday, and from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. and then 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Thursday through Saturday, Huterstein said.
McCormick sophomore Dave Nebel said the service will finally bring Evanston’s restaurants within reach of North Campus students like himself, who have limited after-hours dining options.
“In North Campus, you’re really confined to Noyes Street shops – D&D (Dogs) and Al’s Deli and Lisa’s Café – and you really miss out on all those things on South Campus,” he said. “(The service) would give people so much more access to so much more food and I think that we’ll really take advantage of that.”
