No delivery for you!
A Seinfeldian dilemma has struck hunger in the guts of Upper West Siders stuck in a fifth dimension of inconvenience, an area some call…The Delivery Dead Zone.
The zone, sufferers told The Post, is bordered roughly by 59th street to 72nd street, from Central Park to the Hudson River — just beyond the delivery area of most affordable take-out joints.
And it’s forced some ravenous residents to employ clever, only-in-New-York style tactics.
“There’s this place my wife and I like to order from that’s on 81st street, and for some reason they won’t deliver to 71st street — but they’ll deliver to 72nd street,” zone denizen Romeo Arroyo Lopez told The Post.
“So we’ll place our order, give an address — either the Chase on the corner or the bar that’s right next to it — I’ll wait outside, smoke a cigarette and I’ll see the delivery guy, grab the order and then I’ll just walk home.”
The “big and meaty” Buffalo wings from McAleer’s Pub make it all worthwhile, said Lopez, 32.
“But it’s ridiculous that we have to do that. Can’t you just walk one street over and deliver to 71st? It’s just frustrating — and that’s not the only one. We have to do it for a couple of other restaurants,” he admitted.
Lopez is part of a growing faction of fed-up Dead Zone denizens.
“Most Hell’s Kitchen restaurants stop delivering at 59th Street. Most Upper West Side restaurants cut off at 72nd Street. Those of us sandwiched in between must fend for ourselves, in our own little subdivision that objectively appears convenient in all other aspects of life — just not this,” griped West 67th Street resident Joelle Berger on the news site West Side Rag.
Berger, 28, doesn’t wait on a street corner for her combination platter #5, but she has been forced do something else unusual for some UWSers — use the stove.
“I’ve had to become more resourceful — I’ve had to learn to cook,” she confessed. “But people don’t have time to be preparing dinner every night — I hope some of these restaurants will take notice.”
Lopez’s trickery harkens to “The Pothole,” a classic “Seinfeld” episode in which Elaine — desperate for a taste of the Supreme Flounder from a restaurant that refuses to deliver to her home on the south side of West 86th Street — takes up residence in a broom closet in a building on the north side.
“That Chinese food story was based on an actual experience of mine,” said “Pothole” co-writer Steve O’Donnell, noting that his girlfriend at the time lived on the wrong side of 86th Street.
“I asked the restaurant, ‘Well, if you can go to the one side of the street, why not the other?’ And he said, ‘Well, we have to stop somewhere.”
“So I said, ‘I’ll meet you.’ And he said, ‘We need to have an address.’”
O’Donnell, 59, who lives on 88th Street, said he never took things as far as Elaine to get his fish dish, which in real life was a seafood medley — not flounder.
“I’d either go pick it up or go sit down and eat it — which really is the civilized way to do it.”