INDIANAPOLIS — Smartphones and meal delivery services may go together like spaghetti and meatballs, but getting a freshly prepared meal delivered to your home 35 years ago required a lot of ingenuity, and a fax machine.
Dinner Express was the brainchild of Charlie and Tina Crawford. The food delivery service allowed Hoosiers to order food from 10 participating restaurants in and around Broad Ripple.
“We selected [the] Broad Ripple area to start up our business because of the high-quality restaurants in one congested area and the lifestyles of the people in the area,” Tina Crawford said. “We thought [it] was a great combination to start with and it seems to have gone good for both us and our customers.”
Here’s how it worked.
Dinner Express clients would place their takeout order to one of the participating restaurants over the phone. The order was then faxed by Dinner Express to the appropriate restaurant. Charlie would then deliver the order within an hour. All for a fee of just $3.
Participating restaurants included:
- Broad Ripple Steak House
- Korey’s
- The Spaghetti Shop
- Midtown Cafe
- The Jazz Cooker
- Canton Chinese
- Taj Mahal Curry House
- Windy City Rib Co.
- Lotus Express
- El Matador
