Details on the Brooklyn Take-Out Taxi

The only places that deliver in Bedford-Stuyvesant are pizza, Chinese, and Brook’s valley. Donna Walrond would know. A single mother of two young boys, she’s been struggling with the nabe’s culinary dearth since she moved here 6 years ago. She knew she wasn’t the only one suffering, so she launched Take-Out Taxi (718-374-4594), a one-woman delivery service that will pick up orders from restaurants all over Brooklyn and deliver them to your doorstep for $5 to $8 depending on distance.

She now picks up and delivers from anywhere in Bed Stuy, Stuyvesant Heights, Crown Heights, Leffert Gardens, Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Fort Green and Park Slope. Lunch hours are Monday to Friday, 11:30 to 2pm. Dinner hours are 5:30 to 9pm on Sunday through to Thursday, and goes until 10pm on Friday and Saturday. You can call the restaurant and then call her, or she can put through the order for you. There are menus of 15 favorite restaurants up on her website.

This is a great idea, filling perfectly the gap between the yuppies who’ve moved into Bed-Stuy and the food scene in the nabe which is still lagging behind. It’s also a real grassroots, entrepreneurial effort. She got the idea, printed a thousand postcards, and has just been handing them out at the subway on Throop hoping to kick it off. It’s been less than a month, but on a busy night she can get about 7 calls. In addition to the taxi, Donna also runs a cleaning service.

Rachel Chang