Among the many nice many issues there are to determine at Surprise is how one can describe to clients what it’s. The enterprise doesn’t match neatly into an current meals service class. “Supply firm” implies simply an app and courier community, like Uber Eats or Grubhub, however Surprise makes all its personal meals in its personal kitchens, too. “Ghost kitchen” and “digital restaurant” describe manufacturers that exist solely as a menu on an app, with no street-level industrial presence; Surprise has slickly designed areas the place clients can order, choose up, and, not less than in idea, dine in at a handful of tables. Currently, the corporate’s inner inventive crew of seven has coalesced across the tagline “A New Sort of Meals Corridor.”

“I feel that will get to the variability side,” stated Daniel Shlossman, who left a task because the advertising and marketing chief at Sweetgreen to affix Surprise’s senior management crew in 2023. But in addition, he stated, “we discuss it because the ‘super-app of mealtime,’” an outline that sums up Mr. Lore’s ambition for Surprise’s app to promote and ship not solely meals from its personal kitchens, however meals from different eating places, too, in addition to meal kits, even groceries. (Surprise’s choices aren’t obtainable through different supply apps, which suggests clients should need its meals sufficient to hunt it out.)

Immediately, although, the principle focus at Surprise is getting its personal eating places up and working. Its kitchens don’t require gas-powered stoves and exhaust techniques to vent cooking fumes, making for cheaper, faster build-outs. Every little thing on the Surprise menu is designed to be cooked utilizing three items of electrical tools: a sizzling water bathtub, a rapid-cook oven, and a fryer.

Throughout a go to to Parsippany in January, Mr. Shlossman took me to see Surprise’s analysis and growth middle, a sequence of gleaming check kitchens staffed with dozens {of professional} cooks clad in Surprise-branded chef’s whites.

Surprise prepares and in lots of circumstances, par-cooks, all of its menu gadgets in giant commissary amenities, then distributes the dishes individually portioned to its eating places, the place staff can end the preparation in a matter of minutes, with little cooking ability required. This permits the eating places to be staffed by what Mr. Lore calls “frivolously educated labor.”