Among the many nice many issues there are to determine at Surprise is the way to describe to clients what it’s. The enterprise doesn’t match neatly into an present 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 business presence; Surprise has slickly designed places the place clients can order, choose up, and, no less than in principle, dine in at a handful of tables. These days, the corporate’s inside inventive workforce of seven has coalesced across the tagline “A New Form of Meals Corridor.”

“I feel that will get to the variability side,” mentioned Daniel Shlossman, who left a task because the advertising chief at Sweetgreen to affix Surprise’s senior management workforce in 2023. But in addition, he mentioned, “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 should not obtainable by way of different supply apps, which implies clients must need its meals sufficient to hunt it out.)

Right this moment, although, the primary 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. The whole lot on the Surprise menu is designed to be cooked utilizing three items of electrical gear: a scorching water tub, 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 heart, a collection of gleaming take a look at kitchens staffed with dozens {of professional} cooks clad in Surprise-branded chef’s whites.

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