New York (BBN)-Mohamed Hosen, a Bangladeshi ace deliveryman at the Taj Kebab King restaurant in Brooklyn, was merely one of the many “food heroes” who braved the inclement weather so that the diners of New York could enjoy their favorite dishes during the predicted storm.
Mr. Hosen was ready. Cheeks shedding steam, eyebrows still thawing, he had just come in from a nearby chicken curry run in Williamsburg, reports The New York Times.
Now he was headed out again — with chicken madras, chicken poori and an order of lemon rice — on a longer trip to Greenpoint.
His vehicle was a rickety Arrow motorbike. The road conditions were nasty to impassable.
His compensation was, as always, minimum wage plus tips. But his spirit was unbroken.
“I am a fighter,” Mr. Hosen said, as he opened his employer’s door and stepped out, bundled in triple layers into the blowing, whitewashed world.
“Yes, I can do this. Of course I can. It is only Mother Nature.”
It was exactly what one did not want to do on Monday night: go out into stormy conditions delivering dinner to less than grateful people inside their warm apartments.
But Mr. Hosen, who is 37 and an immigrant from Bangladesh, was merely one of the many “food heroes” who braved the inclement weather so that the diners of New York could enjoy their favorite dishes during the predicted storm, according to a celebratory statement issued Monday by GrubHub.com, the food delivery site that also owns Seamless.com.
“We hope that diners will be patient if their orders take longer than normal to arrive,” the statement said, “and generous and appreciative when tipping their drivers.”
In his rubber boots, two hooded sweatshirts, waterproof pants and reflective yellow jacket, Mr. Hosen, a two-year veteran of the Taj Kebab King, spent his evening, herolike indeed, piloting his Arrow through deep icy ruts and treacherous winter drifts.
In general, he arrived on time and with the food in his care still warm. And he always took a moment for basic customer service: Outside each apartment that he went to, he politely stamped his feet, clearing them of snow.
“Delivery,” he yelled into a buzzer on Lorimer Street, his second run of the night, where he was dropping off a $30 order. The customer let him up.
She opened the door and received her bag. She was about to close the door when this reporter asked if she had any words of gratitude.
“Oh right, thanks,” she said. The verbal equivalent of her $4 tip.
Discerning people will understand why Mr. Hosen declined to say exactly how much he earned on Monday night, though he did say it was enough to make a living. He boards with a roommate in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, where his rent is $750 a month.
He helps support his wife, Aklima Aktar, and their 9-year-old son, Farhan Ahmed, who live in the Comilla District in Bangladesh.
At Williamsburg Pizza, a few blocks away, John Kutinsky, the delivery manager, was also hauling dinners through the neighborhood, though in the luxury of his heated Subaru Outback.
Mr. Kutinsky, an owner of the restaurant, had been pressed into service that night after his regular deliveryman, who lives in Bronx, called off and the new guy he had just hired could not be found.
“If we had a fleet of Humvees, I’d have four or five guys out there tonight,” he said, adding that, with everybody wanting to stay put, he could “easily do a couple grand intakeout.”
But even though the orders kept coming in, Mr. Kutinsky consulted with his partners and shut down deliveries at shortly after 7:00pm.
Citing the city’s travel ban and voluntary closings, the website Delivery.com reported that its orders were down almost 30 percent compared with the average Monday night.
By mayoral decree, all vehicular deliveries were halted at 11:00pm, when nonofficial cars and trucks were told to leave the roads.
This order was, on occasion, followed in the breach. A delivery request made at 11:15pm to a certain Brooklyn diner elicited the response: “Yeah, O.K., but it’ll take a while. Our guy ain’t supposed to be out there.”
A similar request to a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side was received by the staff without the slightest hesitation.
Then there was Mr. Hosen, who was going to get as many runs in as he could. One of those — a $34 job of chicken tikka masala and samosa — took him all the way from his base in Williamsburg to Lafayette Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
By that point in the evening, the air was bleached with snow, and Mr. Hosen’s tires were kicking up an icy wake of slush.
When he reached his destination, his nose was frozenand his lips were set into a kind of Arctic rictus.
A passer-by could not believe that he was out in such conditions and said so — aloud and to no one in particular.
Up the stoop he went, handing the bag to his customer. Then coming down, his lips had thawed into a smile.
BBN/AKG-28Jan15-12:15pm (BST)