FAQ

Our Daily Specials and Meals of the Week are full meals with the side orders included. They can be found listed in the "Monday" to "Friday" categories, and in the "Pick Any Weekday" category.

All the other items in the shop are part of our Build-a-Meal offering, and do not include any side orders, to make them more versatile. It also allows you to add the side items of your choosing at home.

You may click on the item name or image of any product in the store to view a full description of what is included.

Most of our meals are several portions packaged together (for either two, four or six people) - the "2 pax", "4 pax" and "6 pax" refers to this. Meals-for-one are only available for our Daily Specials under the "Monday" to "Friday" headings. Our operations are based around sending out a large number of similarly-packaged meals. As a result, we are unable to accommodate the additional complexity of other meal parcel sizes at this point in time.

We also cannot package more than one type of meal together in one meal package. Vegetarian meals, smart-carb meals and gluten-free meals are different types than the standard meal. The billing is therefore based on the packaging, and two Meals-for-Two will be billed individually, not as a Meal-for-Four.

Our primary goal is delivering the right meal to the right person at the right time. We hope that you will understand that certain limitations are necessary to achieve this.

Our daily delivery window falls between 15:00 and 18:00 on weekdays, as we spend the first part of each day freshly preparing all the items for delivery. Generally speaking, we are unable to give a more specific time of arrival for the delivery in advance, but if you wish to give us a call in the early afternoon of the applicable day, we should be able to supply a closer estimate.

When special occasion meals (for example, our Christmas Menu) are offered, delivery times vary from menu to menu. Please consult the meal description for the delivery window that applies.

A limited number of products offer additional delivery times as part of their drop-down options — please see the next question for additional information and pricing for this.

Our standard delivery fee for dinner parcels delivered in the afternoons, is a flat fee of R50 per delivery day, for any area inside our normal delivery range. The number of items ordered do not affect the delivery fee, only the number of delivery days included in the order.

On certain items, such as our Canapé Sets and Cakes, another time window for delivery is offered (between 10:00 and 14:00, which is also available on Saturdays). The delivery fee for this is currently R150 per delivery, as such are done as single-destination trips, and do not form part of a larger delivery route.

We currently deliver to areas within 25km driving distance of our kitchen in Observatory, and additionally to Somerset West. This means that we cover the majority of the population in the City of Cape Town municipal area. Delivery to more outlying areas in and around Cape Town may be possible, by prior arrangement — please contact us for more information on this.

By all means! Collection is available between 14:00 and 17:00 from our kitchen (Lugard Street, Observatory) on weekdays. Please phone us as you approach (021 447 0323), and we'll bring your order out to your car.

On certain items, such as our Canapé Sets and Cakes, another time window for collection is offered (between 10:00 and 14:00). This is also available on Saturdays (for these items specifically). Should you wish to collect such an order later than 14:00 on a Saturday, please give us a call to discuss, as the possibility of this will vary based on our Saturday event catering commitments.

When special occasion meals (for example, our Christmas Menu) are offered, collection times vary from menu to menu. Please consult the meal description for the collection window that applies.

When you start a new order, our website assumes that it will be for delivery, in order for it to calculate accurate cart totals for the majority of our customers who all use the delivery service, instead of tacking the delivery charge on at the end only. The calculated delivery fees are labeled as "Shipping" in the cart display.

If you wish to collect from us instead, you may:

• edit the order type in the Cart pop-up display by clicking on the pen icon next to the word "Shipping", or
• ignore the "Shipping" total in the interim and then change the order from "Delivery" to "Collection" once you reach the Checkout page.

Either method will remove the delivery fees from the order.

If you wish to place a separate add-on order to a delivery that has already been scheduled, the system will be unaware of the overlap, and will calculate new delivery fees. To avoid being double-charged for delivery in such cases, please give us a call for advice on how to proceed.

Items (aside from the Frozen section) are freshly made in the morning/early afternoon on the day specified. Meals that have a day of the week or a date in their title (our Daily Meals) are only made on that specific day and the preparation of it cannot be shifted to another day — but we can, upon request, refrigerate it for one day if delivery on the original date should become impossible.

For all other items, you may specify the day of the week we will produce it by choosing a day from the drop down list. Although everything (aside from meals in the Frozen section) is delivered freshly cooked, many of our dishes are suitable for home freezing as well.

Our cut-off time for same-day delivery of weekday meals is at 08:00 in the morning, but orders may of course also be placed further ahead of time.

For our Canapé Sets, however, we ask that orders be finalised 24 hours in advance.

Online orders are not continuously live-monitored, so if you have placed a late order or are uncertain whether your order was received in time, please give us a call to check.

Yes! Each item will be allocated to a delivery day according to what was specified. Our daily specials change once a week, at the start of the preceding weekend, so it is possible to order for a full week at once, if you choose.

We are currently avoiding handling cash or passing card machines back and forth, for the health and safety of our customers and our employees. Instead we are promoting payment via card payments online, electronic funds transfer (EFT) or SnapScan. If you experience any difficulty making payment, please contact us.

The most common reason for this is that the confirmation email did not go to your Inbox, but to your Spam/Junk folder instead. This is decided by your email service provider and is out of our control. You may inform your service provider that you wish all of our emails to go to your Inbox by whitelisting our domain, dishfood.co.za

Another possibility could be that there was a typing error in the email address provided. Please let us know if the address needs to be corrected/updated as we are not notified of delivery failures for the automated emails.

There are a variety of factors that can cause this, ranging from problems on your bank's servers, temporary issues or delays with the BankServAfrica interconnection hub, or a poor cellular data connection to your mobile device. Checking the Peach Payments System Status page may provide additional information on any current incidents or planned system maintenance.

Some customers are currently experiencing difficulty completing two-factor authentication when using the VISA "Click-to-Pay" function on the PayGate portal. If you experience this problem, please retry the payment using the "Card Payments" submission instead, which is located just above the VISA button.

Your card needs to be enabled by your bank for online shopping and 3D Secure (two-factor authentication) to work.

This happens most often when using a mobile device to place an order. Because most devices do not allow browsers and websites to run in the background, the checkout process cannot fully complete while you still have the SnapScan app open, or close it without returning to the website's checkout page. As a result, the order will then stay in Pending Payment status until you do, or until we manually mark it as paid.

In future, to allow the website to refresh and receive confirmation of the payment from SnapScan, please switch back from the SnapScan app to your web browser app (Chrome/Safari/Firefox/etc.) after completing payment.

An order left on Pending status for several hours will automatically change to Cancelled. In all likelihood, we should pick up any paid orders that have been marked as Cancelled the next day when we are reconciling payments, and then finalise the order for you — you should then receive the automated order confirmation email. But if you have concerns, or require earlier confirmation of a successful order, please contact us.

Please contact us and we will happily answer any other questions you may have.