LA restaurants are losing $95k+/year per location to delivery apps. Take it back.

LA County is 10M people. The metro is 13M+. The dining scene is structurally different from anywhere else in the country because the great restaurants are spread across hundreds of dense ethnic corridors — Koreatown BBQ row is the largest Korean restaurant cluster outside Seoul; Sawtelle Japantown is the densest Japanese strip outside Japan in the US; Boyle Heights, East LA, and the broader San Gabriel Valley hold one of the strongest independent Mexican restaurant scenes in the country; Thai Town and Little Ethiopia anchor smaller but dense ethnic corridors; Anaheim's Little Arabia is one of the densest Arab restaurant communities on the West Coast.

And then there is the strip-mall layer. Some of the best Thai, Filipino, Persian, Salvadoran, Korean, and Vietnamese restaurants in America are in unmarked strip-mall slots in Mid-City, the SGV, or the Valley. The marketplaces structurally under-rank these in local search — chain results dominate the algorithm — which makes strong branded discovery (schema + GEO + on-page authority) one of the highest-leverage moves a strip-mall operator can make. Direct ordering on a branded site captures the local repeat base that already knows the spot.

And there is the industry layer. The Hollywood industry runs on recurring catering — production catering, post-production crew meals, agency lunches, on-set craft service. None of that fits the marketplace model, but the branded direct site with scheduled orders, group ordering, and recurring account history is purpose-built for it. WeHo and Beverly Hills dinner traffic at $50-$120 average tickets makes the 28% marketplace tax fatal at the high end too. The whole city is a direct-ordering market waiting to happen.