Two fasting calendars and a catering book. Zayos is built for both.
Zayos gives a Chicago Mediterranean restaurant one ordering site for both halves of its business: the weeknight shawarma ticket and the half pan catering tray. Flat $499 to $699 a month per location. Catering carries a 10 percent fee paid by the guest, never by you.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why does a Chicago Mediterranean restaurant have two businesses instead of one?
Because the category is wider here than almost anywhere else, and each half of it earns differently. Greektown on Halsted, the Levantine kitchens along Kedzie in Albany Park, the Assyrian and Middle Eastern stretch of Devon Avenue, and the large Palestinian community in Bridgeview, Oak Lawn, Burbank and Orland Park all get filed under one word on a delivery app. In practice they share something more useful than a label: a weeknight plate business, and a large format tray business that dwarfs it.
The most profitable order a Chicago Mediterranean kitchen takes all week is usually the one that never touches a delivery app.
Marketplaces are built around one person ordering one dinner. They have no real product for a half pan, no lead time, no guest count and no drop off window. So the trays keep moving the way they always have, by phone call and text message, with no record, no deposit and no way to reach the same office again next December.
Which weeks actually decide the year?
Chicago Mediterranean runs on two religious calendars and one brutal winter. None of the three looks like a standard restaurant year, and a platform built for 11am to 10pm Tuesday through Sunday handles none of them well.
| When | What happens | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| January and February | Coldest delivery weeks of the year. Driver supply thins, quoted times stretch, and nobody wants to leave the house. | A delivery zone you can shrink yourself, and pickup that still works when delivery does not. |
| Clean Monday through Pascha | Great Lent. Observant Greek Orthodox families eat nistisima for seven weeks: no meat, no dairy, no eggs, and often no fish or oil. | A menu that can surface a real Lenten section, not a vegetarian filter bolted onto the same list. |
| Ramadan, moving earlier each year | Iftar lands on one minute at sundown and the kitchen goes quiet all day. Suhoor traffic runs before dawn. | Scheduled pickup windows and hours you change yourself, same day. |
| Eid al Fitr and Greek Easter | Two of the biggest family feast weekends on the Chicago calendar, often within weeks of each other. | Catering booked two weeks ahead with tray sizing and a collection time. |
| May through September | Patio season, street festivals, graduations and backyard parties. Large format orders move faster than plated dinners. | A catering builder that does not route a $600 tray through a delivery app. |
| November and December | Office party trays out of the Loop and the suburbs, then the first serious snow. | Corporate invoices, scheduled drop off times, and a channel that does not take a percentage of a $1,200 order. |
What does one half pan tray cost inside a marketplace?
Take a single $600 catering order, a half pan of chicken shawarma with rice, salad, hummus and pita for about twenty five people. At a 28 percent blended marketplace cost, the platform takes roughly $168 of it. That is not a fee on a delivery, it is most of the margin on the tray.
On Zayos the same order carries a 10 percent catering fee of about $60, and the guest pays it at checkout. You keep the full $600. The regular business runs the same way: model 220 online orders a month at a $34 ticket and that is $7,480 of volume, which costs about $2,094 a month in blended commission, or roughly $25,128 a year. Operator plus Marketplace is $599 a month flat at any order count.
Modeled from the tray price, order count and ticket above, not a customer result. Run your own numbers with the free AI report, or read whether restaurants make money on DoorDash.
How do you move a catering book online in four steps?
- Put the tray sizes on the site
Half pan and full pan for every item you actually cater, with the guest count each one feeds and the real price. Most Chicago Mediterranean catering still lives in a laminated sheet by the register.
- Set a lead time and a cutoff
Two weeks out for large events, 48 hours for office lunches. The site refuses a Friday tray order placed Friday morning, which is the order that ruins a service.
- Take the deposit and the pickup time online
The customer chooses drop off or collection and a time slot at checkout, so nobody is texting a phone at midnight to confirm a Saturday.
- Keep the record
Every catering order lands in a customer list you own, so next December you can reach the same twelve offices without asking a marketplace for permission.
How do you put a mezze order online without it turning into a phone call?
A Mediterranean order is not one dish, it is a build. Protein, two sides, rice or salad, pita count, spice level, sauces on the side, extra toum, a platter that feeds six. Marketplace menus flatten most of that into a text box, and a text box produces wrong orders, remakes and refund disputes that get decided against the kitchen.
Every modifier a menu cannot express becomes a phone call, and every phone call during a Friday rush is a ticket somebody had to stop and take.
On your own site each of those choices is a real modifier with its own price, so a family ordering for eight builds the order correctly the first time and pays for what they actually asked for. It also means the ticket that prints in the kitchen is the ticket the customer wanted, which is worth more on a Friday than any discount you could run.
What happens to delivery in a Chicago February?
Demand goes up and supply goes down at the same time. Nobody wants to leave the house, so orders climb, while driver availability thins and quoted delivery times stretch well past what the food can survive. Mediterranean cooking handles the trip better than most, because grilled meat, rice and mezze hold heat far better than anything fried, but that advantage only turns into money if you own the channel.
On your own site you shrink the delivery zone to what a driver can genuinely cover in twenty minutes, run pickup only for a week, shorten the menu to what the walk in can support, or pause ordering entirely. Every one of those changes is live the moment you make it. Inside a marketplace you wait, and the one star review for a cold plate lands on your listing rather than on theirs.
What is included, and what does the diner pay?
Operator is $499 a month per location: your branded ordering site on your own domain, the full menu with every modifier, the catering builder, pickup and delivery with a zone you draw, the kitchen tablet, and a customer list that belongs to you. Operator plus Marketplace is $599 and adds Otter ingestion so DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets print in the same feed. Concierge is $699 and includes up to five virtual brands out of one kitchen.
All three are per location, month to month, no setup fee, and no percentage of any ticket at any volume. The diner pays a flat service fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, nothing on dine in and 10 percent on catering, and the restaurant keeps 100 percent of food revenue and 100 percent of tips. See the pricing page, the fee breakdown and how it works. Most operators are live in under 2 weeks.
Who is running Zayos right now?
One restaurant is live and taking orders on it today: Naya Grill, a Mediterranean kitchen in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, which keeps $48k+/yr that used to leave as marketplace commission at roughly 3,000 orders a month. Seven more storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates, several of them Mediterranean and Levantine.
There is no Chicago restaurant on the platform yet. Zayos is a Fort Lauderdale company and we serve Chicago from there, which we would rather say than hand you a reference that does not exist.
Questions Chicago Mediterranean owners ask.
Why not just run catering through DoorDash like everything else?
How does a Lenten menu work if half my customers are not fasting?
Can the menu handle a mezze order without turning into a phone call?
What actually happens to delivery in a Chicago February?
What does it cost, and what does the diner pay?
Do I have to leave the marketplaces to do this?
Do you have a Chicago restaurant on the platform I can call?
Add up last December, then read this back.
The free report runs your own order count and average ticket against a flat monthly fee, and shows the gap over a year.