First Party Ordering in Chicago Restaurants
Ora can find out if a restaurant offers first-party ordering. As of late August 2026, 2,626 of Chicago's 7,155 live restaurants (36.7%) take orders through a flow they control, and one platform hosts more of those flows than all others combined.
First-party means the restaurant controls the order flow: its own site or a branded ordering domain. A listing on DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, or Seamless is not first-party. Neither is an ordering storefront owned by a delivery platform, like DoorDash's order.online pages, no matter where the restaurant links it from.
The census: 7,725 restaurants inside Chicago's city limits, built from Ora's daily read of Google in a May 2026 sweep, deduplicated by place ID. Two limitations:
- 371 had permanently closed and 115 no longer matched their own Google listing. That is 6.3% of the city's restaurants gone or changed in about three months, which is why restaurant data goes stale so fast.
- 1,645 of the 7,155 live restaurants, 23%, have no website at all.
Who takes the order
83 distinct platforms host first-party ordering in Chicago. The head of the table is not close:
| Host | Restaurants | Share of first-party |
|---|---|---|
| Toast | 1,426 | 54.3% |
| Square | 227 | 8.6% |
| Own-site custom builds | 116 | 4.4% |
| Owner.com | 96 | 3.7% |
| Clover | 92 | 3.5% |
| HungerRush (Menufy) | 84 | 3.2% |
| ChowNow | 78 | 3.0% |
| SkyTab | 58 | 2.2% |
| Chowbus | 52 | 2.0% |
| SlickMenus | 46 | 1.8% |
| Slice | 32 | 1.2% |
| SpotOn | 28 | 1.1% |
| 71 other platforms | 291 | 11.1% |
Toast's 1,426 restaurants are more than the other 82 hosts combined. They are also one in five of all live restaurants in the city, not just the ones that sell direct.
The tail carries the local texture. Chowbus clusters around Chinatown: 16 of its 52 restaurants sit in ZIP 60616 alone.
Here are examples for Toast, Square, Owner.com, Clover, SpotOn, ChowNow, and a custom build with Lou Malnati's.
How it works
Download the dataset: 7,155 rows with name, address, first-party status, host, confidence, evidence type, website, and evidence link.
Ora tracks the openings, closings, and platform switches that change this table. Contact us to learn more.