When Jersey City resident Sirui Hua ordered Sichuan spicy beef all the way from Flushing’s diner Maojiaohuola to his home, he was caught by surprise: The delivery courier arrived in a full protective suit, goggles, and an N95 mask. The worker got off the van but instructed Hua to keep a distance, then set up a foldable table, placed the food on top of it, and sprayed disinfectant on the packaging before gesturing for Hua to take it.

“It’s incredible,” Hua says of the setup.

Though it looked somewhat post-apocalyptic, the scene was in fact a safety protocol that’s been in place at Chinese food delivery service Yun Ban Bao (YBB) since March — a system that few other delivery companies in New York use. But due to close ties with the local Chinese community, YBB and other delivery platforms that serve Chinese and Asian immigrants have been several steps ahead in preparing for the outbreak in hopes of both protecting workers and appeasing the anxiety of customers.

“We have entered the new normal.”

Weeks ahead of other food services, companies targeting the Chinese community in New York started ordering protective gear and preparing for higher delivery demand. Some businesses started mandating safety measures such as no-contact delivery and masks for employees as early as mid-February.

And now, as some businesses across the country consider reopening timelines, those with closer ties to China — where the outbreak started — are gearing up for a far longer battle for the restaurants’ survival. The future of New York’s Chinese restaurant scene, which has flourished in recent years due to an influx of Chinese students, remains uncertain under the rising anti-China sentiment and a sharp decline of Chinese student enrollment.

“We have entered a new normal,” says Panwen Chen, a spokesperson for Hungry Panda, an app that primarily targets Chinese students and new immigrants. “All we can do is to bring restaurants as many orders as possible.”

Food delivery apps targeting Chinese immigrants have been on the rise over recent years, thanks to the robust growth of Chinese international students and workers from overseas. In New York alone, there are multiple platforms, including Chowbus, Recipo, Hungry Panda, and YBB. While they are essentially similar to UberEats and Grubhub, they tend to strike exclusive collaborations with select Asian restaurants, offer foods that are not on prominent English-language apps, and show menus in Chinese.

For many of these apps, a large percentage of the management, employees, and customers have Chinese backgrounds and became wary about COVID-19 when the pandemic broke out in China in January. Before the virus officially hit the U.S. and New York, they were some of the first businesses to feel the impacts of the pandemic, especially when fear of the novel coronavirus mainly concerned Chinese communities.

“There’s a lag of understanding,” says Hungry Panda’s Chen of the American preparation for the crisis. “When we saw the outbreak in China, we started planning because we felt it would come to the U.S. and Europe at some point.”

“We knew how serious it was in China.”

The apps had to address safety concerns from all sides to ensure both the couriers and customers were comfortable. Chowbus started buying masks and hand sanitizer for drivers and couriers in late February, when supply was still available, according to CEO Linxin Wen. YBB, an app popular among New York professionals for the lunches it delivers straight from Flushing, went further by providing protective suits and goggles, as well as the foldable tables and disinfectant sprays that couriers would use in front of the customer, according to CEO Paul Lang. No-contact delivery became standard practice in mid-March.

And unlike many American organizations that followed early Center for Disease guidelines discouraging non-medical workers from wearing masks — guidance that some now criticize as counterproductive — many Chinese food delivery platforms encouraged and sometimes mandated employees to do so.

“We knew how serious it was in China,” Wen says.

Beyond safety measures, many of these delivery apps predicted that demand for their services would dramatically spike and began seeking more staff fairly early. Chowbus started hiring as soon as early March and has since doubled its staff capacity to do deliveries, adding more than 3,000 drivers across the country. Similar platforms, such as Caviar, have struggled with fulfilling deliveries and meeting customer service requests due to an unprecedented number of orders.

Many companies also quickly started to double down on grocery delivery, which has become another major source of revenue as shoppers stock up for quarantine. For Chinese food enthusiasts, mainstream services like Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods often lack basic produce required for Chinese cooking, and the available items can be much pricier due to the supply chain. In the U.S., common Asian vegetables and fruits are often grown by small farms specializing in the produce, sometimes meaning higher costs.

Take chives, a common vegetable in Chinese cuisine. They’re categorized as an herb in the Whole Foods online store and priced at $2.69 per ounce, roughly 17 times the price they’re sold for on some Asian delivery platforms: $3.30 per pound. Chinese snacks, vegetables, and seasonings started to sell quickly, according to Wen.

“It’s common to see people place grocery orders worth over $1,000,” Wen says.

Many apps, thanks to a closer relationship with the Chinese community, have also been partnering with local Chinese restaurants, like Chicago’s Lao Sze Chuan, to deliver free meals to hospitals, using couriers to distribute masks to international students, and raising funds for pandemic relief. In many ways, these apps have partially repaired the broken link between the immigrants and some Chinese restaurants during the social-distancing order.

But these delivery platforms face many of the same challenges as their better-known English-language counterparts, such as mass closures of restaurants and strained supply systems. Pandemic shopping sprees have added pressure to supermarkets and produce suppliers, which now have fewer staff members and more shipping delays.

“Some items were sold out the minute they went online, and sometimes the partner supermarket’s inventory changes,” says Wen. Since the stay-at-home order, Chowbus has hired over 40 customer service representatives dedicated to solving cancellation and refund issues.

And though the delivery services are seeing more business, the restaurants are under greater stress. Many places are functioning with fewer employees, pricier ingredients, and barely any profit, and the restaurants that are still open face high concentrations of orders, which means long hours in hopes of survival.

“Some places have to operate 16 hours a day or more to fulfill our orders,” YBB’s Lang says.

“The dine-in customers now order in the same foods at the same price, but we need to pay for the pickup commission and packaging.”

At Dian Kitchen in the East Village, owner Jessie Zhang is still using Grubhub, which charges 15 to 30 percent of each order for commission. She later also joined Chowbus, which launched a more restaurant-friendly policy by waiving all pickup fees during the outbreak. The app instead charges delivery fees to customers and offers a $9.99 monthly subscription for loyal customers to waive those delivery fees.

“The dine-in customers now order in the same foods at the same price, but we need to pay for the pickup commission and packaging,” Zhang says, adding that she’s only offering delivery to survive the pandemic.

Manhattan dim sum chain Three Times (stylized as 3 Times) is also struggling between the influx of delivery orders and the added cost. Its Union Square square branch pays UberEats a 30 percent commission and Hungry Panda a 25 percent commission to deliver hot dishes and frozen foods to customers; it’s operating without profit.

The Lower East Side location now only sells frozen dim sum and uses an in-house delivery team that Three Times built during the pandemic. That location uses ChowNow, a Chinese food-specialized system, to take orders from customers, and then staffers send the food themselves across neighborhoods where many Chinese immigrants reside: Manhattan, Queens, and Jersey City.

But the delivery capacity for the restaurant’s in-house team is limited. They can only deliver on Wednesdays and Sundays for orders over $80, though the threshold is easy to reach for people who plan to stock up frozen dumplings and xiaolongbao.

“Hiring is difficult now, and it costs more than usual,” says Cici Zhang, a spokesperson at Three Times.

The biggest uncertainty still stems from the pandemic itself. While the apps are shifting gear to accommodate the sudden rush of business from stay-at-home Chinese customers, it is still unclear how soon the Chinese restaurant industry — and the entire economy — will recover.

Restaurateurs and delivery platform executives believe that, based on what they’ve seen in China, the battle is far from over. Across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore, new coronavirus cases have resurfaced after the situation appeared to be under control and business reopened. In the case of Hong Kong and Harbin, a couple of asymptomatic bargoers or active visitors can negate weeks of quarantine efforts. Concerns for a second wave of spread have been mounting as freshly liberated consumers go out for “revenge shopping,” or surges of spending and gathering at both restaurants and retailers after weeks of social distancing.

Many delivery platforms say that they are currently focused on helping restaurants survive the pandemic, and that their revenue boost right now may not last forever. “All this growth will disappear in the very long term, but right now we can’t think that much,” says YBB’s Lang. “We’re trying to get customers fed.”

And in some ways, it’s safer to focus on surviving with delivery no matter what. For many restaurateurs, reopening is something to look forward to — but it will inevitably lead to more issues.

“When people feel they are finally free to go out, they will rush to dine in restaurants,” Zhang says, “and we are actually facing a bigger challenge in health and safety.”

When he’s not planning his next meal, Tony Lin makes videos and writes about food and the world around him.