Julio Diaz was hungry. The problem was that Mr. Diaz was sitting in his Mitsubishi S.U.V., had a great parking spot on the Upper West Side, and could not walk away from the car until the alternate-side parking period had passed.

Anywhere else, breakfast might have had to wait. But, in a land where a bouquet of daffodils, a clubbing outfit or a box of Pampers can be summoned in the flicker of a smartphone screen, the solution was simple. Thus began Mr. Diaz’s habit of having his morning sustenance delivered directly to his car. “I have the whole works,” said Mr. Diaz, a shoe salesman. “Bacon, eggs, home fries, toast. I have a real breakfast in my car. It smells like a restaurant.”

Perhaps nothing is dearer to New Yorkers than the idea that in this city, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it this year, “I order food, it’s at my door in 10 to 15 minutes. O.K.?” (Justice Sotomayor, who grew up in the Bronx, had unkind words for Washington restaurants, where “there isn’t a place I call where it doesn’t take 45 minutes.”)

Now that the hungry can use cellphones and food-delivery apps to order anything their stomachs desire to the very spot where they stand, however, delivery is no longer confined to the apartment or the office — or even, for that matter, to a place with an address. “We go to the park all the time; we go to the beaches all the time,” said Robert Asmail, the manager at Due Fratelli Pizza in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “The police officers, they call on the corner, say, ‘We are outside patrolling.’ We go over there, we go anyplace! Doesn’t matter!” Mr. Asmail added that his deliverymen often make trips to the Red Hook piers to feed fishermen. “I don’t care,” he said. “They buy, we send it out.”