Burger in the sky – Deliveroo Eat Up

Feeling like the cat that has got the cream I was one of the lucky ones to attend Deliveroo’s Eat Up sky-high dining event.

However before I tell you about my experience hot dogging up in the air let me tell you a little about Deliveroo.

Deliveroo

Deliveroo was founded by CEO Will Shu who moved to London in 2013.  He discovered a city full of great restaurants, but he was amazed that so few of them delivered food. So he made it his personal mission to bring the best local restaurants food direct to people by a offering a fast and reliable service which customers can order via their phone and track.

Discover more about Deliveroo via clicking here.

Deliveroo Eat Up

Deliveroo was inspired by the ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’ photograph which featured construction workers atop steelwork during the construction of the Rockefeller Center in New York back in 1932.

So Deliveroo decided after eight-six years later, to give 200 members of the public a free opportunity to recreate the iconic photo on 21 & 22 August.  For all those that were interested got entered into a ballot with various time slots from breakfast through to dinner. The lucky diners will then sit up in the air at 450ft (32 storeys high) in a secret location.

During the 30 minute seating, with food provided by Deliveroo partners, guests could take in the stunning panoramic views of London with landmarks of the BT Tower, St Paul’s Cathedral and the London Eye. Depending which time slot you had guests either got provided food from Bleecker, Coco di Mama, Tortilla or Lola’s Cupcakes.

More about the iconic 1932 photo ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’

Did you know…

• That the ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’ was a publicity stunt to promote the new Rockfeller Center at the time of the Great Depression to show that American’s was still building, progressing and working.
• The 11 workers were situated 69 floors high in the air.  However some historians think that the photo was not nearly as risky as it looked.  One article in the New York Times poses the theory that below the men, just out of view from the camera, was a perfectly safe, finished floor for the men to lower themselves onto. However like so many things about the image, the truth has been lost to history.
• There was more than just this single shot taken that day. In addition to photos featuring different poses for the 11 men on the beam, there’s also a rarely seen picture of four of the men stretched out across it, taking a well-deserved nap.
• No one really knows who was responsible for taking the photo. One name that keeps coming up is Charles C. Ebbets, who actually received credit for it for a while. But other photographers were up there that day, too, including William Leftwich and Thomas Kelley, and so the Rockefeller archive and Corbis removed any official credit and attributed the photo to ‘unknown’.  Corbis owned the rights to the glass negative to ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’ from 1995 to 2016, until the company sold its images archive to Visual China Group, which has a distribution deal with Getty.
• The original negative is stored in a cave in Pennsylvania that also has many other priceless artwork, photos, film negatives, pieces of music, and government documents from all around the world stored.

Hot Dog

I discovered the competition for Deliveroo Eat Up event to recreate ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’ via Facebook and thought wow that is nuts.  Anyway I am nutty as a fruitcake so I thought I would enter the ballot to recreate the iconic photo but I never expected I would win.  So the next day I got an email to say I was one of the lucky ones to win a pair of tickets to attend Deliveroo Eat Up event.  I felt like a cat that had got the cream.

The event happened on top of one of London’s tallest buildings near London Bridge.  Upon arriving at the skyscraper, with my legs feeling like jelly but feeling eager as mustard at the same time to get hoisted up into the air with my blogger friend Laura of lojovstheworld.  We was greeted by some Deliveroo staff and taken up to the roof.  We then saw the specially-built rig which had a 8-metre steel girder which was situated right on at the edge of the rooftop.    

Firstly though before sitting on the steel girder it was time to sign a waiver, get harnessed up, then buckled and strapped onto one of the six seats which were on the girder so we don’t slip off the girder and end up being flat as a pancake.  

Once we were all tightly fitted in and up against each other like peas in a pod we was then hoisted up sky high. Once up feeling fall of beans we took in the many famous landmarks around us from the Shard to St Paul’s Cathedral.

After looking down and around initially being terrified we then felt as cool as cucumbers.

Time to say cheese.

Then it was time for our meal. On our time slot of 3.30pm we was given a Bleecker burger.  The burger was great in taste but then they do use pastured fed beef from rare breeds supplied from small farms in the UK. All their burgers are dry-aged, giving all their burgers an intense, beefy flavour.

The experience was the best thing since sliced bread.

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YouTube our experience in real life

Terrifying or exhilarating? Your call?