The “Take In” restaurant in Helsinki, Finland, is currently in the news for its ingenious service. Instead of cooking the meals in its own kitchen – which doesn’t exist – it allows patrons to order various dishes from a selection of 20 other restaurants in the city.

Sponsored by American Express and Wolt, a popular food delivery app, Take In is a pop-up restaurant that opened at the beginning of November 2016, and will run through April 2, this year. As you’ve probably already guessed, the name “Take In” is a clever play on words, as in take-out eaten in a restaurant. It sounds like a dumb concept, I know, after all, the whole point of ordering take-out is to avoid going to a restaurant, and if you’re going to dress up to go out, you might as well go straight to your favorite restaurant instead of ordering food from it somewhere else. But here’s the idea behind it – when you go out with a group of friends and you can’t decided where to go for dinner, because everyone wants to order something else, Take In is the perfect solution. You can have a pizza, while your buddies enjoy Japanese, Chinese or even a gourmet burger.

Photo: miltonshowroom/Instagram

“We want to be a living room in the city,” a Wolt spokesperson told Monocle magazine. “We all know what it’s like – you’re about to go out for dinner with a big group of friends, one of you wants to go for pizza, one of you wants to go and try that fantastic new find dining restaurant. One of you just wants sushi. One of you is only having salad because you’ve gone carb-free for January. What are you going to do? Well, the answer in Helsinki right now is you come to Take In because you can do all of those things in the same place.”

Patrons are more than welcome to stick to the selection of drinks available at the bar, but if they want to try the “take in” experience, all they have to do is use the Wolt app, just as they would from the comfort of their own homes. They have access to the full menus of a curated selection of around 20 local restaurants, and once they order and pay for their meals, all they have to do is wait for someone to deliver it to the pop-up restaurant. It’s like take out, only in…

Photo: Take In restaurant/Twitter