Patrick Stewart Invented Uber Eats First

Sometime around his early teen years, Patrick Stewart decided to become something of an entrepreneur in his home neighborhood, devising what he refers to in his book as a “proto-Uber Eats.”

He was already in the habit of knocking on his neighbors’ doors and asking to do small jobs for them in order to earn enough money to fuel one of his passions—going to the movies.

But holiday times afforded him greater freedom in his schedule, and on Fridays, he would use his extra time to establish himself as a one-person food delivery service.

Each Friday morning, Patrick Stewart would go around his neighborhood collecting orders for fish and chips, which he would then take to the local fish and chips restaurant later in the day.

As he tells it, the restaurant employees would groan when they saw him coming because they knew he would be bringing a large number of orders to be made all at once.

Once the orders were all completed, he would gather them up and deliver them to his neighbors, collecting a small delivery fee from each one.

While we can’t say Uber Eats was especially inspired by Patrick Stewart’s entrepreneurial endeavors in his younger years, his early business efforts were not his only intersection with the food delivery brand.

In 2020, Stewart starred in a series of Uber Eats commercials that pitted him, the captain of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Enterprise, against Star Wars’s Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill.

Part of the “Tonight I’ll be Eating” ad campaign from the company, which experienced a significant boost during the pandemic, the spots feature Hamill and Stewart facing off in an abandoned warehouse.

In the original, Mark Hamill says he’ll be having a veggie cheeseburger with no tomato, while Patrick Stewart remarks that his four-cheese tortellini will be coming with extra “to-mah-to.”

The face-off, with Hamill brandishing a baseball bat and Stewart holding a cricket bat over his shoulder, makes as little sense as any enmity between fans of the two “Star “franchises and quickly devolves into silliness.

Later, shorter advertisements have the pair squaring off over air hockey and finally a heated game of Connect Four.

Apart from these delightfully funny ads, it’s fun to think of Patrick Stewart as a visionary young businessman in his small Yorkshire town, the future Star Trek Captain running errands for his neighbors.

But the book reveals many such anecdotes of humble beginnings before a young Stewart is introduced to the theater, Shakespeare, and eventually the final frontier.

Amid stories of hiding out in his family’s outhouse with a candle to read books by and making his way through schools and jobs as a working class boy in a largely stratified society relates in engaging detail the many colorful, sometimes difficult events of his past that shaped him into the legend he has become.

We particularly recommend the audiobook of Making It So as there’s nothing quite like hearing Patrick Stewart’s stories in his own inimitable voice.

And in this particular instance, it’s kind of amazing to see Stewart ahead of his time, creating an Uber-Eats-style business in the 1950s. However successful this venture may have been for the young Yorkshire teen, we’re glad he ultimately chose to follow his passion for acting instead.