The points the article make come close to my gripe with ghost kitchens but don't quite cover it:
they feel like scams and when I've accidentally ordered from a ghost kitchen it was by design a terrible experience.
I'm talking like, you order a 15$ main that is called "creamy pasta with prosicutto" and when it shows up its buttered spaghetti with a couple stamp-sized bits of ham. Ordering from actual restaurants come with some of the downsides the article assigns to ghost kitchens, like cold food and weird presentation, but ghost kitchens never seemed to reach the bar of "food someone would actually order, even if it was teleported to them instantly".
They also scammed the operators. It was an Uber-esque ploy.
What actually got sold was an uber-esque scam: these kitchens were rented to tiny operators who, instead of opening their own restaurants, opened in a ghost kitchen facility. I read an in-depth article that showcased the extremely high failure rate of the operators. They were sold indiscriminately to anyone who could be suckered into doing it, with no thought of whether the "restaurant" was likely to succeed. The parallels to driving for Uber are obvious.
I actually suspect that ghost kitchens would work fine, but it would be one company operating them and carefully selecting products that sell and controlling for quality.
It always felt like a weird business model to me. If you lack a physical presence, the only thing you have over a decent prepared section at the grocery store is variety (and freshness, at least in theory). You don't even have convenience on your side since Instacart exists, and because the lower rent was predicated on leasing in more remote areas, the food is even less likely to be warm by the time it arrives than if you got groceries delivered.
And for the providers of the ghost kitchens, while they are selling a shovel of sorts, their bet was there would be a continuing market for their shovels. That space isn't likely to be used for any other restaurants because of the lack of foot traffic, but it also isn't likely to be used in large-scale food production because the facilities usually aren't large enough to be re-tooled for anything beyond catering companies. Commercial kitchen build-outs are not cheap, so investing in large scale small kitchen spaces is a risky bet.
Yup, this is a crucial detail that the article sort of assumes the reader already knows: the companies being discussed are not actually cooking the food. They are ghost kitchen facility providers. Like WeWork for takeout/delivery cooks. And, surprise: they don’t print money any better than WeWork did.
It's interesting to contrast to food trucks that are another method for more profitable places by reducing costs.
Food trucks seem to be pretty popular and work well.
Perhaps the difference is that food trucks are all about establishing a reputation for good cheap food that you can verify where as ghost kitchens wind up being the opposite.
Food trucks are also usually founded by a person with a vision and passion. Someone who wants to do something completely different with their life, a cook who thinks they have what it takes to go out on their own, etc, and that can be something that goes beyond even the reputational incentives.
Certainly not always, but I'd wager far more commonly than a generic ghost kitchen out of a shared kitchen with an Applebee's or out of the back of a cheap warehouse district.
Food trucks seem like they would involve more cost than a "ghost kitchen" and the branding on the truck especially will follow you around. If a ghost kitchen sucks, there is no cost in changing their name and maybe even their menu and continuing their bullshit. But there are real costs in re-branding and vinyling your food truck and food trucks deal with face to face business.
>>"food someone would actually order, even if it was teleported to them instantly".
The article states
>>Quality control became impossible. Shared kitchen facilities meant that one staff member prepared food for multiple brands simultaneously. No ownership. No accountability. Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers.
I'm not sure if it was impossible or if management never actually prioritized it, not bothering to understand what an actual customer would want. How much of it is the stupid management assumption that they can "just make a dish generally meeting description X on the menu" and deliver that and it'll be ok? «— Real question, did mgt fail at the product specification level, or was QC just as a practical matter, impossible?
On the economics, it really seems 30% for delivery is insane. It seems that same 30% might exceed the cost of the physical restaurant. And when it adds a 15-45min delay while homogenizing and cooling the meal, it seems an impossible problem. Maybe if the 30% transported it instantly and losslessly...
Probably good this soulless idea will die. Too bad so much perfectly good capital was squandered on it instead of better ideas
It really seems like it should be possible, but you have to put in the effort to develop recipes, buy minimum quality ingredients, and train the staff. Old school diners, especially Greek diners in the NYC area, used to be famous for their wide-ranging menus—burgers, spaghetti, spanakopita, chopped liver, etc.—and the food was generally pretty good. Cheesecake Factory has built something similar on a national level, and workplace cafeterias often aren't bad either, certainly not at the level of a ghost kitchen.
I think tech founders often underestimate what it takes to build a food business and what the margins are like and then start to cut corners to make the business viable.
> Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers.
And this is how it works in many (not all) American airports. Local restaurants put their brands on the signs, but the food is prepared by probationary employees of Acme Baggage Displacement And Cafeteria Management Corp.
Shops that run 100 different brand names usually do a spectrum of quality and pricing ranging from great quality and great prices to high prices with terrible quality. You might for example put a very similar item (if not exactly the same) on two different menu cards where customer B gets twice as much for half the price. B is the stability of the project while A is a disposable brand. If you can corner the market A conditions the customer to think B is a great deal.
I mean they basically are drive by scams. They just flood the market with a million listings for the same kitchen, use some stock photos (AI generated now). And if you get bad reviews or food poisoning complaints you delete the business and list up 5 more.
A business trading on a name without some kind of sunk cost that incentivizes them to protect that name should be a red flag for consumers. It's the same thing that's made Amazon a surreal morass of brands like DYBOOP and BIPLOZA. If a ghost kitchen can shut down and reopen with a different name just by clicking a few buttons and not actually have to move their kitchen or anything, the whole concept is totally untrustworthy.
There was an interesting local example of a place that started out trying to be more or less a ghost kitchen but wound up being forced by success to become a real eatery. It had the endearingly utilitarian name "Pizza Online Company". They had no phone nor any in-house delivery system. You could order online or in-person to pick up, or via GrubHub/Doordash/etc., and that was it. Initially they had no eating area, just a tiny space big enough for three or four people to stand and wait for their orders.
But the pizza wasn't bad and it was (at least at first) remarkably cheap. It undercut Domino's prices by at least 25% while being much better quality. The place became popular. And sure enough when a place becomes popular people start wanting to go there. They added a small counter with stools to the waiting area. They didn't have space for more than that inside, but when it wasn't enough they took over some of the strip-mall walkway outside the front door and made it into a patio with seating for 8-10 people.
Unfortunately it closed abruptly a couple years ago, apparently due to some kind of family emergency.
I completely agree with your point about food quality being borne from the economic incentive of protecting an initial investment.
However, I always thought the DYBOOPs and BIPLOZAs of this world existed on Amazon because of a glut of Chinese manufacturing expertise outpacing any ability to do proper branding and marketing. My QSMYYUYE grill stove, CYEER steel plates, and SUNYAY telescopic bug sprayer are all well made and reasonably priced commodity objects.
It's certainly possible that some of those weird brands are of decent quality. My point is just that, if they're not, they'll just change the name from DYBOOP to CYEER and keep selling the same thing. There's no reputation to uphold.
> However, I always thought the DYBOOPs and BIPLOZAs of this world existed on Amazon because of a glut of Chinese manufacturing expertise outpacing any ability to do proper branding and marketing.
IIRC, if you have a "brand name" it unlocks some desirable features in the Amazon Seller experience.
The DYBOOPs and BIPLOZAs are almost always just heavily marked-up items you can buy on AliExpress much cheaper if you're willing to wait a week or two.
something like 63% of sellers on Amazon are Chinese front companies. They often use random strings of letters for brand names to easily register trademarks. This practice allows them to bypass stricter naming regulations and flood the market with products that can be difficult to distinguish from one another.
to be clear, much of this is an Amazon rule, and branding is meaningless if you sponsor items to be searched; most people DGAF about things like plastic containers or cellphone cases and are happy to buy whatever
We had a very similar story in chicago. Someone started making pizza out of a ghost kitchen and eventually got so popular they opened a storefront location. I think they might have 2 now. millys pizza in the pan
I don't know if "ghost kitchens are dying" means much. The commercial model of a ghost kitchen as an assembly line for low quality low price high throughput food delivered by expensive couriers on demand is dying, yes, and good riddance.
However, when you think about it, a big chunk of the catering industry operates as a ghost kitchen. It's well known that caterers go bankrupt at lower rates than restaurants. We had a local success story called 1800 LASAGNA where a man cooked and delivered exactly one item to customers and met with a lot of success. He then opened a restaurant, which is now in voluntary administration because it was losing so much money. Catering works.
I can't help but feel this is one of those "tech industry reinvents the bus" stories, where ghost kitchens lost because catering (and low-seating restaurants like pizza joints) already existed and had a massive head start. It's not that the core idea was bad: the core idea was great, it was just already out there.
I suspect that the problem is the tech industry itself; the companies that were supposed to cut out the expensive, bloated middleman became expensive bloated middlemen themselves, which is why when you order a Starbucks Frappe and a lemon cake on Uber Eats you pay $8 to Starbucks, $7 to Uber, and $3 to the driver. Meanwhile, all that caterer has to do is answer the phone; substantially more lean.
> Meanwhile, all that caterer has to do is answer the phone; substantially more lean.
Real innovation will come when it becomes genuinely feasible for the caterer to run their own server, with some FOSS ordering system, such that there is no middle-man anymore who can jack up prices, only utility companies.
It would be really nice to have a tag on HN to filter out LLM-generated, or at least partly AI-generated content like this.
If an article makes it to the front page despite being AI-generated it probably has some interesting points or ideas, but it's unfortunate that people seeem to choose the speed and style of LLM writing over the individual style and choice that made the writing of yesteryear more interesting and unique.
I was thinking about commenting the same thing. It had an awful lot of paragraphs that ended in a list of three sentence fragments, usually noun phrases, sometimes negated ones. Was that what tipped you off?
> No dining room. No servers. No storefront. No customers walking through the door. Just a kitchen.
> No ownership. No accountability. Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers.
> No loyal regulars. No servers to smooth over problems. Just angry reviews that destroyed virtual brands forever.
Pretty common pattern these days.
That, plus the hashtags at the end (unless Substack uses those and I was unaware of it), plus the fact that we know he's using AI in some capacity because of the feature images - it's a reasonable conclusion to draw.
Asimov was fond of the trope that the future was starved of protein, and even america had become a land where people had to eat communally, and eat significant amounts of manufactured "zymoveal" protein, because real meat was scarce under population/land pressure. It was clear that "people didn't like it"
Oddly, "cafeteria" cooking has sometimes been the best food I've eaten at the time. It very much depends on the circumstances and budget and your expectations. I've eaten like this in Leeds, London, Rome, France, Beijing. And not always in universities, the experience extends to factories, railways and even just the streetscape.
The FSU had a preference for ground meat and sausages at a state level because it was easier to ensure as much as possible of the meat inputs became food outputs. [This is wrong: they didn't] The Khrushchev flats had communal kitchens. They were universally hated I believe.
Ghost kitchens failed on lack of regulation and motivation to be the best they could be. There was never an intention to be "Jamie Oliver's ghost kitchen"
Re-intermediating consumers away from direct food carries on. Uber eats and Panda are delivering food from restaurants all around me, and one of them is a chinese take-away eponymously called "A Chinese Take Away" -I think it's a hack on the search engine carried forward. I've eaten their floating market soup in the shop, it's fine. Most of their trade is carry-out.
> Oddly, "cafeteria" cooking has sometimes been the best food I've eaten at the time.
Sometimes the lack of choice and lack of responsibility are relieving. It may not be the best meal, but you didn't really have much choice and you didn't have to get ingredients and make it yourself. That can go a long way.
Food that travels well requires different recipes, different ingredients, different packaging.
This doesn't ring true, given the popularity of DoorDash and the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.
Having lower-quality multitasking staff serving multiple restaurants from the same prep and equipment seems like an obvious way to lose quality. But simply streamlining the process of getting a menu onto delivery? That seems like a solved problem.
> This doesn't ring true, given the popularity of DoorDash and the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.
People have really funny ideas about restaurants. Somebody once left an online review of my family's establishment complaining that the hot chicken that was supposed to be on their cold to-go salad was in a separate container. They asserted that it was a "trick" to keep the chicken warm and moist, as though it would have been better to let the hot poultry heat their salad in the same container until it was lukewarm meat on top of wilted greens. Every day I wake up and mourn the IQ point that I lost reading it.
So some places are optimizing their fries for delivery.
I've also noticed some restaurants are better at adapting the packaging, like punching out ventilation so fried products don't steam themselves in transit. Lawrence Seafood (which rules) did that for a side of tempura we got this weekend.
But I agree in large part. I wouldn't order fried chicken delivered via door dash in any event. People doing that are optimizing for something other than quality.
Ten years ago (I moved since), there was a ghost kitchen in the Bay Area that was great. I wish I could remember the name. But it produced meals that were extremely well packaged, but designed to be reheated at home (it took like 15 min max). It was great because the meals could be pre-ordered and delivered by the time you got home. You could tell the recipes were all tweaked to fit the specifics of delivery and reheating.
This was an example of a well functioning ghost kitchen. I don’t know how profitable they were, but it was very convenient. There are a lot of downsides to this approach, like pre ordering, reheating, and limited menu, but it was a very different approach to current ghost kitchens around me now or DoorDash from a local restaurant.
The ghost kitchen model can work if the meal recipes are optimized for being microwave heated at destination before consumption. So pre-cooked, but not hot during transport. This allows a more reliable quality for the customer.
This allows the kitchen to prepare in advance, also reducing waste.
Yes, I am sure about this claim that I am making. Are there restaurants that do optimize for delivery? Certainly. But DoorDash covers most restaurants in my area (and it's a big area --- Chicagoland) and most of those menus are identical to the in-person menu.
Every greasy spoon I frequent now has all sorts of packaging/to-go options, they're self-branding the cups and boxes, they have separate queues for pick-up/delivery orders, they have cubbies for quick pick-up, whatever -- they're all seemingly optimizing for pick-up/online stuff.
> This doesn't ring true, given the popularity of DoorDash and the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.
People are dumb.... but only for so long. I've been burnt so many times by delivery I've gone back to mostly ordering pizza and picking it up in person.
Eating out in US or any developed western civilization is so expensive that everyone in those civilizations think cooking is a basic skill.
I don't understand why there is no good cheap option. In Japan, I could go to a low-tier shop. It would cost $1-3; the food is decent with taste, and it fills my stomach. In US, $1-3 would be the min amount of tips.
Restaurants / cafes in Japan have less fixed cost overhead than in the US. Zoning, licensing, insuring, etc. in Japan are more conductive to small shops being able to stay afloat with only moderate business. There’s other factors of course, but those are biggest ones I found when exploring potential for small side project. With that said, I have yet to run a bar/cafe in either country, so my experience is limited to my research.
I think cooking is a basic skill for self sufficiency, if things go wrong in society.
Living in dense cities it can be easy to forget how many dependencies you rely on, it's a complex chain of logistics.
But I sure do miss the convenience and cost of Japan. Cities in Japan feel like they are made for people to live mostly outside of their house. Whereas it is so expensive to do normal city stuff in many western cities, it costs too much to participate every day.
I suspect it is to do with the amount of pedestrian traffic passing through an area. When you have a high population density there is an increased amount of foot traffic in the area you can charge less per individual serving because you have a higher overall volume of traffic.
Where I live in Australia the cheapest food tends to be Kebabs which congregate around pubs. There is a high amount of students walking (stumbling) home after a night out etc so they can afford to be cheap since they get so much foot traffic coming through.
My uneducated guess would be that rent and labor are much cheaper (in relative terms) in Japan than in the US, perhaps so extremely that it dominates compared to the marginal cost of producing food.
I think rent and zoning make a huge fucking difference here. You cannot really have a tiny noodle shop under a home in the US where that's incredibly common in Japan due in large part to national permissive zoning. You've got to maintain a separate home and business property and have the means to acquire or rent both. That necessarily drives up cost of small retail business and tilts the economics far more in favor of very large companies like Walmart or chains like Panda Express.
The only place with cheap restaurants in the US is ironically NYC. The second most expensive metro in the country is able to sustain the dollar slice because of massive foot traffic. When you serve 100+ people an hour you can lower margins, and labor is a lower percentage of costs. Restaurants outside new york either have much lower sales volume or are corporatized and make massive profit.
When I worked for Dominos in the late 80s, it was a lot like this sounds. No dining room, though customers could walk in and order in a small vestibule. The place was as efficient as possible, just ringing phones, an assembly line, cooler and ovens, storage and cleaners in the back, and delivery drivers running in and out.
There seems to be something special about pizza that sets it apart from everything else, that made it seem reasonable to order it delivered from a non-restaurant even back then.
I think pizza is just virtually indestructible in terms of traveling. Sometimes I see americanized chinese food or those caribbean rotis being sold out of no-seating places likewise. The thing about a non-ghost no-seating establishment is you know they would go out of business eventually if they were truly awful. The ghost kitchens though can spin up new virtual brands endlessly.
It worked because Dominos was a brand name, people knew what to expect before ordering, and they picked up their own food instead of letting a overworked disinterested gig driver deliver it.
Plenty of Chinese takeaways, and a good few “Indian” establishments (takeaway/delivery only, no restaurant) have operated in the same way, without chains or brand names, for decades, at least all over the UK. Many great quality, many poor, but that was part of the fun of moving to a new area, figuring out the good ones from all the menus that got shoved through the letterbox.
Before that, of course, the fish and chip shop is an ancient institution, though they rarely delivered.
Most Domino’s were/are almost always delivery. Yes you can go pick up your pizza but most people don’t.
When I worked there they sold pizza and Coke. That was it. No breadsticks, no wings, no salads. One kind of crust, two size options. And by Coke I mean Coca Cola Classic in 16oz glass bottles. No Diet Coke, no sprite, nothing else. It was pure efficiency by elimination.
The drivers were all employees then, too. Not gig workers. No idea if that’s still the case.
I remember in the early 2000s there was a big push to deshittify delivery pizza. Companies were all advertising how they were now sending out their pizza in insulated bags. Dominos went particularly heavy, advertising a purpose built delivery vehicle with a built in warming oven (not sure if this was ever real or just for advertising) and a big emphasis on how they reformulated the entire menu to taste better.
When I worked there they had hot boxes drivers would carry in their car. There was an alcohol burner in it that somewhat kept it warm. They switched to insulated bags about a year after I started.
The stores usually had one or two company cars, a hatchback like a Ford Escort, painted up with the Domino’s logo. It was not equipped with any special pizza warmer. But most drivers used their own car. They got an hourly wage, a percentage of the order total if they used their own car, and tips.
Maybe Domino's had another delivery vehicle in the 2000s, but one of the 10 Tritan Domino's delivery vehicles from the '80s sold at auction a few weeks ago for US $45,000.
The vehicle was real. There is (or was) a series on YouTube about someone who bought one that had been salvaged and wanted to repair it for his own use but ended up getting various legal threats from Domino's, claiming he obtained the vehicle illegally or planned to misuse their branding.
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they feel like scams and when I've accidentally ordered from a ghost kitchen it was by design a terrible experience.
I'm talking like, you order a 15$ main that is called "creamy pasta with prosicutto" and when it shows up its buttered spaghetti with a couple stamp-sized bits of ham. Ordering from actual restaurants come with some of the downsides the article assigns to ghost kitchens, like cold food and weird presentation, but ghost kitchens never seemed to reach the bar of "food someone would actually order, even if it was teleported to them instantly".
What actually got sold was an uber-esque scam: these kitchens were rented to tiny operators who, instead of opening their own restaurants, opened in a ghost kitchen facility. I read an in-depth article that showcased the extremely high failure rate of the operators. They were sold indiscriminately to anyone who could be suckered into doing it, with no thought of whether the "restaurant" was likely to succeed. The parallels to driving for Uber are obvious.
I actually suspect that ghost kitchens would work fine, but it would be one company operating them and carefully selecting products that sell and controlling for quality.
And for the providers of the ghost kitchens, while they are selling a shovel of sorts, their bet was there would be a continuing market for their shovels. That space isn't likely to be used for any other restaurants because of the lack of foot traffic, but it also isn't likely to be used in large-scale food production because the facilities usually aren't large enough to be re-tooled for anything beyond catering companies. Commercial kitchen build-outs are not cheap, so investing in large scale small kitchen spaces is a risky bet.
Should be no surprise. CloudKitchens, even, was founded by none other than Travis Kalanick.
Food trucks seem to be pretty popular and work well.
Perhaps the difference is that food trucks are all about establishing a reputation for good cheap food that you can verify where as ghost kitchens wind up being the opposite.
Certainly not always, but I'd wager far more commonly than a generic ghost kitchen out of a shared kitchen with an Applebee's or out of the back of a cheap warehouse district.
I will also eat the food close to the truck, meaning it's very little effort for me to go back and say "oi, this is shit, mate".
In a ghost kitchen you have zero way to actually give feedback to the kitchen itself.
>>"food someone would actually order, even if it was teleported to them instantly".
The article states >>Quality control became impossible. Shared kitchen facilities meant that one staff member prepared food for multiple brands simultaneously. No ownership. No accountability. Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers.
I'm not sure if it was impossible or if management never actually prioritized it, not bothering to understand what an actual customer would want. How much of it is the stupid management assumption that they can "just make a dish generally meeting description X on the menu" and deliver that and it'll be ok? «— Real question, did mgt fail at the product specification level, or was QC just as a practical matter, impossible?
On the economics, it really seems 30% for delivery is insane. It seems that same 30% might exceed the cost of the physical restaurant. And when it adds a 15-45min delay while homogenizing and cooling the meal, it seems an impossible problem. Maybe if the 30% transported it instantly and losslessly...
Probably good this soulless idea will die. Too bad so much perfectly good capital was squandered on it instead of better ideas
I think tech founders often underestimate what it takes to build a food business and what the margins are like and then start to cut corners to make the business viable.
And this is how it works in many (not all) American airports. Local restaurants put their brands on the signs, but the food is prepared by probationary employees of Acme Baggage Displacement And Cafeteria Management Corp.
And? It’s not enough that someone makes crap food. The matter is when there is no market force to penalize crap food.
I thought platform feedback was a solved issue. Online sellers are (across the board in general) very focused on avoiding negative feedback.
There was an interesting local example of a place that started out trying to be more or less a ghost kitchen but wound up being forced by success to become a real eatery. It had the endearingly utilitarian name "Pizza Online Company". They had no phone nor any in-house delivery system. You could order online or in-person to pick up, or via GrubHub/Doordash/etc., and that was it. Initially they had no eating area, just a tiny space big enough for three or four people to stand and wait for their orders.
But the pizza wasn't bad and it was (at least at first) remarkably cheap. It undercut Domino's prices by at least 25% while being much better quality. The place became popular. And sure enough when a place becomes popular people start wanting to go there. They added a small counter with stools to the waiting area. They didn't have space for more than that inside, but when it wasn't enough they took over some of the strip-mall walkway outside the front door and made it into a patio with seating for 8-10 people.
Unfortunately it closed abruptly a couple years ago, apparently due to some kind of family emergency.
However, I always thought the DYBOOPs and BIPLOZAs of this world existed on Amazon because of a glut of Chinese manufacturing expertise outpacing any ability to do proper branding and marketing. My QSMYYUYE grill stove, CYEER steel plates, and SUNYAY telescopic bug sprayer are all well made and reasonably priced commodity objects.
IIRC, if you have a "brand name" it unlocks some desirable features in the Amazon Seller experience.
The DYBOOPs and BIPLOZAs are almost always just heavily marked-up items you can buy on AliExpress much cheaper if you're willing to wait a week or two.
to be clear, much of this is an Amazon rule, and branding is meaningless if you sponsor items to be searched; most people DGAF about things like plastic containers or cellphone cases and are happy to buy whatever
However, when you think about it, a big chunk of the catering industry operates as a ghost kitchen. It's well known that caterers go bankrupt at lower rates than restaurants. We had a local success story called 1800 LASAGNA where a man cooked and delivered exactly one item to customers and met with a lot of success. He then opened a restaurant, which is now in voluntary administration because it was losing so much money. Catering works.
I can't help but feel this is one of those "tech industry reinvents the bus" stories, where ghost kitchens lost because catering (and low-seating restaurants like pizza joints) already existed and had a massive head start. It's not that the core idea was bad: the core idea was great, it was just already out there.
Real innovation will come when it becomes genuinely feasible for the caterer to run their own server, with some FOSS ordering system, such that there is no middle-man anymore who can jack up prices, only utility companies.
If an article makes it to the front page despite being AI-generated it probably has some interesting points or ideas, but it's unfortunate that people seeem to choose the speed and style of LLM writing over the individual style and choice that made the writing of yesteryear more interesting and unique.
Now I wonder whether any of it is even true.
Deleted Comment
> No ownership. No accountability. Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers.
> No loyal regulars. No servers to smooth over problems. Just angry reviews that destroyed virtual brands forever.
Pretty common pattern these days.
That, plus the hashtags at the end (unless Substack uses those and I was unaware of it), plus the fact that we know he's using AI in some capacity because of the feature images - it's a reasonable conclusion to draw.
Oddly, "cafeteria" cooking has sometimes been the best food I've eaten at the time. It very much depends on the circumstances and budget and your expectations. I've eaten like this in Leeds, London, Rome, France, Beijing. And not always in universities, the experience extends to factories, railways and even just the streetscape.
The FSU had a preference for ground meat and sausages at a state level because it was easier to ensure as much as possible of the meat inputs became food outputs. [This is wrong: they didn't] The Khrushchev flats had communal kitchens. They were universally hated I believe.
Ghost kitchens failed on lack of regulation and motivation to be the best they could be. There was never an intention to be "Jamie Oliver's ghost kitchen"
Re-intermediating consumers away from direct food carries on. Uber eats and Panda are delivering food from restaurants all around me, and one of them is a chinese take-away eponymously called "A Chinese Take Away" -I think it's a hack on the search engine carried forward. I've eaten their floating market soup in the shop, it's fine. Most of their trade is carry-out.
Khrushchyovkas did not have communal kitchens; I grew up in one [0]. Perhaps you are thinking about kommunalkas [1]?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7935844
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment
Sometimes the lack of choice and lack of responsibility are relieving. It may not be the best meal, but you didn't really have much choice and you didn't have to get ingredients and make it yourself. That can go a long way.
Food that travels well requires different recipes, different ingredients, different packaging.
This doesn't ring true, given the popularity of DoorDash and the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.
Having lower-quality multitasking staff serving multiple restaurants from the same prep and equipment seems like an obvious way to lose quality. But simply streamlining the process of getting a menu onto delivery? That seems like a solved problem.
People have really funny ideas about restaurants. Somebody once left an online review of my family's establishment complaining that the hot chicken that was supposed to be on their cold to-go salad was in a separate container. They asserted that it was a "trick" to keep the chicken warm and moist, as though it would have been better to let the hot poultry heat their salad in the same container until it was lukewarm meat on top of wilted greens. Every day I wake up and mourn the IQ point that I lost reading it.
"Wilted soggy salad lovers hate this one simple trick!"
So some places are optimizing their fries for delivery.
I've also noticed some restaurants are better at adapting the packaging, like punching out ventilation so fried products don't steam themselves in transit. Lawrence Seafood (which rules) did that for a side of tempura we got this weekend.
But I agree in large part. I wouldn't order fried chicken delivered via door dash in any event. People doing that are optimizing for something other than quality.
This was an example of a well functioning ghost kitchen. I don’t know how profitable they were, but it was very convenient. There are a lot of downsides to this approach, like pre ordering, reheating, and limited menu, but it was a very different approach to current ghost kitchens around me now or DoorDash from a local restaurant.
I can't remember when I last used a service like that. The convenience isn't worth the disappointment and aggravation.
Are you sure they're not?
People are dumb.... but only for so long. I've been burnt so many times by delivery I've gone back to mostly ordering pizza and picking it up in person.
I don't understand why there is no good cheap option. In Japan, I could go to a low-tier shop. It would cost $1-3; the food is decent with taste, and it fills my stomach. In US, $1-3 would be the min amount of tips.
Living in dense cities it can be easy to forget how many dependencies you rely on, it's a complex chain of logistics.
But I sure do miss the convenience and cost of Japan. Cities in Japan feel like they are made for people to live mostly outside of their house. Whereas it is so expensive to do normal city stuff in many western cities, it costs too much to participate every day.
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Where I live in Australia the cheapest food tends to be Kebabs which congregate around pubs. There is a high amount of students walking (stumbling) home after a night out etc so they can afford to be cheap since they get so much foot traffic coming through.
… I, and everyone I know, can cook? Do cook. There's no way to eat out every night…?
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There seems to be something special about pizza that sets it apart from everything else, that made it seem reasonable to order it delivered from a non-restaurant even back then.
Before that, of course, the fish and chip shop is an ancient institution, though they rarely delivered.
When I worked there they sold pizza and Coke. That was it. No breadsticks, no wings, no salads. One kind of crust, two size options. And by Coke I mean Coca Cola Classic in 16oz glass bottles. No Diet Coke, no sprite, nothing else. It was pure efficiency by elimination.
The drivers were all employees then, too. Not gig workers. No idea if that’s still the case.
The stores usually had one or two company cars, a hatchback like a Ford Escort, painted up with the Domino’s logo. It was not equipped with any special pizza warmer. But most drivers used their own car. They got an hourly wage, a percentage of the order total if they used their own car, and tips.
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