13 ms·

Our Ghost Kitchen Future

59 points by mitchbob 6y ago

sradman 6y ago
This is about startup Reef Technology [1] that provides software and logistics for standing-up food preparation/pickup in locations such as parking lots that lack the required utilities: > The Power of Proximity™.... We are creating a network of neighborhood hubs to bring you the goods and services you want, faster than ever before. [1] https://reeftechnology.com/ https://reeftechnology.com/
the-dude 6y ago
> In the trade publication Parking Today, publisher John Van Horn speculated about the repercussions of ParkJockey’s ascent. I find it hilarious there is even such a publication. Over the years I have read about other, similar hilarious ones, but I forgot which. Emphasis mine.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > I find it hilarious there is even such a publication. Parking is a ten-billion dollar industry in the US alone. Doesn't surprise me that it can support a magazine. How many magazines do you see that are part of much smaller niches?
  - walrus01 6y ago
    I want to see more photos, schematics and info on these car stacking parking systems and things designed for very high density/high cost of land areas.
- ralfd 6y ago
  This is the current July issue: https://magazine.parkingtoday.com/issues/ParkingToday2020-07JUL/ https://magazine.parkingtoday.com/issues/ParkingToday2020-07... Even them are touched by the BLM protests and the editorial ask unsurely if parking can be racist?
- kryptiskt 6y ago
  I remember an article about Roman valves posted here from Valve Magazine (https://www.valvemagazine.com https://www.valvemagazine.com), a publication that has nothing to with computer games.
  - mauvehaus 6y ago
    If you're interested in that, you might also find the Museum of Plumbing up your alley: http://www.theplumbingmuseum.org/ http://www.theplumbingmuseum.org/ Where is it located? Watertown, MA. Where else? N.B. I haven't been, and they're closed at the moment (presumably for the same reason as everybody else). If you make it there and haven't had your fill of water-related museums, there's also the pumping station at Chestnut Hill: https://waterworksmuseum.org/about/ https://waterworksmuseum.org/about/ They have 3 large steam engines that pumped water in the Boston area for the better part of a century. I have been to this one, and it's amazing.
- drfuchs 6y ago
  A few I've run into at random: BusLine Magazine, with an ad in the back for "BarfClean! Just spray on to solidify, for easy removal!" (The ads in the front were less lurid: "Our new seats are 32% lighter!") And, more on-topic, Restaurateur Magazine, with an ad for "Sizzle! Paint-on Char Marks for any meat, for that fresh-from-the-grill look!" (Names of magazines and products approximate; but I'm sure about "BarfClean".)
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    I wonder where people get the raw material for testing a product like BarfClean during development. Actually, maybe I don't really want to know.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - mauvehaus 6y ago
    It's usually interesting, but sometimes not pretty to see what's going on behind the curtain. I once saw a bottle under a sink in a restaurant: Extra Strength Urine Remover. Are people that bad at peeing that there's a need for urine remover in extra as well as regular strength?!
    - throwanem 6y ago
      Have you seen men?
      - mauvehaus 6y ago
        Tellingly, my wife informed me that there wasn't a bottle in the women's restroom.
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      Pillars of Hercules (god rest its soul) in London had an infamous and constant layer of liquid on the floor of the men's toilets. Many times I had to suggest an alternate destination because I was wearing my Vibrams.
- timthorn 6y ago
  The UK panel show "Have I Got News For You" includes a guest publication in every episode: https://metro.co.uk/2015/04/17/11-of-the-most-memorable-publications-ever-to-feature-on-have-i-got-news-for-yous-missing-words-round-5149667/ https://metro.co.uk/2015/04/17/11-of-the-most-memorable-publ...
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Thank you!
- wastedhours 6y ago
  I always used to collect any of those niche trade publications I could - you can learn a lot about an industry from the trade pubs (it's like a microcosm of supply chains and inside information). Personal favourites were ones specifically for hotel designers, packaged food companies, airline service suppliers, and boat builders. If you ever want a reminder about the scope of opportunity there is in the world, look for the niche industry magazines. They're a delight.
- michaelt 6y ago
  Stage 1: Keep editorial costs right down by mostly printing reworded press releases and invited comment from industry bigwigs. Stage 2: Plenty of adverts. It's not like a company making car park barriers is advertising in the New York Times. Stage 3: Profit At least, that's my theory as to how there are so many different rail industry magazines...
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  It's part of America's proud hyper-pluralistic nature. A bunch of different interests (usually private) all competing for mindshare and influence in the world.
joe5150 6y ago
had an experience this spring with picking up Thai food from a Chinese restaurant which is also home to: - Chinese Yum! Yum! - Szechwings - Kuri Sashimi Bowls - Send Noods Pho - Veggie Stir Fry House - Sushi Sendai - Panang Panang! Thai Curry - Save the Fish Vegetarian Sushi - Fire Ass Thai and so on. at least 25 restaurants by my count. I don't know if I believe that this is a problem (beyond the usual kinds of problems in restaurants) and I'm mostly curious about how the logistics are managed. is there a wall of iPads so each "restaurant" front gets all its own orders on one? does whatever company that facilitates this kind of thing provide a solution where manifold orders can come in on a more traditional kitchen display system with some flag added for which "restaurant" it belongs to? making the various menus work doesn't seem like as big of a challenge: the majority of the client restaurants are offering whole subsets of the host restaurant's menu or food easily reconstructed from those items.
- pjc50 6y ago
  White label food. It does rather defeat Yelp or other attempts at reviews if "restaurants" can be spun up and down like AWS VMs. I suppose the limit case would be personalised restaurants, where everyone thinks they're ordering from a slightly different customised-for-them place but which all come from the same kitchen. I guess the parasocial relationships are the next thing to automate?
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    > White label food. Already had those -- the frozen-grill trend of the 90s, aka the TGIFridays, Bennigan's, Applebees, etc. With COVID they just ditched sit-down part and went straight to delivery.
- hahamrfunnyguy 6y ago
  It's funny you say that because making the various menu items seems like the biggest challenge in my view. In my experience, a restaurant with a large menu is a sure sign of mediocre food. It's like when you order Thai cuisine at a Chinese restaurant - you end up getting sweet and spicy Chinese food. When you have so many menu items, how do you ensure consistency and train cooks how to prepare the recipes?
ausbah 6y ago
> It now manages 1.3 million parking spaces in forty-five hundred locations. >But, for now, customers may find themselves paying a premium for meals similar to those found at a fast-food restaurant, or in a supermarket freezer. >Reef’s kitchens are registered as mobile food facilities, which tend to have fewer permitting requirements. >The branding and food are real, but the restaurants do not exist elsewhere in the physical world. I can't say I'm exactly thrilled about another "disrupting" another couple of industries. The take up parking and seemingly tiptoe around regulations only to provide mediocre cookie cutter dishes via fake restaurants? I'll have to pass.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  Wow I could not disagree more. Unlike parking spaces, this is at least providing some positive value to a city. And what makes these fake restaurants? These are cheap spaces where entrepreneurial chefs who could never afford to start a full restaurant can open a delivery restaurant and start selling food quickly. They can still develop a name and a brand for themselves via delivery just like any restaurant could. Why does it have to be mediocre food? Surely some amazing food will come out of spaces like this.
  - biggidywiggidy 6y ago
    Amazing food will come out of your kitchen when you learn to cook. Youtube will teach you how.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Spivak 6y ago
      But this misses the point of getting food for delivery. If cooking is one of your hobbies you will very quickly be able make food better than any mid-tier restaurant in your city (i.e. the kind of place you would probably order take-out from). It's honestly not that big of an accomplishment because you have so many advantages over line cooks when you're just cooking for yourself / your family. Once you're at that point getting take-out isn't about getting better food for a special occasion, it's paying for something better than frozen that you don't have to cook. Ordering take-out is a function of how tired I am, not the quality of food I want.
jt2190 6y ago
> [Ari] Ojalvo, [C.E.O of Reef] cites his own experience in the restaurant industry... to note that opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant is high-risk and expensive, whereas ghost kitchens are lower-risk, offering a more affordable way for entrepreneurs to enter the business. In most cities, opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant requires a gauntlet of permits and inspections; restaurateurs waiting on permits might find themselves paying months of rent for space they aren’t yet allowed to use. Reef’s kitchens are registered as mobile food facilities, which tend to have fewer permitting requirements. Like the trailers themselves, the business details are configurable: Reef offers flexible staffing arrangements and short-term leases. What’s interesting is that this is, in part, a response to things that aren’t as fast as the (increasingly online) marketplace itself, like finding a suitable storefront for a restaurant, building out a commercial kitchen, and all of the waiting for permits and licenses, which together impose a number of risks on a new business.
- dwater 6y ago
  I live in a small city, pop. 250k metro area 1M, and there is a local business news site that reports on openings, closings, and other local business news. It's more or less standard that when they announce a new restaurant, bar, or brewery opening the owner will state an expected opening date a month or two in the future, and then 3-6 months later a follow up story about how they are still 1-2 months from opening. It's almost always due to unexpected snags in the permitting and licensing process. There are many different local government agencies that have to sign off: zoning, permits & inspections/building, business license, health department, ABC, the fire marshal. And if any of those agencies requires you to make changes to the building or systems you have to go through permits & inspections again. It's a system that is not optimized for speed or efficiency.
- HPsquared 6y ago
  And people wonder why there are so many megacorp chain restaurants everywhere.
akavi 6y ago
Is it just me, or does Reef sound like nearly pure regulatory arbitrage of the screwed up zoning laws in American cities? Ie, zoning oversupplies parking spaces relative to commercial real estate, and so if you can put your business in a "van" and "park" it, you get to use land for cheap. The article alludes to this ("Parking lots have long been attractive sites for urban designers, many of whom see them as wasteful, inefficient land banks."), but doesn't quite draw the connection.
- totetsu 6y ago
  It sounds like a twisted timeline version of the 1960s Japanese metabolism city planning movement. https://thetokyofiles.com/2011/12/15/not-like-a-cancer-grows-artistic-expression-as-alternative-success-narrative/ https://thetokyofiles.com/2011/12/15/not-like-a-cancer-grows...
- maxsilver 6y ago
  It sounds like this is a benefit of functional regulatory laws in American cities. If this wasn't required to be a public-transportation-providing parking lot most of the time, it would instead be some hyper-expensive privately-owned-and-operated building, just like the hundreds of other buildings in the city. Buildings that Reef can't afford or use, and that most restaurants could not sustainably afford to operate within. The fact that this land is used "inefficiently" is a feature, not a bug. It puts a soft-cap on the possible land value, which retains that land to be used temporarily in good ways. Without that cap, the land would just be permanently wasted in bad ways, because any good use would never be able to afford it.
totetsu 6y ago
recent jwz >That "Cloud Kitchens" enterprise is a dystopian horror show, too. It means that Kalanick and the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund own the first part of restaurant take-out -- the menu and online ordering; they own the third part -- delivery; and now they also own the second part -- actually making the food. The "restaurant", at that point, is just a brand logo. Their sweatshops make the same food for everybody and paste whatever name on it. The restaurant isn't even a franchise at that point. It's a sticker.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  You might have been close to making some kind of reasonable point in the first half of this comment but then you took it to crazy town and discredited the whole thing. These are rental spaces, just like almost every restaurant in the world operates out of. How is it a sweatshop or anything close to a franchise if someone starts their own restaurant under their own brand with their own menu and rents kitchen space to work/deliver out of?
  - totetsu 6y ago
    Sorry to be too brief. this is a quote from a blog post by jwz, former internet person and now pizza restaurant owner, on this topic. https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2020/07/10.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2020/07/10.html The whole post might make more or less sense.
- blackrock 6y ago
  Fascinating. What if the cloud kitchen becomes the kitchen for all restaurants? Say you want to eat steaks tonight. You go to your fancy restaurant, and order up your $50 filet mignon. The waiter put in the order on his terminal, and it gets relayed to a cloud kitchen 5 miles away. There, the order is received. A Food Technician pull out the raw meat, cook it, then package it for delivery inside a heating container to keep the food warm. Then, it is handed off to an Uber driver to deliver it to the restaurant. Delivery time is about 7 minutes. The restaurant receives the food, and the local food technician unpackages it, does a final Quality Control check to make sure it’s not raw, and is cooked to specifications, then he re-plates it on a nice plate, with some garnish for the final touch. Your filet mignon is now served, to your exacting specifications: medium rare. Along with an expensive bottle of vintage red wine. Same goes for any other fancy restaurant, serving say seafood linguini, or anything else. It’s cooked at a food factory, and delivered to your plate, hot to the touch. You wouldn’t even know the difference. And in the future, instead of using an Uber driver, the food will be delivered by aerial delivery drones. Over time, you’ll end up seeing drones criss crossing the skies above a city, just delivering hot and freshly prepared meals to fancy restaurants and eateries. No more need for the restaurant to hire a dedicated cook. Instead, they’ll use the services of a centralized cook, that is busy every single minute. Then, over time, even the cloud kitchen cooks will get automated out, and replaced with a robotic cook. And the cloud kitchen will hire a Quality Control technician to watch over the cooking robots. Then the entire process is automated. The food packaging technician is replaced with a food packaging robot. Then the food package is automatically attached to the delivery drone, and sent off. Then it lands at the restaurant on a specialized receiving platform, which accepts the food package, and puts it on a shelf for the waiter to pick up, and serve to the customer. Dystopian indeed. Perfect for the post-pandemic world.
ArmandGrillet 6y ago
Reef's website shows anything but where the food is actually cooked, a bunch of stock pictures and unknown-but-cutely-named brands related to comfy food. Restaurants have strict sanitary rules, what are the ones for parking-based-kitchens? From the article and the company's website, Reef looks like a business making the parking spot next to your flat a source of nuisances (the smell of frying out, the noise of a kitchen) while offering yet another way to make people pay a premium on warmed up frozen food.
supernova87a 6y ago
Small restaurants have trouble surviving in the US because of the sheer cost of trying an experiment, or sustaining even a small kitchen. There are just so many regulatory (local, really badly managed, even corrupt) hurdles, and investments required. It practically incentivizes restaurants to be big corporations (and sell liquor) in order to survive. If you look at places that have less regulation (or governments which have made this a more conscious priority) or the rent/land ownership structure is different, there are tons of little mom-pop restaurants that can survive situations like this. I'm all for regulation -- when necessary -- but even I can see that local licensing (as Obama administration acknowledged) is hindering affordability of industries where regulation has come to serve only local interests. Look to Southeast Asia, even some parts of Europe. Hole in the wall restaurants can make it, because rent is cheap, they don't have city inspectors coming to ding you on fire supression equipment that is 2 inches out of spec. (Also, they don't have waiters and hosts other than the owners) There are food centers set up to foster small restaurants all located together in a high demand area, where the infrastructure is shared and standardized. In Italy, Spain -- restaurants run for generations in corners of small apartment blocks and aren't in fear of getting evicted for a chain. If we want our cities to look like and cultivate a certain desireable feature, we need to put active work into fixing the things that disincentivize it in small daily doses. Otherwise it's crappy Panera Breads for everyone.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  > Look to Southeast Asia, even some parts of Europe. Hole in the wall restaurants can make it, because rent is cheap, they don't have city inspectors coming to ding you on fire supression equipment that is 2 inches out of spec. (Also, they don't have waiters and hosts other than the owners) There are food centers set up to foster small restaurants all located together in a high demand area, where the infrastructure is shared and standardized. In Italy, Spain -- restaurants run for generations in corners of small apartment blocks and aren't in fear of getting evicted for a chain. This is because food is cheap, salaries are cheap, and no one is reporting these guys for selling you rat that's labelled as chicken. Plus, on average, most small businesses fail in ~5 years, not just restaurants (though they tend to fail extra hard).

59 points by mitchbob 6y ago

This is about startup Reef Technology [1] that provides software and logistics for standing-up food preparation/pickup in locations such as parking lots that lack the required utilities: > The Power of Proximity™.... We are creating a network of neighborhood hubs to bring you the goods and services you want, faster than ever before. [1] https://reeftechnology.com/ https://reeftechnology.com/

the-dude 6y ago

> In the trade publication Parking Today, publisher John Van Horn speculated about the repercussions of ParkJockey’s ascent. I find it hilarious there is even such a publication. Over the years I have read about other, similar hilarious ones, but I forgot which. Emphasis mine.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> I find it hilarious there is even such a publication. Parking is a ten-billion dollar industry in the US alone. Doesn't surprise me that it can support a magazine. How many magazines do you see that are part of much smaller niches?
- walrus01 6y ago
  I want to see more photos, schematics and info on these car stacking parking systems and things designed for very high density/high cost of land areas.
ralfd 6y ago
This is the current July issue: https://magazine.parkingtoday.com/issues/ParkingToday2020-07JUL/ https://magazine.parkingtoday.com/issues/ParkingToday2020-07... Even them are touched by the BLM protests and the editorial ask unsurely if parking can be racist?
kryptiskt 6y ago
I remember an article about Roman valves posted here from Valve Magazine (https://www.valvemagazine.com https://www.valvemagazine.com), a publication that has nothing to with computer games.
- mauvehaus 6y ago
  If you're interested in that, you might also find the Museum of Plumbing up your alley: http://www.theplumbingmuseum.org/ http://www.theplumbingmuseum.org/ Where is it located? Watertown, MA. Where else? N.B. I haven't been, and they're closed at the moment (presumably for the same reason as everybody else). If you make it there and haven't had your fill of water-related museums, there's also the pumping station at Chestnut Hill: https://waterworksmuseum.org/about/ https://waterworksmuseum.org/about/ They have 3 large steam engines that pumped water in the Boston area for the better part of a century. I have been to this one, and it's amazing.
drfuchs 6y ago
A few I've run into at random: BusLine Magazine, with an ad in the back for "BarfClean! Just spray on to solidify, for easy removal!" (The ads in the front were less lurid: "Our new seats are 32% lighter!") And, more on-topic, Restaurateur Magazine, with an ad for "Sizzle! Paint-on Char Marks for any meat, for that fresh-from-the-grill look!" (Names of magazines and products approximate; but I'm sure about "BarfClean".)
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  I wonder where people get the raw material for testing a product like BarfClean during development. Actually, maybe I don't really want to know.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- mauvehaus 6y ago
  It's usually interesting, but sometimes not pretty to see what's going on behind the curtain. I once saw a bottle under a sink in a restaurant: Extra Strength Urine Remover. Are people that bad at peeing that there's a need for urine remover in extra as well as regular strength?!
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Have you seen men?
    - mauvehaus 6y ago
      Tellingly, my wife informed me that there wasn't a bottle in the women's restroom.
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    Pillars of Hercules (god rest its soul) in London had an infamous and constant layer of liquid on the floor of the men's toilets. Many times I had to suggest an alternate destination because I was wearing my Vibrams.
timthorn 6y ago
The UK panel show "Have I Got News For You" includes a guest publication in every episode: https://metro.co.uk/2015/04/17/11-of-the-most-memorable-publications-ever-to-feature-on-have-i-got-news-for-yous-missing-words-round-5149667/ https://metro.co.uk/2015/04/17/11-of-the-most-memorable-publ...
- the-dude 6y ago
  Thank you!
wastedhours 6y ago
I always used to collect any of those niche trade publications I could - you can learn a lot about an industry from the trade pubs (it's like a microcosm of supply chains and inside information). Personal favourites were ones specifically for hotel designers, packaged food companies, airline service suppliers, and boat builders. If you ever want a reminder about the scope of opportunity there is in the world, look for the niche industry magazines. They're a delight.
michaelt 6y ago
Stage 1: Keep editorial costs right down by mostly printing reworded press releases and invited comment from industry bigwigs. Stage 2: Plenty of adverts. It's not like a company making car park barriers is advertising in the New York Times. Stage 3: Profit At least, that's my theory as to how there are so many different rail industry magazines...
Dirlewanger 6y ago
It's part of America's proud hyper-pluralistic nature. A bunch of different interests (usually private) all competing for mindshare and influence in the world.

joe5150 6y ago

had an experience this spring with picking up Thai food from a Chinese restaurant which is also home to: - Chinese Yum! Yum! - Szechwings - Kuri Sashimi Bowls - Send Noods Pho - Veggie Stir Fry House - Sushi Sendai - Panang Panang! Thai Curry - Save the Fish Vegetarian Sushi - Fire Ass Thai and so on. at least 25 restaurants by my count. I don't know if I believe that this is a problem (beyond the usual kinds of problems in restaurants) and I'm mostly curious about how the logistics are managed. is there a wall of iPads so each "restaurant" front gets all its own orders on one? does whatever company that facilitates this kind of thing provide a solution where manifold orders can come in on a more traditional kitchen display system with some flag added for which "restaurant" it belongs to? making the various menus work doesn't seem like as big of a challenge: the majority of the client restaurants are offering whole subsets of the host restaurant's menu or food easily reconstructed from those items.

pjc50 6y ago
White label food. It does rather defeat Yelp or other attempts at reviews if "restaurants" can be spun up and down like AWS VMs. I suppose the limit case would be personalised restaurants, where everyone thinks they're ordering from a slightly different customised-for-them place but which all come from the same kitchen. I guess the parasocial relationships are the next thing to automate?
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  > White label food. Already had those -- the frozen-grill trend of the 90s, aka the TGIFridays, Bennigan's, Applebees, etc. With COVID they just ditched sit-down part and went straight to delivery.
hahamrfunnyguy 6y ago
It's funny you say that because making the various menu items seems like the biggest challenge in my view. In my experience, a restaurant with a large menu is a sure sign of mediocre food. It's like when you order Thai cuisine at a Chinese restaurant - you end up getting sweet and spicy Chinese food. When you have so many menu items, how do you ensure consistency and train cooks how to prepare the recipes?

ausbah 6y ago

> It now manages 1.3 million parking spaces in forty-five hundred locations. >But, for now, customers may find themselves paying a premium for meals similar to those found at a fast-food restaurant, or in a supermarket freezer. >Reef’s kitchens are registered as mobile food facilities, which tend to have fewer permitting requirements. >The branding and food are real, but the restaurants do not exist elsewhere in the physical world. I can't say I'm exactly thrilled about another "disrupting" another couple of industries. The take up parking and seemingly tiptoe around regulations only to provide mediocre cookie cutter dishes via fake restaurants? I'll have to pass.

cactus2093 6y ago
Wow I could not disagree more. Unlike parking spaces, this is at least providing some positive value to a city. And what makes these fake restaurants? These are cheap spaces where entrepreneurial chefs who could never afford to start a full restaurant can open a delivery restaurant and start selling food quickly. They can still develop a name and a brand for themselves via delivery just like any restaurant could. Why does it have to be mediocre food? Surely some amazing food will come out of spaces like this.
- biggidywiggidy 6y ago
  Amazing food will come out of your kitchen when you learn to cook. Youtube will teach you how.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spivak 6y ago
    But this misses the point of getting food for delivery. If cooking is one of your hobbies you will very quickly be able make food better than any mid-tier restaurant in your city (i.e. the kind of place you would probably order take-out from). It's honestly not that big of an accomplishment because you have so many advantages over line cooks when you're just cooking for yourself / your family. Once you're at that point getting take-out isn't about getting better food for a special occasion, it's paying for something better than frozen that you don't have to cook. Ordering take-out is a function of how tired I am, not the quality of food I want.

jt2190 6y ago

> [Ari] Ojalvo, [C.E.O of Reef] cites his own experience in the restaurant industry... to note that opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant is high-risk and expensive, whereas ghost kitchens are lower-risk, offering a more affordable way for entrepreneurs to enter the business. In most cities, opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant requires a gauntlet of permits and inspections; restaurateurs waiting on permits might find themselves paying months of rent for space they aren’t yet allowed to use. Reef’s kitchens are registered as mobile food facilities, which tend to have fewer permitting requirements. Like the trailers themselves, the business details are configurable: Reef offers flexible staffing arrangements and short-term leases. What’s interesting is that this is, in part, a response to things that aren’t as fast as the (increasingly online) marketplace itself, like finding a suitable storefront for a restaurant, building out a commercial kitchen, and all of the waiting for permits and licenses, which together impose a number of risks on a new business.

dwater 6y ago
I live in a small city, pop. 250k metro area 1M, and there is a local business news site that reports on openings, closings, and other local business news. It's more or less standard that when they announce a new restaurant, bar, or brewery opening the owner will state an expected opening date a month or two in the future, and then 3-6 months later a follow up story about how they are still 1-2 months from opening. It's almost always due to unexpected snags in the permitting and licensing process. There are many different local government agencies that have to sign off: zoning, permits & inspections/building, business license, health department, ABC, the fire marshal. And if any of those agencies requires you to make changes to the building or systems you have to go through permits & inspections again. It's a system that is not optimized for speed or efficiency.
HPsquared 6y ago
And people wonder why there are so many megacorp chain restaurants everywhere.

akavi 6y ago

Is it just me, or does Reef sound like nearly pure regulatory arbitrage of the screwed up zoning laws in American cities? Ie, zoning oversupplies parking spaces relative to commercial real estate, and so if you can put your business in a "van" and "park" it, you get to use land for cheap. The article alludes to this ("Parking lots have long been attractive sites for urban designers, many of whom see them as wasteful, inefficient land banks."), but doesn't quite draw the connection.

totetsu 6y ago
It sounds like a twisted timeline version of the 1960s Japanese metabolism city planning movement. https://thetokyofiles.com/2011/12/15/not-like-a-cancer-grows-artistic-expression-as-alternative-success-narrative/ https://thetokyofiles.com/2011/12/15/not-like-a-cancer-grows...
maxsilver 6y ago
It sounds like this is a benefit of functional regulatory laws in American cities. If this wasn't required to be a public-transportation-providing parking lot most of the time, it would instead be some hyper-expensive privately-owned-and-operated building, just like the hundreds of other buildings in the city. Buildings that Reef can't afford or use, and that most restaurants could not sustainably afford to operate within. The fact that this land is used "inefficiently" is a feature, not a bug. It puts a soft-cap on the possible land value, which retains that land to be used temporarily in good ways. Without that cap, the land would just be permanently wasted in bad ways, because any good use would never be able to afford it.

totetsu 6y ago

recent jwz >That "Cloud Kitchens" enterprise is a dystopian horror show, too. It means that Kalanick and the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund own the first part of restaurant take-out -- the menu and online ordering; they own the third part -- delivery; and now they also own the second part -- actually making the food. The "restaurant", at that point, is just a brand logo. Their sweatshops make the same food for everybody and paste whatever name on it. The restaurant isn't even a franchise at that point. It's a sticker.

cactus2093 6y ago
You might have been close to making some kind of reasonable point in the first half of this comment but then you took it to crazy town and discredited the whole thing. These are rental spaces, just like almost every restaurant in the world operates out of. How is it a sweatshop or anything close to a franchise if someone starts their own restaurant under their own brand with their own menu and rents kitchen space to work/deliver out of?
- totetsu 6y ago
  Sorry to be too brief. this is a quote from a blog post by jwz, former internet person and now pizza restaurant owner, on this topic. https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2020/07/10.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2020/07/10.html The whole post might make more or less sense.
blackrock 6y ago
Fascinating. What if the cloud kitchen becomes the kitchen for all restaurants? Say you want to eat steaks tonight. You go to your fancy restaurant, and order up your $50 filet mignon. The waiter put in the order on his terminal, and it gets relayed to a cloud kitchen 5 miles away. There, the order is received. A Food Technician pull out the raw meat, cook it, then package it for delivery inside a heating container to keep the food warm. Then, it is handed off to an Uber driver to deliver it to the restaurant. Delivery time is about 7 minutes. The restaurant receives the food, and the local food technician unpackages it, does a final Quality Control check to make sure it’s not raw, and is cooked to specifications, then he re-plates it on a nice plate, with some garnish for the final touch. Your filet mignon is now served, to your exacting specifications: medium rare. Along with an expensive bottle of vintage red wine. Same goes for any other fancy restaurant, serving say seafood linguini, or anything else. It’s cooked at a food factory, and delivered to your plate, hot to the touch. You wouldn’t even know the difference. And in the future, instead of using an Uber driver, the food will be delivered by aerial delivery drones. Over time, you’ll end up seeing drones criss crossing the skies above a city, just delivering hot and freshly prepared meals to fancy restaurants and eateries. No more need for the restaurant to hire a dedicated cook. Instead, they’ll use the services of a centralized cook, that is busy every single minute. Then, over time, even the cloud kitchen cooks will get automated out, and replaced with a robotic cook. And the cloud kitchen will hire a Quality Control technician to watch over the cooking robots. Then the entire process is automated. The food packaging technician is replaced with a food packaging robot. Then the food package is automatically attached to the delivery drone, and sent off. Then it lands at the restaurant on a specialized receiving platform, which accepts the food package, and puts it on a shelf for the waiter to pick up, and serve to the customer. Dystopian indeed. Perfect for the post-pandemic world.

ArmandGrillet 6y ago

Reef's website shows anything but where the food is actually cooked, a bunch of stock pictures and unknown-but-cutely-named brands related to comfy food. Restaurants have strict sanitary rules, what are the ones for parking-based-kitchens? From the article and the company's website, Reef looks like a business making the parking spot next to your flat a source of nuisances (the smell of frying out, the noise of a kitchen) while offering yet another way to make people pay a premium on warmed up frozen food.

supernova87a 6y ago

Small restaurants have trouble surviving in the US because of the sheer cost of trying an experiment, or sustaining even a small kitchen. There are just so many regulatory (local, really badly managed, even corrupt) hurdles, and investments required. It practically incentivizes restaurants to be big corporations (and sell liquor) in order to survive. If you look at places that have less regulation (or governments which have made this a more conscious priority) or the rent/land ownership structure is different, there are tons of little mom-pop restaurants that can survive situations like this. I'm all for regulation -- when necessary -- but even I can see that local licensing (as Obama administration acknowledged) is hindering affordability of industries where regulation has come to serve only local interests. Look to Southeast Asia, even some parts of Europe. Hole in the wall restaurants can make it, because rent is cheap, they don't have city inspectors coming to ding you on fire supression equipment that is 2 inches out of spec. (Also, they don't have waiters and hosts other than the owners) There are food centers set up to foster small restaurants all located together in a high demand area, where the infrastructure is shared and standardized. In Italy, Spain -- restaurants run for generations in corners of small apartment blocks and aren't in fear of getting evicted for a chain. If we want our cities to look like and cultivate a certain desireable feature, we need to put active work into fixing the things that disincentivize it in small daily doses. Otherwise it's crappy Panera Breads for everyone.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
> Look to Southeast Asia, even some parts of Europe. Hole in the wall restaurants can make it, because rent is cheap, they don't have city inspectors coming to ding you on fire supression equipment that is 2 inches out of spec. (Also, they don't have waiters and hosts other than the owners) There are food centers set up to foster small restaurants all located together in a high demand area, where the infrastructure is shared and standardized. In Italy, Spain -- restaurants run for generations in corners of small apartment blocks and aren't in fear of getting evicted for a chain. This is because food is cheap, salaries are cheap, and no one is reporting these guys for selling you rat that's labelled as chicken. Plus, on average, most small businesses fail in ~5 years, not just restaurants (though they tend to fail extra hard).