8 ms·

How a shadow army of ghost kitchens took over America’s restaurants

70 points by prostoalex 6y ago

bognition 6y ago
This all feels eerily similar to the all the fake products on amazon that are just rebranded versions of the same thing. In my experience many of these restaurants are all selling the same food. They're buying recipes and ingredients from a big nation supplier like Sysco so you end up getting the food just prepared in a different kitchen. We've ordered Thai on UberEats and GrubHub from nearly a dozen places and despite different names the food is identical and is flat in flavor. I've taken to finding real restaurants and picking the food up myself. It's more inconvenient but i'm getting better food for cheaper while building a relationship with a real business.
- m463 6y ago
  It's amazing how trustworthy/reliable brands have been buried by a torrent of nonsense generic brands on amazon.
  - tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    Brands in and of themselves are worthless when they can be bought and sold like commodities, or simply slapped on existing or even totally different businesses.
    - aabhay 6y ago
      That's the definition of a bad brand. A truly good brand cannot be bought and sold in that way, takes decades to earn the trust of its rabid fan base, and with every slight imperfection creates legions of haters that declare the brand 'over'. E.g. Apple. But at the end of the day, Apple earns its margins with its brand, and entirely its brand.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > They're buying recipes and ingredients from a big nation supplier like Sysco... One sees so much nostalgia among Americans driving across the heartland for "the traditional diner instead of fast food chains where the food is the same everywhere", when in fact so many of those traditional diners are sourcing all their ingredients from Sysco. You can have the exact same eggs or biscuits, for example, in supposedly mom and pop places in state after state. I think it was already in the mid 20th century that the US lost the diversity of cooking found in some other regions of the world, and so this latest development with ghost kitchens is only continuing a long trend.
  - bsder 6y ago
    > so many of those traditional diners are sourcing all their ingredients from Sysco The question is what level do you source from Sysco? Source flour, shortening, sugar, etc. and make your own pie or cake. It will still be unique. Source pie mix or cake mix from Sysco and, yes, you've lost your uniqueness. The real question: do the eaters care? The continuing existence of places like Applebee's seems answer the question with "Apparently not."
    - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
      Well, the real answer of course is that some of the eaters don't care, at least some of the time. I love good food and I'm a fairly good cook, but that doesn't stop me from picking up dinner at McDonald's when I just don't feel like cooking. I don't think that the existence of Applebee's proves anything other than sometimes people want to "eat a meal that someone else microwaved."
    - benrbray 6y ago
      > do the eaters care? I think those who are aware of the problem definitely do care. Many people just don't think about it, because they're not old enough to remember a time where the local diner baked its own pies, simmered its own soups, etc.. For me, all my perceptions of food changed when I started traveling outside the United States. Basic staples like bread and soup taste so good in places like Germany and Japan by default, but food of the same quality in the United States would cost $20-30 per plate. This is a big reason I started cooking at home. The quality simply isn't there in the American restaurants that are affordable to most people, especially outside of big cities.
- bavila 6y ago
  That's interesting. I live in Hawaii, and we have a lot of different Thai restaurants. They are almost all family-owned businesses staffed by people who either first- or second-generation Thai immigrants. Those ones are always the best, and they all serve the same types of dishes but they also all have their unique spin on things. I haven't been to a lot of Thai restaurants on the mainland, but the few I've been to on the East Coast have all been similarly terrible. I've always wondered just where these places are getting their awful recipes from.
  - linksnapzz 6y ago
    My $0.02 for a good Thai restaurant on the East Coast, crazy as it may seem, is to check and see if they have a picture of the late Thai monarch Rama IX displayed prominently near the coat-check/hostess station/bar. I don't know what it is, but the Thai places who have his picture up are invariably better quality than the ones that don't. But yeah, Thai food on the West Coast was reliably better.
- SMAAART 6y ago
  Well, it's also happening at your local restaurant(s). Try to attend and "Fancy Food Show" and visit the booths of companies selling to restaurants. You'd be amazed at how streamlined production is from, prepared ingredients, to fully pre-prepared dishes ready-to-be defrosted/heated and served. I would not be surprised if in the near future 80% of restaurant meals will be ready-to-serve meals. The future is not what it used to be.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  What's interesting is Thai food is actually part of a massive soft-power promotional campaign by the Thai government. https://www.vice.com/en/article/paxadz/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america https://www.vice.com/en/article/paxadz/the-surprising-reason...
briga 6y ago
Occasionally I'll walk in and order food from these places--the people working there always seem surprised that I'm not a DoorDash driver. One place I went had seemingly everything on the menu: Indian curries, fried food and burgers, pasta, bibimbap, donairs, salads, Chinese food. Which to me raises the question: if this is a sustainable and profitable menu for a restaurant to have, why don't we see bigger menus in established sit-down restaurants?
- bognition 6y ago
  Have you ever been to the cheesecake factory?
  - 177tcca 6y ago
    People consider that food?
  - rfdave 6y ago
    Or a Greek Diner in New Jersey?
  - mjevans 6y ago
    The CF seems like the in restaurant version of the 'ghost kitchen' by associating a combination of related kitchens under the kitchen sink, one stop shop to please everyone, option. There are some core variations that only require an extra spice mix or a variation of pasta that's easy to keep stocked and share common cooking methods and ingredients with other items that I can get regularly. The salads are where I've personally noticed the most turnover. At least, pre-pandemic when I was still willing to get a salad from them because they were close to the office.
- forkLding 6y ago
  My mum was a restauranteur and I used to crunch the numbers for her on excel when I was a kid. Sit-down restaurants have more operating expenses because they have to pay more for labor for like waiters. People usually only buy certain products (a lot of profits came from some items like dumplings and also wine) which actually bring major profits to a restaurant. It is a lot harder to maintain selling many dishes at the same time because you need to hire more chef/cooks skilled in those dishes and also buy more ingredients and manage those ingredients' lifespan so its much easier to be profitable with a small menu of very profitable dishes or at least easier to cost manage.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Found a really excellent burger place on DoorDash, such that we wanted to find out where it was. Turned out it was the same address as a local steakhouse. I was kind of wondering if it was the same company pulling double duty or if they were renting use of their kitchen to another company.
- behringer 6y ago
  Chuck e cheese does the same thing. If you order from Pasqually's, you're getting the rat shack.
  - SrslyJosh 6y ago
    Upvoting to save a life.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- SkyPuncher 6y ago
  My inclination is they want to avoid damaging their main brand with a "cheap" product.
  - rhino369 6y ago
    Or even price discrimination. Sell the same burger but charge more for the steakhouse brand.
millstone 6y ago
Any good tips for unmasking these restaurants, so you know what you're really getting? You can find their address and see what restaurant is listed there, but sometimes that doesn't work for large shopping centers with many restaurants.
- novok 6y ago
  Well shopping center food tends not to be that good either. Otherwise you'll notice a cluster of restaurants at the exact same address.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- soared 6y ago
  Yeah look up the address on google maps and if its still a plausible location, look at the reviews. Guaranteed that a reviewer mentions its delivery-only or not. Also you should try out finding a restaurant on google maps, then go to your delivery app.
dehrmann 6y ago
Why pay for prime retail space that's not necessarily easily accessible by car when all your orders are delivery?
aabhay 6y ago
I worked in a food production and delivery startup (meal prep), and while I was constantly surrounded by the 'buzz' of ghost kitchens, a part of me was sure -- absolutely sure -- that this would be a fad. Why? Simple market dynamics. After 5000 years, the economics of running a traditional restaurant are essentially identical. That's because the lion's share of the value of a restaurant is the repeat and referral business, NOT in discoverability. That's why a fancy restro-bar on Glitzy Avenue shuts down after 3 months. For a good restaurant, the CAC should go to zero over time. The food should sell itself. By adding artificial market dynamics to this equation (mandatory advertising, artificially low unit costs, artificial discovery), you are removing that crucial, critical element, and the food will inevitably suffer. Burgers-R-Us can pay $1 per customer to appear at the top of your feed, serve you a shitty hamburger, then rename to Best Burger, and rinse and repeat. Eventually consumers will wake up (many already have), and the traditional restaurants will escape with meaningful margins. Of course only a tiny fraction of restaurants that are started turn into surviving businesses, as has been the case since time immemorial.
- mjevans 6y ago
  I'll be back, post-pandemic, for my favorites. Delivery doesn't fulfill my desires. As a consumer, everything I enjoy getting at a restaurant has three critical properties. * Hot (or cold; extreme) temperature * Fresh (IMO: short best by time) * Annoying to make at home The exceptions to the first two on this list were already delivery pre-'gig jobs'; pizza and most (American) Chinese food; those kept reasonably well in insulated or even warmed bags. The last factor might involve the hassle of deep frying, or the need for food specific industrial equipment (like a pizza oven), or even just a ton of ingredients to keep fresh. Something a kitchen selling 50+ of that thing a week can easily accommodate but I can't. The secret to the best sourdough bread and butter at the fish shop, pre-pandemic? That butter was farm fresh daily because they just used THAT much; and the bread fresh from the oven the same way.
  - flukus 6y ago
    > The exceptions to the first two on this list were already delivery pre-'gig jobs' IME just about everything that wasn't awful when delivered was already being delivered decades before gig jobs existed. Indian and pizza work well with delivery but things like burgers or anything with a hot component and a salad component just become a soggy luke warm mess. A gourmet salad place is about the only exception I've come across. The other big advantages of restaurants is that they get to "hide" the calories, if you make the same thing at home you're aware of everything that goes into it and half the time the restaurant version is only better because the amount of fat/sugar they put in things.
therockspush 6y ago
Its funny to hear doordash ads about supporting local businesses, when they're completely invested in turning them inside out. A quick look at the doordash careers page shows they're targeting a future of hikikomori that order from restaurants they've never been to and buy from convenience stores that don't actually allow customers in. https://www.doordash.com/careers/ https://www.doordash.com/careers/

70 points by prostoalex 6y ago

This all feels eerily similar to the all the fake products on amazon that are just rebranded versions of the same thing. In my experience many of these restaurants are all selling the same food. They're buying recipes and ingredients from a big nation supplier like Sysco so you end up getting the food just prepared in a different kitchen. We've ordered Thai on UberEats and GrubHub from nearly a dozen places and despite different names the food is identical and is flat in flavor. I've taken to finding real restaurants and picking the food up myself. It's more inconvenient but i'm getting better food for cheaper while building a relationship with a real business.

m463 6y ago
It's amazing how trustworthy/reliable brands have been buried by a torrent of nonsense generic brands on amazon.
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  Brands in and of themselves are worthless when they can be bought and sold like commodities, or simply slapped on existing or even totally different businesses.
  - aabhay 6y ago
    That's the definition of a bad brand. A truly good brand cannot be bought and sold in that way, takes decades to earn the trust of its rabid fan base, and with every slight imperfection creates legions of haters that declare the brand 'over'. E.g. Apple. But at the end of the day, Apple earns its margins with its brand, and entirely its brand.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> They're buying recipes and ingredients from a big nation supplier like Sysco... One sees so much nostalgia among Americans driving across the heartland for "the traditional diner instead of fast food chains where the food is the same everywhere", when in fact so many of those traditional diners are sourcing all their ingredients from Sysco. You can have the exact same eggs or biscuits, for example, in supposedly mom and pop places in state after state. I think it was already in the mid 20th century that the US lost the diversity of cooking found in some other regions of the world, and so this latest development with ghost kitchens is only continuing a long trend.
- bsder 6y ago
  > so many of those traditional diners are sourcing all their ingredients from Sysco The question is what level do you source from Sysco? Source flour, shortening, sugar, etc. and make your own pie or cake. It will still be unique. Source pie mix or cake mix from Sysco and, yes, you've lost your uniqueness. The real question: do the eaters care? The continuing existence of places like Applebee's seems answer the question with "Apparently not."
  - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    Well, the real answer of course is that some of the eaters don't care, at least some of the time. I love good food and I'm a fairly good cook, but that doesn't stop me from picking up dinner at McDonald's when I just don't feel like cooking. I don't think that the existence of Applebee's proves anything other than sometimes people want to "eat a meal that someone else microwaved."
  - benrbray 6y ago
    > do the eaters care? I think those who are aware of the problem definitely do care. Many people just don't think about it, because they're not old enough to remember a time where the local diner baked its own pies, simmered its own soups, etc.. For me, all my perceptions of food changed when I started traveling outside the United States. Basic staples like bread and soup taste so good in places like Germany and Japan by default, but food of the same quality in the United States would cost $20-30 per plate. This is a big reason I started cooking at home. The quality simply isn't there in the American restaurants that are affordable to most people, especially outside of big cities.
bavila 6y ago
That's interesting. I live in Hawaii, and we have a lot of different Thai restaurants. They are almost all family-owned businesses staffed by people who either first- or second-generation Thai immigrants. Those ones are always the best, and they all serve the same types of dishes but they also all have their unique spin on things. I haven't been to a lot of Thai restaurants on the mainland, but the few I've been to on the East Coast have all been similarly terrible. I've always wondered just where these places are getting their awful recipes from.
- linksnapzz 6y ago
  My $0.02 for a good Thai restaurant on the East Coast, crazy as it may seem, is to check and see if they have a picture of the late Thai monarch Rama IX displayed prominently near the coat-check/hostess station/bar. I don't know what it is, but the Thai places who have his picture up are invariably better quality than the ones that don't. But yeah, Thai food on the West Coast was reliably better.
SMAAART 6y ago
Well, it's also happening at your local restaurant(s). Try to attend and "Fancy Food Show" and visit the booths of companies selling to restaurants. You'd be amazed at how streamlined production is from, prepared ingredients, to fully pre-prepared dishes ready-to-be defrosted/heated and served. I would not be surprised if in the near future 80% of restaurant meals will be ready-to-serve meals. The future is not what it used to be.
bobthepanda 6y ago
What's interesting is Thai food is actually part of a massive soft-power promotional campaign by the Thai government. https://www.vice.com/en/article/paxadz/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america https://www.vice.com/en/article/paxadz/the-surprising-reason...

briga 6y ago

Occasionally I'll walk in and order food from these places--the people working there always seem surprised that I'm not a DoorDash driver. One place I went had seemingly everything on the menu: Indian curries, fried food and burgers, pasta, bibimbap, donairs, salads, Chinese food. Which to me raises the question: if this is a sustainable and profitable menu for a restaurant to have, why don't we see bigger menus in established sit-down restaurants?

bognition 6y ago
Have you ever been to the cheesecake factory?
- 177tcca 6y ago
  People consider that food?
- rfdave 6y ago
  Or a Greek Diner in New Jersey?
- mjevans 6y ago
  The CF seems like the in restaurant version of the 'ghost kitchen' by associating a combination of related kitchens under the kitchen sink, one stop shop to please everyone, option. There are some core variations that only require an extra spice mix or a variation of pasta that's easy to keep stocked and share common cooking methods and ingredients with other items that I can get regularly. The salads are where I've personally noticed the most turnover. At least, pre-pandemic when I was still willing to get a salad from them because they were close to the office.
forkLding 6y ago
My mum was a restauranteur and I used to crunch the numbers for her on excel when I was a kid. Sit-down restaurants have more operating expenses because they have to pay more for labor for like waiters. People usually only buy certain products (a lot of profits came from some items like dumplings and also wine) which actually bring major profits to a restaurant. It is a lot harder to maintain selling many dishes at the same time because you need to hire more chef/cooks skilled in those dishes and also buy more ingredients and manage those ingredients' lifespan so its much easier to be profitable with a small menu of very profitable dishes or at least easier to cost manage.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

Found a really excellent burger place on DoorDash, such that we wanted to find out where it was. Turned out it was the same address as a local steakhouse. I was kind of wondering if it was the same company pulling double duty or if they were renting use of their kitchen to another company.

behringer 6y ago
Chuck e cheese does the same thing. If you order from Pasqually's, you're getting the rat shack.
- SrslyJosh 6y ago
  Upvoting to save a life.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
SkyPuncher 6y ago
My inclination is they want to avoid damaging their main brand with a "cheap" product.
- rhino369 6y ago
  Or even price discrimination. Sell the same burger but charge more for the steakhouse brand.

millstone 6y ago

Any good tips for unmasking these restaurants, so you know what you're really getting? You can find their address and see what restaurant is listed there, but sometimes that doesn't work for large shopping centers with many restaurants.

novok 6y ago
Well shopping center food tends not to be that good either. Otherwise you'll notice a cluster of restaurants at the exact same address.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
soared 6y ago
Yeah look up the address on google maps and if its still a plausible location, look at the reviews. Guaranteed that a reviewer mentions its delivery-only or not. Also you should try out finding a restaurant on google maps, then go to your delivery app.

dehrmann 6y ago

Why pay for prime retail space that's not necessarily easily accessible by car when all your orders are delivery?

aabhay 6y ago

I worked in a food production and delivery startup (meal prep), and while I was constantly surrounded by the 'buzz' of ghost kitchens, a part of me was sure -- absolutely sure -- that this would be a fad. Why? Simple market dynamics. After 5000 years, the economics of running a traditional restaurant are essentially identical. That's because the lion's share of the value of a restaurant is the repeat and referral business, NOT in discoverability. That's why a fancy restro-bar on Glitzy Avenue shuts down after 3 months. For a good restaurant, the CAC should go to zero over time. The food should sell itself. By adding artificial market dynamics to this equation (mandatory advertising, artificially low unit costs, artificial discovery), you are removing that crucial, critical element, and the food will inevitably suffer. Burgers-R-Us can pay $1 per customer to appear at the top of your feed, serve you a shitty hamburger, then rename to Best Burger, and rinse and repeat. Eventually consumers will wake up (many already have), and the traditional restaurants will escape with meaningful margins. Of course only a tiny fraction of restaurants that are started turn into surviving businesses, as has been the case since time immemorial.

mjevans 6y ago
I'll be back, post-pandemic, for my favorites. Delivery doesn't fulfill my desires. As a consumer, everything I enjoy getting at a restaurant has three critical properties. * Hot (or cold; extreme) temperature * Fresh (IMO: short best by time) * Annoying to make at home The exceptions to the first two on this list were already delivery pre-'gig jobs'; pizza and most (American) Chinese food; those kept reasonably well in insulated or even warmed bags. The last factor might involve the hassle of deep frying, or the need for food specific industrial equipment (like a pizza oven), or even just a ton of ingredients to keep fresh. Something a kitchen selling 50+ of that thing a week can easily accommodate but I can't. The secret to the best sourdough bread and butter at the fish shop, pre-pandemic? That butter was farm fresh daily because they just used THAT much; and the bread fresh from the oven the same way.
- flukus 6y ago
  > The exceptions to the first two on this list were already delivery pre-'gig jobs' IME just about everything that wasn't awful when delivered was already being delivered decades before gig jobs existed. Indian and pizza work well with delivery but things like burgers or anything with a hot component and a salad component just become a soggy luke warm mess. A gourmet salad place is about the only exception I've come across. The other big advantages of restaurants is that they get to "hide" the calories, if you make the same thing at home you're aware of everything that goes into it and half the time the restaurant version is only better because the amount of fat/sugar they put in things.

therockspush 6y ago

Its funny to hear doordash ads about supporting local businesses, when they're completely invested in turning them inside out. A quick look at the doordash careers page shows they're targeting a future of hikikomori that order from restaurants they've never been to and buy from convenience stores that don't actually allow customers in. https://www.doordash.com/careers/ https://www.doordash.com/careers/