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> Trying to run ghost kitchens Is a ghost kitchen that different from the kitchen in a regular restaurant? Either one doesn't strike me as the best working env

> Trying to run ghost kitchens Is a ghost kitchen that different from the kitchen in a regular restaurant? Either one doesn't strike me as the best working environment, not necessarily anyway.

Tsiklon 6y ago
A ghost kitchen is a kitchen associated with a restaurant that doesn’t serve walk-in customers or have the capacity to allow customers to sit-in. Often times these kitchens are anonymous looking from the outside, often located outside of the town centre In the UK they should be beholden to the same hygiene standards as any other food preparation business Some of these kitchens have their own branding and are not associated with a restaurant, but if you know your local area and see some restaurants which you don’t recognise on deliveroo or the other food delivery services, it’s possible that they are a ghost kitchen.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
The Guardian ran a few alarmist articles on them going back a while which might have sparked some of the outrage, including this opinion piece [1]. It turns out these "dark satanic mills" are often: hot, without windows and cold in winter. I don't advocate for bad working conditions, but it must be hard for anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen to keep a straight face when reading that. Even many Michelin starred kitchens are horrible environments. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-kitchens-satanic-mills-deliveroo https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-k... Edit: This isn't meant to be whataboutism, just pointing out that a "ghost kitchen" is only really different from a normal kitchen in its business structure. By and large, catering is not, and has never been, a glamorous industry. If you want to stop kitchens being difficult places to work, that's a worthwhile cause, but much, much bigger than Deliveroo.
- corobo 6y ago
  It would be better to report those too rather than dismiss something because something else is worse.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  So what if the rest of the industry is terrible, how does that make ghost kitchens acceptable?
  - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
    It doesn't make ghost kitchens acceptable. However it does mean that it's misleading to criticise ghost kitchens specifically, while implying they're worse than other kinds of restaurants.
  - Griffinsauce 6y ago
    It's not the fact that it's a ghost kitchen that's bad right? It's the poor treatment of workers. Focusing on a poor correlation is not solving the core problem.
feu 6y ago
The ghost kitchens are really consistent, the quality of food is much better than the majority of restaurants on Deliveroo.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
I think one issue is, they separate branding from production. Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards. It's something you can learn, and then choose the restaurants that suit your standards and taste the most. In a world of on-line orders and delivery, a ghost kitchen operator - or a "clever" entrepreneur subcontracting one or more of such kitchens - can set up an arbitrary amount of "restaurants", each with completely different marketing copy, but all ultimately delivering the exact same food. Or totally random food, if there are multiple ghost kitchens placed behind a (food ordering equivalent of) load balancer. This makes it very hard for an established restaurant to compete on-line - from outside, the five real restaurants in your neighbourhood look no different than 20 "virtual" restaurants. There's no way to tell. In this reality, as a customer, I have to resign to expect completely random results when I try to order food. These are also perfect conditions for a race to the bottom.
- fnord123 6y ago
  It's hard for established restaurants to compete on-line because they are kitted out for a dining room, paying a lease on the square meters for said dining room, and a kitchen setup to only handle a single set of menus. > Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards. Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Further, traditional restaurants are also running multiple virtual restaurants (e.g. one menu for katsu curry, and another for sushi).
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Perhaps not. And yes, I know there's a supply chain. But every restaurant I've been to - or ordered from - where I live[0], each one has its own distinct and consistent style. For instance, being a pizza aficionado, I could tell you just by looking and tasting, which restaurant you ordered a pizza from in the town I now live, and which major pizza parlor[1] you ordered from in Kraków (the city I spent most of my life in). This is what I'm concerned about. While not perfect, the restaurant's name was something you could use to "hash" a particular style of a particular dish by. They may have all supplied themselves at few well-known wholesalers[2], but they each processed the ingredients differently. Ghost kitchens + "virtual restaurants" kill that mechanism. To be clear: I don't mind the concept of ghost kitchens per se. Done well (i.e. regulated well), they'll be able to deliver consistent quality at good price. My problem is with the other half of the equation - the virtual restaurants. Something like this has already happened with consumer goods - so many of them are white-label goods these days, each sold by many fly-by-night brands. Consumer's ability to use branding as a proxy for quality (or quality of support) has been destroyed, DDoSed by the proliferation of such transient brands. I consider this a loss to customers and to the market at large (it increases information asymmetry). I worry the same is about to happen with food delivery. -- [0] - I love my country for being just enough developed to get all the fun stuff conceived in the US, but just enough not developed that they come with a delay of a few years - giving us time to see the expected social impact things will have :). [1] - At least until recently. Now there's too many small operators offering delivery services to track - but I can still distinguish between the ~6-8 places I used to order from. When these small operators started showing up, many of them were delivery-only, so I suspect they may have graduated to ghost kitchen frontends by now. [2] - Or discount supermarkets :). My wife and I have a bunch of stories about it. Notably, I remember once being in the queue behind a couple who were buying the entire stock of chicken breast and invoicing it to a company - presumably the Asian restaurant nearby :).

> Trying to run ghost kitchens Is a ghost kitchen that different from the kitchen in a regular restaurant? Either one doesn't strike me as the best working environment, not necessarily anyway.

Tsiklon 6y ago

A ghost kitchen is a kitchen associated with a restaurant that doesn’t serve walk-in customers or have the capacity to allow customers to sit-in. Often times these kitchens are anonymous looking from the outside, often located outside of the town centre In the UK they should be beholden to the same hygiene standards as any other food preparation business Some of these kitchens have their own branding and are not associated with a restaurant, but if you know your local area and see some restaurants which you don’t recognise on deliveroo or the other food delivery services, it’s possible that they are a ghost kitchen.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

The Guardian ran a few alarmist articles on them going back a while which might have sparked some of the outrage, including this opinion piece [1]. It turns out these "dark satanic mills" are often: hot, without windows and cold in winter. I don't advocate for bad working conditions, but it must be hard for anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen to keep a straight face when reading that. Even many Michelin starred kitchens are horrible environments. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-kitchens-satanic-mills-deliveroo https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-k... Edit: This isn't meant to be whataboutism, just pointing out that a "ghost kitchen" is only really different from a normal kitchen in its business structure. By and large, catering is not, and has never been, a glamorous industry. If you want to stop kitchens being difficult places to work, that's a worthwhile cause, but much, much bigger than Deliveroo.

corobo 6y ago
It would be better to report those too rather than dismiss something because something else is worse.
arkitaip 6y ago
So what if the rest of the industry is terrible, how does that make ghost kitchens acceptable?
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  It doesn't make ghost kitchens acceptable. However it does mean that it's misleading to criticise ghost kitchens specifically, while implying they're worse than other kinds of restaurants.
- Griffinsauce 6y ago
  It's not the fact that it's a ghost kitchen that's bad right? It's the poor treatment of workers. Focusing on a poor correlation is not solving the core problem.

feu 6y ago

The ghost kitchens are really consistent, the quality of food is much better than the majority of restaurants on Deliveroo.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

I think one issue is, they separate branding from production. Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards. It's something you can learn, and then choose the restaurants that suit your standards and taste the most. In a world of on-line orders and delivery, a ghost kitchen operator - or a "clever" entrepreneur subcontracting one or more of such kitchens - can set up an arbitrary amount of "restaurants", each with completely different marketing copy, but all ultimately delivering the exact same food. Or totally random food, if there are multiple ghost kitchens placed behind a (food ordering equivalent of) load balancer. This makes it very hard for an established restaurant to compete on-line - from outside, the five real restaurants in your neighbourhood look no different than 20 "virtual" restaurants. There's no way to tell. In this reality, as a customer, I have to resign to expect completely random results when I try to order food. These are also perfect conditions for a race to the bottom.

fnord123 6y ago
It's hard for established restaurants to compete on-line because they are kitted out for a dining room, paying a lease on the square meters for said dining room, and a kitchen setup to only handle a single set of menus. > Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards. Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Further, traditional restaurants are also running multiple virtual restaurants (e.g. one menu for katsu curry, and another for sushi).
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Perhaps not. And yes, I know there's a supply chain. But every restaurant I've been to - or ordered from - where I live[0], each one has its own distinct and consistent style. For instance, being a pizza aficionado, I could tell you just by looking and tasting, which restaurant you ordered a pizza from in the town I now live, and which major pizza parlor[1] you ordered from in Kraków (the city I spent most of my life in). This is what I'm concerned about. While not perfect, the restaurant's name was something you could use to "hash" a particular style of a particular dish by. They may have all supplied themselves at few well-known wholesalers[2], but they each processed the ingredients differently. Ghost kitchens + "virtual restaurants" kill that mechanism. To be clear: I don't mind the concept of ghost kitchens per se. Done well (i.e. regulated well), they'll be able to deliver consistent quality at good price. My problem is with the other half of the equation - the virtual restaurants. Something like this has already happened with consumer goods - so many of them are white-label goods these days, each sold by many fly-by-night brands. Consumer's ability to use branding as a proxy for quality (or quality of support) has been destroyed, DDoSed by the proliferation of such transient brands. I consider this a loss to customers and to the market at large (it increases information asymmetry). I worry the same is about to happen with food delivery. -- [0] - I love my country for being just enough developed to get all the fun stuff conceived in the US, but just enough not developed that they come with a delay of a few years - giving us time to see the expected social impact things will have :). [1] - At least until recently. Now there's too many small operators offering delivery services to track - but I can still distinguish between the ~6-8 places I used to order from. When these small operators started showing up, many of them were delivery-only, so I suspect they may have graduated to ghost kitchen frontends by now. [2] - Or discount supermarkets :). My wife and I have a bunch of stories about it. Notably, I remember once being in the queue behind a couple who were buying the entire stock of chicken breast and invoicing it to a company - presumably the Asian restaurant nearby :).