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> A single kitchen operating under many names to increase its algorithmic “surface area”; another shape of things to come. I find this infuriating. There's one

> A single kitchen operating under many names to increase its algorithmic “surface area”; another shape of things to come. I find this infuriating. There's one dominican restaurant in my city that's listed on DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats under over 20 different names with different subsets of their menu. All of these duplicate listings for the same place make it harder to search or browse the actual restaurant options in the area. Any time I come across a restaurant that looks worth trying out, I have to look up the address to see if it actually exists, or if it's just IHOP masquerading as a burger bar.

gernb 4y ago
And this is why the semantic web will never work.
- smarx007 4y ago
  No, they will just all be marked "owl:sameAs" (though it's not as smooth as one would think [1]) in semantic web. [1]: https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/papers/ws21 https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/papers/ws21
slater 4y ago
Haha, right on. I love me some Indian food, and there's ten different Indian "restaurants" near me, all located at the same address. I looked it up on Google Maps, and it's basically a hole-in-the-wall restaurant space that can barely hold one restaurant, never mind ten. Yet Grubhub et al. don't seem to care one way or another
- Wistar 4y ago
  There's also ghost kitchens cranking out food for delivery without any traditional restaurant space at all. Here's a commercial ghost kitchen explanation to restaurateurs: https://cloudkitchens.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-ghost-kitchens/ https://cloudkitchens.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-ghost-kitch...
akira2501 4y ago
I wonder if that's a consequence of the "gig economy" working in the wrong direction. Perhaps the relationship should be between the delivery service "gig fleet" and the restaurants themselves. The ratings and feedback information would actually be more useful and would allow different restaurants to post different contract rates through the service based upon these ratings. That would actually provide a service that doesn't dilute their brand. As it is, these restaurants have just found a way to counter this negative outcome by diluting this third party marketplace itself.
CamperBob2 4y ago
(Shrug) This is how hotel restaurants, including some very good ones, have always worked. What difference does it make what other ethnicities/varieties of food the restaurant delivers?
- p1necone 4y ago
  What? Hotel restaurants have always convincingly appeared to people as 20 different restaurants while operating at the same physical location? A place serving a lot of different types of food is not the same thing, it's still one restaurant and they're not making any effort to hide that from the hotel guests. The multitudes of different places at Disneyworld that all operate out of the same massive underground/hidden kitchen complex might be a better example.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    What? Hotel restaurants have always convincingly appeared to people as 20 different restaurants while operating at the same physical location? Yes. Hotels with multiple restaurants tend to have only one kitchen, because why wouldn't they? Again, I don't understand what's so offensive or controversial about this concept. I'm probably misunderstanding the objection.
    - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
      Do you truly believe those situations are equivalent?
      - CamperBob2 4y ago
        Uh, well, yeah? I'm obviously missing something important in the argument you're making.
        p1necone 4y ago
        I think you kinda have a point when it's one physical location presenting itself as multiple different options whose food would never belong on the same menu together at a dine in restaurant in the first place. Where I think it's shady is one kitchen pretending to be 10 different restaurants all serving the same type of food under different restaurant names, just to basically game the system into presenting them to more consumers. The main difference between this and the hotel case is that when a business lists another "restaurant" on Uber Eats/Grubhub/whatever they're effectively taking away some advertising space from all the other restaurants on the platform. Whereas when a hotel adds another "restaurant" frontend to their kitchen, nothing really changes for all the other places in town. And it would be painfully obvious if one hotel opened up 10 nearly identical e.g. indian restaurants on the same premises. TLDR: It's not possible for the practice to get to a predatory level in the physical world so it's less of a concern, even though it's fundamentally very similar.
chupchap 4y ago
It's just SEO I think
Barrin92 4y ago
Seriously wonder why this isn't taken down. Should be pretty trivial given overlap of physical or payment addresses if they're registering the same restaurant several times on the same platform. Probably even possible to do it by hand.
- indymike 4y ago
  If it generates revenue, it's not going down. There is absolutely no incentive at all to remove it. In fact, it gives the consumer more choices, and more ways to give money to the gig delivery service, and acts as a bulwark against being bullied by chains.
  - toxicFork 4y ago
    > it gives the consumer more choices How? If a choice of "this restaurant" or "that restaurant" both take you to "this restaurant", is that really a choice?
  - vintermann 4y ago
    The equivalent on Spotify are not generating revenue, though. The existence of these algorithmically generated spam artists doesn't factor into anyone's decision to buy premium or not - at least not in a positive way. And still they're there.
josephcsible 4y ago
Isn't it really easy to avoid all these fake restaurants, since the fakes only appear when you're searching for takeout? Just pretend you want to dine in, find a restaurant that you want that way, then pull it up in your takeout app of choice.
- toxicFork 4y ago
  That's not really easy. That's a lot of work.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    How is that a lot of work? Is it a lot of work if you really are looking for a restaurant where you can dine in?
    - dangrossman 4y ago
      On the delivery services, you can search all of the menus of places that deliver to you at once. If I want a club sandwich, I can find what 32 restaurants will deliver me a club sandwich. There is no other place I know of that will tell me what restaurants in some radius of me sell club sandwiches for dine-in, that I'd then have to cross-reference with which are available on my preferred delivery service anyway. It's a lot more work.
  - ryeights 4y ago
    Google Maps shows food delivery options now.
asdff 4y ago
It's really bewildering when this happens. I've accidentally picked up food from one of these places and I nearly could not find it. It was a faceless nondescript commercial building that looked abandoned until I saw someone else walk out the door with their food order. Then I walked in and the place looked like some industrial building versus a restaurant. There was just cement floor in a small room, and I gave my order through a metal lined hole in the wall and they gave me my bag. Very oddly, in the background, I noticed Chic Fil A also being prepared in this ghost kitchen by people in tshirts. Such a strange concept. I made sure to never order food from a place that wasn't a brick and mortar again, and to call up restaurants directly.
- MockObject 4y ago
  > I made sure to never order food from a place that wasn't a brick and mortar again What's wrong with food from a ghost kitchen?
  - dangrossman 4y ago
    In my experience, it's inferior in every way, perhaps because they have no accountability the same way a standalone restaurant has. For example, a pizza place near me opened multiple ghost kitchens, including a Saladworks and Guy Fieri's Flavortown. There's no Saladworks if you visit their address, just the pizza place. They offer the same menu as Saladworks, the chain of fast service salad shops, but don't have the same supplier or training or equipment as a Saladworks. This pizza place just attempts to recreate the same salads using inferior ingredients, pizza toppings, generic dressings, and generic plastic takeout containers. The result doesn't taste like a Saladworks salad and is smaller than a Saladworks salad. I've tried it twice and neither recreation of Saladworks was faithful, missing ingredients both times, with a different lettuce mix than Saladworks uses, etc. There's no Guy Fieri restaurant if you visit their address either. The food from this brand of the ghost kitchen is just inedible. It has 5 reviews on Yelp locally so far, and all are one star. They're microwaving burgers, sending out raw pasta, sending out easy mac with pizza toppings as a fancy loaded mac & cheese, using the same generic plastic takeout containers they do for Saladworks. And yet at least they have a brand to burn. What I was actually frustrated with in my comment a few levels up is the places that list their own menu, sliced and diced in different ways, under 20+ different names. If someone complains about the quality of "Simply Crepes", they can just remove that listing, since those crepes are also available under "Morning Times Cafe", "Morning Breakfast Sandwich Bar", "The Daily Fare", "The Coffee Creperey", etc.
djmips 4y ago
I don't mind it myself. If you like the food it's OK if a downtown bar and grill is also sidelining as a chicken restaurant online. They have slow times and a paid kitchen staff. Go for it! And some of the other ghost kitchens / home address food prep is pretty good. Like there was an ice cream place that delivered until midnight ( out of somebodies garage ) their ice cream was cooled down to well below zero so it was not melted when you got it.
cpersona 4y ago
I remember looking out of the window with my girlfriend trying to find a restaurant that Grubhub claimed was across the street. It was a ghost kitchen inside of another place and the food is pretty good, but I have generally stuck with places I've at least seen with my own eyes since then.

gernb 4y ago

And this is why the semantic web will never work.

smarx007 4y ago
No, they will just all be marked "owl:sameAs" (though it's not as smooth as one would think [1]) in semantic web. [1]: https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/papers/ws21 https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/papers/ws21

slater 4y ago

Haha, right on. I love me some Indian food, and there's ten different Indian "restaurants" near me, all located at the same address. I looked it up on Google Maps, and it's basically a hole-in-the-wall restaurant space that can barely hold one restaurant, never mind ten. Yet Grubhub et al. don't seem to care one way or another

Wistar 4y ago
There's also ghost kitchens cranking out food for delivery without any traditional restaurant space at all. Here's a commercial ghost kitchen explanation to restaurateurs: https://cloudkitchens.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-ghost-kitchens/ https://cloudkitchens.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-ghost-kitch...

akira2501 4y ago

I wonder if that's a consequence of the "gig economy" working in the wrong direction. Perhaps the relationship should be between the delivery service "gig fleet" and the restaurants themselves. The ratings and feedback information would actually be more useful and would allow different restaurants to post different contract rates through the service based upon these ratings. That would actually provide a service that doesn't dilute their brand. As it is, these restaurants have just found a way to counter this negative outcome by diluting this third party marketplace itself.

CamperBob2 4y ago

(Shrug) This is how hotel restaurants, including some very good ones, have always worked. What difference does it make what other ethnicities/varieties of food the restaurant delivers?

p1necone 4y ago
What? Hotel restaurants have always convincingly appeared to people as 20 different restaurants while operating at the same physical location? A place serving a lot of different types of food is not the same thing, it's still one restaurant and they're not making any effort to hide that from the hotel guests. The multitudes of different places at Disneyworld that all operate out of the same massive underground/hidden kitchen complex might be a better example.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  What? Hotel restaurants have always convincingly appeared to people as 20 different restaurants while operating at the same physical location? Yes. Hotels with multiple restaurants tend to have only one kitchen, because why wouldn't they? Again, I don't understand what's so offensive or controversial about this concept. I'm probably misunderstanding the objection.
  - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
    Do you truly believe those situations are equivalent?
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      Uh, well, yeah? I'm obviously missing something important in the argument you're making.
      - p1necone 4y ago
        I think you kinda have a point when it's one physical location presenting itself as multiple different options whose food would never belong on the same menu together at a dine in restaurant in the first place. Where I think it's shady is one kitchen pretending to be 10 different restaurants all serving the same type of food under different restaurant names, just to basically game the system into presenting them to more consumers. The main difference between this and the hotel case is that when a business lists another "restaurant" on Uber Eats/Grubhub/whatever they're effectively taking away some advertising space from all the other restaurants on the platform. Whereas when a hotel adds another "restaurant" frontend to their kitchen, nothing really changes for all the other places in town. And it would be painfully obvious if one hotel opened up 10 nearly identical e.g. indian restaurants on the same premises. TLDR: It's not possible for the practice to get to a predatory level in the physical world so it's less of a concern, even though it's fundamentally very similar.

chupchap 4y ago

It's just SEO I think

Barrin92 4y ago

Seriously wonder why this isn't taken down. Should be pretty trivial given overlap of physical or payment addresses if they're registering the same restaurant several times on the same platform. Probably even possible to do it by hand.

indymike 4y ago
If it generates revenue, it's not going down. There is absolutely no incentive at all to remove it. In fact, it gives the consumer more choices, and more ways to give money to the gig delivery service, and acts as a bulwark against being bullied by chains.
- toxicFork 4y ago
  > it gives the consumer more choices How? If a choice of "this restaurant" or "that restaurant" both take you to "this restaurant", is that really a choice?
- vintermann 4y ago
  The equivalent on Spotify are not generating revenue, though. The existence of these algorithmically generated spam artists doesn't factor into anyone's decision to buy premium or not - at least not in a positive way. And still they're there.

josephcsible 4y ago

Isn't it really easy to avoid all these fake restaurants, since the fakes only appear when you're searching for takeout? Just pretend you want to dine in, find a restaurant that you want that way, then pull it up in your takeout app of choice.

toxicFork 4y ago
That's not really easy. That's a lot of work.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  How is that a lot of work? Is it a lot of work if you really are looking for a restaurant where you can dine in?
  - dangrossman 4y ago
    On the delivery services, you can search all of the menus of places that deliver to you at once. If I want a club sandwich, I can find what 32 restaurants will deliver me a club sandwich. There is no other place I know of that will tell me what restaurants in some radius of me sell club sandwiches for dine-in, that I'd then have to cross-reference with which are available on my preferred delivery service anyway. It's a lot more work.
- ryeights 4y ago
  Google Maps shows food delivery options now.

asdff 4y ago

It's really bewildering when this happens. I've accidentally picked up food from one of these places and I nearly could not find it. It was a faceless nondescript commercial building that looked abandoned until I saw someone else walk out the door with their food order. Then I walked in and the place looked like some industrial building versus a restaurant. There was just cement floor in a small room, and I gave my order through a metal lined hole in the wall and they gave me my bag. Very oddly, in the background, I noticed Chic Fil A also being prepared in this ghost kitchen by people in tshirts. Such a strange concept. I made sure to never order food from a place that wasn't a brick and mortar again, and to call up restaurants directly.

MockObject 4y ago
> I made sure to never order food from a place that wasn't a brick and mortar again What's wrong with food from a ghost kitchen?
- dangrossman 4y ago
  In my experience, it's inferior in every way, perhaps because they have no accountability the same way a standalone restaurant has. For example, a pizza place near me opened multiple ghost kitchens, including a Saladworks and Guy Fieri's Flavortown. There's no Saladworks if you visit their address, just the pizza place. They offer the same menu as Saladworks, the chain of fast service salad shops, but don't have the same supplier or training or equipment as a Saladworks. This pizza place just attempts to recreate the same salads using inferior ingredients, pizza toppings, generic dressings, and generic plastic takeout containers. The result doesn't taste like a Saladworks salad and is smaller than a Saladworks salad. I've tried it twice and neither recreation of Saladworks was faithful, missing ingredients both times, with a different lettuce mix than Saladworks uses, etc. There's no Guy Fieri restaurant if you visit their address either. The food from this brand of the ghost kitchen is just inedible. It has 5 reviews on Yelp locally so far, and all are one star. They're microwaving burgers, sending out raw pasta, sending out easy mac with pizza toppings as a fancy loaded mac & cheese, using the same generic plastic takeout containers they do for Saladworks. And yet at least they have a brand to burn. What I was actually frustrated with in my comment a few levels up is the places that list their own menu, sliced and diced in different ways, under 20+ different names. If someone complains about the quality of "Simply Crepes", they can just remove that listing, since those crepes are also available under "Morning Times Cafe", "Morning Breakfast Sandwich Bar", "The Daily Fare", "The Coffee Creperey", etc.

djmips 4y ago

I don't mind it myself. If you like the food it's OK if a downtown bar and grill is also sidelining as a chicken restaurant online. They have slow times and a paid kitchen staff. Go for it! And some of the other ghost kitchens / home address food prep is pretty good. Like there was an ice cream place that delivered until midnight ( out of somebodies garage ) their ice cream was cooled down to well below zero so it was not melted when you got it.

cpersona 4y ago

I remember looking out of the window with my girlfriend trying to find a restaurant that Grubhub claimed was across the street. It was a ghost kitchen inside of another place and the food is pretty good, but I have generally stuck with places I've at least seen with my own eyes since then.