10 ms·
'It gets scary': Neighbors say these Bay Area ghost kitchens are out of control
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoFun Fact: CloudKitchens purchases most of its properties through shell companies. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.ft.com/content/53f444c1-d03b-4fb6-8040-2b6d2c01ace8 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gorkish 3y agoThis is not at all surprising when the business model does nothing to encourage drivers and restaurants to cooperate. If these places had to service their customers directly with drive-through/drive-up they would not be able to sustain themselves. As it is, the delivery driver usually ends up being the customer's punching bag for any issue whatsoever. Do delivery drivers have any leverage whatsoever against restaurants who provide this kind of terrible experience?
- dontreact 3y agoI live next door to one of these (mentioned in the article) and I think it's an improvement to my neighborhood. This article seems like a huge over-exaggeration of some minor issues to me. It's nice to be able to have a ton of food options in your neighborhood where you can go and pick up as well.
- ddol 3y agoThe article specifically mentions Cloud Kitchens, and my understanding is that they do not allow for pickup. Is your experience different with your local Cloud Kitchens location, if so, how do you order pickup (call/text in)?
- dontreact 3y agoYour understanding is not correct. You can either a) schedule a pickup using any app or b) stroll in and place an order off the menu. A) is way more convenient so I haven't done B) in more than a year though.
- fragmede 3y agoIn Doordash at least, I click pick-up instead of delivery, and just go to the address given. When I get there, there's a tablet, and lockers, and I follow the instructions to pick my order of food. Everyone else there is picking up for Doordash/whatever.
- the_watcher 3y agoI have literally walked in to the one in Redwood City and ordered from someone sitting at a folding desk.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoOne wonders if people who think it's wasteful to use a car to transport a single person think using a car and a person to transport a sandwich is not.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoIn other countries, bike messengers, motorcycles, and rikishas deliver food around the area. In London, Pret used to semi-ghost resupply sandwiches to their tiny stores from catering-like hubs via hand carts.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoAlways seemed a shame to me that megacities didn't lean into Mail Rail-style[1] logistics. Arterials of goods from depots outside, feeding into local hubs within the city via light rail or narrow-gauge and then last-mile dispatch via small vehicle, bikes etc from there. So there are sort of "wellsprings" of supply throughout the city. In my factory-builder-rotted mind's eye some kind of semi-automated AS/RS kind of system shuttling small-ish containers like those that go into planes now onto and off trains. Of all the things to wish to automate away, driving 40 tonne vehicles with notoriously poor sightlines (though they have imposed safety minimums in London[2], but not after many, many deaths), often with steering wheels on the wrong side, down urban roads seems one of the better ones. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway [2] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/direct-vision-standard-and-hgv-safety-permit https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/direct-vision-standard-and-...
- TillE 3y agoI have no idea about SF, but in Germany all the food delivery companies are 99% bike couriers.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoThe picture of that car-snarl leading that article implies it's a lot of cars (lots of scooters and bikes in the UK too - I doubt the cost of fuel and keeping a roadworthy car in general, makes cars economical for it here, not to mention the need for a licence which you don't need on most small bikes).
- richbell 3y agoThe YouTuber Eddy Burback has a video called "The Deceptive World of Ghost Kitchens" that I'd highly recommend watching. https://youtu.be/KkIkymh5Ayg https://youtu.be/KkIkymh5Ayg
- tptacek 3y agoI remember watching this, and just skimmed it again at 3x. The video spends about half its time on the phenomenon of restaurants that are all relabeled versions of the same core concept --- that's, like, annoying, like I would feel taken if I ordered from a "restaurant" and really it was just one of 7 interchangeable labels for the same place, but it's not materially damaging in any way. It then talks about health inspections, but doesn't really make a strong case for how ghost kitchens make health inspection harder; about the most it has to say is that it makes allergenic cross-contamination harder to evaluate, but that's not really something health inspections catch anyways!
- silenced_trope 3y ago> The video spends about half its time on the phenomenon of restaurants that are all relabeled versions of the same core concept --- that's, like, annoying, like I would feel taken if I ordered from a "restaurant" and really it was just one of 7 interchangeable labels for the same place, but it's not materially damaging in any way. There's a restaurant on Polk St that does this with Ubereats. I know their address based on seeing it a few times and have learned not to order from it. Here's a list, I won't add links because they're too long, but you can find them all on Ubereats. This restaurant from the outside is "Fresco Pizza Shawarma", here's nine storefronts they have on Ubereats. - Ma's Meatballs - Big Daddy's Wings - Chateau Shawarma - Angry Chicken - Uncle Sam's Pizza - Polk St Pizza - Wingman Co. - Little Italy's Calzones - Little Italy Pasta They probably have more too this was just a quick search. It's spammy and I've learned to check the address of restaurants to see if they're a "ghost kitchen". I suspect a lot of "real" restaurants with just one authentic storefront get drowned out in the "ghost kitchen" spam.
- hot_gril 3y ago
- JohnFen 3y agoThe existence of ghost kitchens is why I stopped ordering food online entirely in favor of going to the actual restaurant to get my food. You can't trust online food delivery at all anymore.
- tptacek 3y agoYou can't just order from restaurants you know are real?
- JohnFen 3y agoNot online. It's becoming more common for online ordering from real restaurants to be actually serviced by ghost kitchens rather than the restaurant. I don't know about calling them, but I expect that's no different. If a restaurant is outsourcing their cooking for online orders, it would make sense for them to do so with phone orders as well.
- jonahhorowitz 3y agoNo, because sometimes those restaurants operate (or license) secondary ghost kitchens.
- tptacek 3y agoWhy do you care? I absolutely get not wanting to order from a "restaurant" that is nothing more than a brand name applied to a totally generic delivery concept run off interchangeable people and food-service supplies; that is a real problem with DoorDash listings. But (to take a nonexistent example) if Small Cheval in Chicago wants to sell burgers out of a "ghost kitchen", I don't know why I'd want to prefer the "real" location; you're still getting the same product.
- jjulius 3y ago> Why do you care? ... you're still getting the same product. My experience has been that food from ghost kitchens has been incredibly subpar when compared to the same food ordered from that same restaurant's brick-and-mortar location.
- tptacek 3y agoIf you pay attention to local politics and, in particular, zoning variance debates, these are ultra-common, ultra-boring issues that are usually addressed directly by municipalities. It's true that businesses create traffic and traffic safety externalities, which is why well-run cities usually impose limits and extra expenses on businesses that do these kinds of things.
- neilv 3y ago> Cloud Kitchens, which is backed by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Disregarding regulations and externalities worked well for him the last time.
- janalsncm 3y agoIt worked well in the U.S., not so well for their plans for global expansion. Hence the existence of companies like Grab/Didi.
- tptacek 3y agoI understand the dunk here, but what I'm saying is that a lot of this is on Bay Area municipalities. This isn't like Uber where an entire new business model created a brand new set of regulatory challenges. This is a bog standard regulatory challenge every city already has to be set up to address, because it comes up every time a new retail business gets put somewhere that wasn't already precisely zoned for it. This is seriously every liquor license kerfluffle ever; just in slightly different form. (I had a lot of problems with what Uber did with regulatory arbitrage; in particular, for a decent amount of time, Uber managed to recreate the Chicago redlining map with their service areas. It's not that I'm disinclined to regulate; it's that it's not Kalanick's job to regulate himself.)
- hot_gril 3y agoEven Uber for passengers didn't seem too hard to handle. Almost a drop-in replacement for taxis, except some cities added more loading zones because of the increased riders. Uber Eats, different story.
- sxp 3y ago> At the sites where parking issues have not been resolved, businesses and residents have tried turning to the city for assistance. Koral and her husband and business partner, Dan Perata, contact the city’s 311 line and the police regularly but say nothing is done. (San Francisco parking enforcement did not respond to a request for comment.) This seems like a problem that can be easily resolved by traffic police ticketing anyone who parks incorrectly. that would disincentivize the drivers to go there, and it should result in the ghost kitchen owners moving to a place with adequate parking/traffic infrastructure.
- xracy 3y agoah yes, "traffic enforcement fixes traffic" That's why there exists no traffic in all of the places with traffic police. It's not at all like it's a positive feedback loop where one person messing up parking causes downstream effects for the rest of the day... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHSCmQnGH9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHSCmQnGH9Q
- FireBeyond 3y agoSend photos to towing companies. They may not respond quickly enough if you call 'on demand', but tell them to hang out near you and they'll get bites, and they might. Plus, the sight of a tow truck might scare people. Hell, maybe just buy a tow truck and 'patrol' the street.
- appplication 3y agoIf I went through the expense to buy a tow truck, I wouldn’t have have the self control to not use it against my newfound parking nemeses.
- lacker 3y agoTLDR: NIMBYs are unhappy about the traffic problems caused by economic progress. Ghost kitchens are great. Regular restaurants are simply too inefficient to scale. And yet Americans spend about 5% of their waking lives on food prep. One day, making your own dinner could be an occasional hobby, like knitting your own sweater. The long term promise is especially high with robotics. Your food could be made by a robot, the whole delivery could happen with an autonomous vehicle. And if the food robot is centralized, I don't have to worry about the cleaning and maintenance myself.
- hot_gril 3y agoYep, call me a NIMBY but I don't want this kind of business operating in my residential street. There are plenty of business zones where this economic progress can take place. Also, illegally double-parking isn't fair game. If the police enforce those laws, there are economic solutions to that too, like building more parking. But often times the zoning will mandate spots too because they know a huge business without that is gonna rely on illegal parking.
- vasvae3 3y ago[flagged]
- hot_gril 3y agoIdk what HN wants, I'm not HN. But 15-minute city wouldn't have cars delivering food to begin with.
- gruez 3y ago> Yep, call me a NIMBY but I don't want this kind of business operating in my residential street. There are plenty of business zones where this economic progress can take place. That's basically the standard NIMBY line. "I don't oppose [thing], I just don't want [thing] near where I live."
- hot_gril 3y ago
- mminer237 3y agoIs there no ordinance requiring appropriate parking levels for businesses like this? In my Midwestern city, a pick-up-only restaurant has to have 1 parking space for every 400 square feet in addition to bike spaces. It looks like Cloud Kitchens has ~20 parking spaces for 20,000+ sqft of kitchen? And half of those appear to be for employees with no spaces for bikes/scooters. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Charter+Oak+Food+Pick-Up+-+San+Francisco+CloudKitchens/@37.7370193,-122.4054271,119m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x808f7f3fd87d4f9f:0xb527090bb3dd8375!8m2!3d37.7368403!4d-122.4053576!16s%2Fg%2F11ryswds85?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Charter+Oak+Food+Pick-Up+-... This sounds like a total planning failure. That's a huge facility that never should have been allowed to open there without the proper infrastructure in place. They need like 2 or 3 times that many spaces, and there's not really a good way to create them after the fact. I think food delivery in general is pretty wasteful, but making fewer spaces doesn't make fewer cars/bikes required. If you want a huge ghost kitchen, you have to be prepared to handle a huge amount of traffic.
- acchow 3y agoThere are far too many cars driving around SF carrying no passengers and just a pound or two of food. I think it makes sense for drivers to switch to mopeds, and the parking situation everywhere will naturally fix itself.
- hot_gril 3y agoEnforcing the existing laws would fix this. These delivery cars always stop in the middle of traffic or bike lanes because there simply isn't enough space in SF.
- gruez 3y agoIronically what the parent poster implied is the solution (parking minimums?) only makes the problem worse, by making businesses/neighborhoods even more spread out to accommodate parking lots, which entrench cars even more.
- hot_gril 3y ago
- teeray 3y agoKinda surprised they haven’t moved ghost kitchens to the next logical step to avoid some of the issues that come with having them in a location: food trucks. You could have completely elastic kitchen space deployed to different locations all the time. Trucks could be restocked at a warehouse outside of town. Delivery drivers just get the address of the food truck to pick up from instead of a physical location.
- silenced_trope 3y agoI don't think food trucks can just park somewhere and serve/work there. As weird as that may seem because why have a roving restaurant if it's required to be in one spot? Nonetheless I think permits are required, the Senior Sisig truck always used to be next to the Equinox on Sansome St. Other food trucks only ever serve at the "Off the Grid" park.
- sgift 3y agoI took a look into the origin of the food truck once (internet rabbit hole ftw), and originally they moved - some still do these days. Usually serving a different area each day or if you have two areas with non-overlapping break times even midday. But when it got more popular people started to complain that trucks would just stop where they wanted to and cities started to demand permits (I'm not saying they were wrong, just how it is). That made in uneconomical and sometimes even impossible to move around all the time. It's rather hard to just stop spontaneous and serve a crowd if you need a permit for each stop. So, these days, food trucks are mostly for show (that's the ones you saw) or company events. Company wants to feed all their employees something different than the usual grub, but not leave the campus for the event: Rent a food truck.
- dpflan 3y agoClearly the company needs to do better planning and anticipate cars coming to them, causing traffic congestion is a net negative for the service it is trying to provide.
- hellweaver666 3y agoSeems to me that the problem is less the buildings and more the fact that delivery drivers in the US seem to insist on using cars. Here in the Netherlands they deliver on scooters and bikes and create a lot less traffic problems.
- Fauntleroy 3y agoUnfortunately, the US is still set up in such a way that scooter delivery won't provide suitable coverage area. Wish it weren't the case. I feel like we're hemmed in, in so many ways, by the car induced sprawl throughout the nation.
- EnergyAmy 3y agoSome places in the US might be set up that badly, but it seems unlikely that scooters wouldn't work for like 95% of the time here.
- dzhiurgis 3y agoOrder locally then
- hot_gril 3y agoIt's quite possible that you only have a single restaurant within e-scooter distance.
- dzhiurgis 3y agoTell me - why thats not enough?
- hot_gril 3y agoEnough for what, to survive? Not talking about that, but I'll put it this way: I would absolutely never order delivery if e-scooter radius was the limit. Even the restaurants that are good and well-priced near me aren't suitable for delivery. And delivery is already very rare for me since my wife and I will either cook or go out unless we're very sick or something. Without delivery, we'd just deal with it and it'd kinda suck.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoThat's some FUD demonizing delivery restaurants with some fear-based labels and emotionally-loaded language. Although it's my experience delivery service drivers more often than not refuse to follow clear directions and have no chill, I stopped using 2 apps because of the hassles and expensive (services pocketed the money), inconsistent, and substandard results. Perhaps the problem is a lack of training, minimum livable wages, and healthcare rather than the delivery model.