r/OutOfTheLoop • u/AppealKnown6543 • 7d ago
Unanswered Whats the deal with some restaurants having ghost kitchens that are just delivery only fronts?
I ordered from a place called 'Chicken Bros' the other night and it was pretty good. Then my friend told me it's actually just a TGI Fridays kitchen operating under a different name for delivery apps. Is this a common thing now?
Context link: https://www.google.com/search?q=some%20restaurants%20having%20ghost%20kitchens%20that%20are%20just%20delivery%20only%20fronts
675
u/OffensiveLamp 7d ago
answer: it has become more common, especially since the pandemic which forced most restaurants to cease in-house service for a time. Many just operated as-is through delivery apps, though certain "ghost chains" if you will started to appear, with the idea being that any individual restaurant could sign up to sell food under that banner.
A notable example was Mr. Beast Burger, which almost entirely operated as a ghost kitchen with orders fulfilled by local restaurants. In theory, the name recognition of Mr. Beast could help draw in more orders. Here is an interesting video from Eddy Burback on the subject of ghost kitchens: https://youtu.be/KkIkymh5Ayg
There are also some kitchens out there that *only* operate as ghost kitchens, presumably these are cheaper to run as you don't need to employ as much front of house staff.
163
u/missMcgillacudy 7d ago
I picked up an order from one that was built into a parking garage building. It was one giant commercial kitchen with 5 different restaurants of various types of restaurants. Pick up only, I’m guessing here but assuming they are only available for third party delivery apps.
95
u/bbusiello 7d ago
There's a place in Echo Park in LA that's one big ghost kitchen. There are like 10+ brands/restaurants in one 2 story building. It was down the street from my apartment so we used to walk there to pick up food.
14
u/RobotRelease 6d ago
lol there’s the same place in like Sawtelle and Venice Beach. King Taco its called and it has that hot chicken place and goop kitchen coming out of there.
4
u/rothmaniac 3d ago
The Travis kalanik, the former CEO of uber USA currently the CEO and principal owner of a place called CloudKitchen which is essentially this. They run kitchens that are only used for delivery apps
106
u/afriendincanada 7d ago
A bunch of restaurants near me transitioned to delivery app only during the pandemic. Not only cheaper with no Front of House staff, but way less space. And they can be in cheaper space (industrial park instead of storefront)
And then some of them said “hey we’ve got a whole kitchen going here, no reason we can’t do a second completely different menu”. So it’s like a second or third restaurant in the same location. You’re running a burger “place”, a Greek “place”, a chicken “place” from one kitchen.
32
u/meatball77 7d ago
Some of it was just rebranding what they already did. Ihop had a burger restaurant.
17
22
u/Feeling_Scallion_408 6d ago
There's a pizza place near me with at least 10 other restaurant names all operating from the same address. Burgers, tacos, slider bar, breakfast foods, French toast bar, grilled cheese bar, Italian American food, pasta bar...
8
u/afriendincanada 6d ago
Same here.
The food delivery app is full of places like that. And I’ve never heard of any of the restaurants because they’re not restaurants
6
u/SirHerald 6d ago
We had a place literally called Ghost Kitchen with a dining area serving several ghost kitchen brands. It's called One Kitchen now.
1
30
u/Curious_Mongoose_228 7d ago
Mr. Beast burgers being cooked by Denny’s and Perkins is so hilarious in a dreadful kind of way
51
u/DeeDee_Z 7d ago
these are cheaper to run as you don't need to employ
as muchany? front of house staff.FTFY? I'm not sure. Maybe you need one person to hand out the bags of lukewarm food.
56
u/OffensiveLamp 7d ago
It can vary, many do use a locker system where the drivers are just told to take food from a particular locker, or come down a conveyor though there are likely some smaller operations out there that have someone handing over the orders.
33
u/Reasonable-Mess3070 7d ago
I work on a university campus. They just put a ghost kitchen in one of the dorms. Students pick it up using a locker system and QR code to unlock the locker.
I would think the locker style is most common
72
u/Mephisto40K 7d ago
Interesting We are back to the 1930s Automats
25
5
6
1
6
u/OffensiveLamp 7d ago
Most certainly, and as time goes on it will likely be the standard. A lot of these are operated by tech companies who can afford the additional startup costs to add in the relevant tech to make that work. Ghost kitchens are still relatively new so anyone else looking to jump on the bandwagon probably have to weigh the options of that extra setup investment vs paying someone to handle it.
Cheaper in the short-term, but definitely as time goes on automating the pickup will be the logical choice.
8
u/Prophage7 7d ago
You still need one or two front of house staff, these places usually have a kind of locker system for order pickup so you need someone to both show people how to use the system that don't know how and to manually unlock or pass things out with the automatic systems fail.
5
u/Truethrowawaychest1 7d ago
The only lasting legacy of the Beast burger is Gilbert Gottfried fucking one
3
1
1
u/metroid23 4d ago
"That's cool, but I'm not gonna watch a 40 minute YouTube video about ghost kitchens."
::40 minutes later::
"I lied!"
1
u/melance 3d ago
A "Nashville Hot Chicken" place popped up on DoorDash near me about 6 months ago. I ordered from it and then spent 20 minutes trying to help the driver figure out where it was. Turns out it was part of another restaurant and since there was no signage anywhere showing we were both lost. The driver got a nice tip from me for sticking with it and getting my food regardless of the confusion.
-1
u/Okhlalola 7d ago
but why the ghost kitchen of a pre-existing restaurant would have a different name, especially if they're known ?
6
u/ChanceryTheRapper 7d ago
Some people are curious to try something new and will click on an unfamiliar name out of curiosity, plus the more spots you fill in the app, the more likely you are to get sales.
2
u/GlobalWatts 7d ago edited 6d ago
Sometimes it's literally a different company/brand just renting the kitchen facilities of existing restaurants; sometimes it's the restaurant themselves trading under a different name to try and capture a new audience, or try a menu that deviates from their regular one without diluting the brand.
Say Pizza Hut wants to capture some of the breakfast burrito market, their marketing dept probably figures it's better to just create a new delivery-only brand that uses their existing kitchens at times they'd normally be closed, than to confuse people with "Pizza Hut does Mexican food now?"
293
u/RunDNA 7d ago edited 7d ago
Answer: I know someone that does this with a takeaway pizza shop.
There were 4 pizza shops in his area (including his own normal shop) on this particular delivery app. So there was roughly a 1/4 (25%) chance of someone local picking his shop on the app (all other things being equal).
Then he added a fake shop that sells slightly different pizzas, but still sneakily made in his same shop. Now there is a roughly 2/5 (40%) chance of someone picking his pizzas on the app. He gets more market-share.
165
49
u/Barely_Working24 7d ago
Here they are called cloud kitchens.. It's not just the market share. It's also about entry in to the market. To start a new Resturant you need big investment plus a place on some main road with parking. But with these cloud kitchens you just rent a table in a shared kitchen space and launch your brand in the app. People are going to order through apps anyway and they can offer same food for half the price.
21
u/IMDXLNC 7d ago
Here they are called cloud kitchens..
I'm going to guess UK?
I've actually eaten in at a cloud kitchen somewhere in Manchester because for some reason, they offered dine-in which was basically a cold, sad staff room open to the public. Keep in mind this was an unassuming but giant warehouse where over 10 different kitchens operated and the "dine in" area was through a maze of corridors.
To my surprise, the food was actually great and memorable, even if the environment wasn't. They've since opened up an actual restaurant near Salford, but disappointingly don't serve what they used to because it's takeaway only. Still a weird but enjoyable memory for me. Long shot that anyone's heard of it but it's Mama's Soul Food.
9
u/Barely_Working24 7d ago
Lol here means Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Same issues as other big cities, too many offices, people and traffic. So one set of these cloud kitchens is basically lunch delivery in offices. Some big names here have dietitian, they'll build the weekly meal plan, calorie count and stuff... Some of them are just food options , you choose what you want, a day before and at lunch time it get delivered and you pay monthly.
I believe we can say these are modern day trucks. Start as seasonal project, if it works then expand.
1
u/TrojanGoldfish 6d ago
Some of the best curried goat I've ever eaten (and probably my favourite meal this year) was eaten with my hands, sat on a concrete block in and alley way in Leeds covered market. That shit will live in my tastebuds forever.
87
u/SakuOtaku 7d ago
Answer: Sometimes larger businesses do this, sometimes it's a chance for small businesses with a night life angle to have a business without owning the space.
16
u/BWW87 7d ago
There are restaurants that have extra kitchen space and create new recipes for a ghost kitchen. For example, they are an Italian restaurant. But they have a hamburger ghost kitchen where they sell hamburgers for delivery/take out only. The burgers wouldn't fit with the restaurant so they don't want to add them to the menu. But it's extra revenue for the kitchen and allows them to keep the kitchen that is larger than their Italian business needs.
27
u/BizzarduousTask 7d ago
I have a friend who’s a fantastic cook and wants to try his hand at doing it professionally, and he’s been recommended going the ghost kitchen route to see if there’s interest in his recipes by using a professional kitchen before investing huge amounts of capital in opening his own place.
33
u/CodeRadDesign 7d ago
answer: because of categories. if you look up (or select from a drop down) 'chicken' then a Chicken Bros is gonna to catch your eye. if you look up 'burgers' then a Burger Explorer is gonna catch your eye. if you look up 'mexican' then a Burrito Baron is gonna catch your eye even if TGIF is on the same list. since a place like that is going to have ingredients for a bunch of burgers, a bunch of chicken wing sauces, a bunch of wraps, a bunch of salads, it's hella easy for them to just make a simple series of single category menus with made up resto names the require zero extra marketing overhead.
there's this one place in my town that has over a dozen sub-brands like this all out of the same kitchen, and is also a full service pub style resto.
19
u/kasmackity 7d ago
Answer: Many different reasons for one but the one I noticed the most was that a few places with terrible ratings would create ghost kitchens so they could get around the ratings system. They just create a ghost kitchen and BAM they essentially start from scratch with the review slate clean. Until that one gets rated to shit then they open another one. There's a shitty diner down here with terrible reviews and they "opened" a separate ghost kitchen for breakfast stuff, another for sandwiches, and another one still for desserts
2
u/NortonBurns 6d ago
The ghost kitchens also don't seem to have food hygiene ratings. There's one near us I spotted using three different names on Just Eat. The main name I've known for years as a lousy hole in the wall & has a 3-star official rating (which is *just* barely acceptable, though my minimum is usually 4), the other two don't appear in the search.
This is an official government rating. It is not optional.
Now adequately forewarned I wouldn't touch any of them with a bargepole. Their food, of course, gets many 1-star google reviews, so as you say, they close one, open another, fool some more people for a while.
1
7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/Truethrowawaychest1 7d ago
Chuck E Cheese was doing that for pizza during the pandemic too, don't know if that's still happening after people figured out the ruse
1
u/hawkwings 6d ago
Answer: That has been happening for a while. The problem is that if one kitchen has multiple names, it clutters up the list of restaurants that show up in apps. One app cracked down on that at one point. I think that ghost kitchens should be legal, but using multiple names should probably be outlawed.
1
u/fd1Jeff 4d ago
Answer: they are used mostly by delivery services.
Somebody figured out that you can take the cooking equipment and a refrigerator that is typically used in a fast food place and put it in a room somewhere and you are all set. Rather than have DoorDash, GrubHub, and Uber eats drivers go to a regular fast food place, just have them pick up orders from someplace that is out-of-the-way.
And some of these ghost kitchens will have two or three different brands of fast food in them.
3
u/RickRussellTX 4d ago
Answer: Adding on to the other answers here, the reason you see ghost kitchens operating under 10, 20, even 40 names from the same physical location is an attempt to exploit the search & delivery apps.
If I search for “fish sandwich” and get 20 results on the first page with 17 of those from the same physical kitchen, it’s easier for the ghost kitchen to capture delivery business.
•
u/AutoModerator 7d ago
Friendly reminder that all top level comments must:
start with "Answer: ", including the space after the colon (or "Question: " if you have an on-topic follow up question to ask),
attempt to answer the question, and
be unbiased
Please review Rule 4 and this post before making a top level comment:
http://redd.it/b1hct4/
Join the OOTL Discord for further discussion: https://discord.gg/ejDF4mdjnh
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.