Ghost kitchens are dying

Anecdotal: Due to lifestyle factors, in my family we use Ubereats often, probably 4-5 orders per week on average.

I have never placed an order from a restaurant that I don't actually know beforehand. Maybe I haven't been there in person, but I know the name of the restaurant and I remember where is it and maybe someone I know ate there.

The only time I go completely blind is if I'm traveling. But that's like 1-2% of my total orders. And, in that case I usually stick to known chains or maybe I ask what's a good restaurant around here, then find it in the app.

I suspect it's not so uncommon to order from restaurants one already knows, rather than taking risks?

If that's the case, then ghost kitchens are going to have a very hard time getting their slice of the market

The points the article make come close to my gripe with ghost kitchens but don't quite cover it:

they feel like scams and when I've accidentally ordered from a ghost kitchen it was by design a terrible experience.

I'm talking like, you order a 15$ main that is called "creamy pasta with prosicutto" and when it shows up its buttered spaghetti with a couple stamp-sized bits of ham. Ordering from actual restaurants come with some of the downsides the article assigns to ghost kitchens, like cold food and weird presentation, but ghost kitchens never seemed to reach the bar of "food someone would actually order, even if it was teleported to them instantly".

It would be really nice to have a tag on HN to filter out LLM-generated, or at least partly AI-generated content like this.

If an article makes it to the front page despite being AI-generated it probably has some interesting points or ideas, but it's unfortunate that people seeem to choose the speed and style of LLM writing over the individual style and choice that made the writing of yesteryear more interesting and unique.

Asimov was fond of the trope that the future was starved of protein, and even america had become a land where people had to eat communally, and eat significant amounts of manufactured "zymoveal" protein, because real meat was scarce under population/land pressure. It was clear that "people didn't like it"

Oddly, "cafeteria" cooking has sometimes been the best food I've eaten at the time. It very much depends on the circumstances and budget and your expectations. I've eaten like this in Leeds, London, Rome, France, Beijing. And not always in universities, the experience extends to factories, railways and even just the streetscape.

The FSU had a preference for ground meat and sausages at a state level because it was easier to ensure as much as possible of the meat inputs became food outputs. The Khrushchev flats had communal kitchens. They were universally hated I believe.

Ghost kitchens failed on lack of regulation and motivation to be the best they could be. There was never an intention to be "Jamie Oliver's ghost kitchen"

Re-intermediating consumers away from direct food carries on. Uber eats and Panda are delivering food from restaurants all around me, and one of them is a chinese take-away eponymously called "A Chinese Take Away" -I think it's a hack on the search engine carried forward. I've eaten their floating market soup in the shop, it's fine. Most of their trade is carry-out.

I believe all of this but:

Food that travels well requires different recipes, different ingredients, different packaging.

This doesn't ring true, given the popularity of DoorDash and the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.

Having lower-quality multitasking staff serving multiple restaurants from the same prep and equipment seems like an obvious way to lose quality. But simply streamlining the process of getting a menu onto delivery? That seems like a solved problem.

The emergence of ghost kitchens, more than anything else, is what got me to stop using food delivery services. They made it impossible for me to have enough trust, so I switched back to ordering from real restaurants that I physically go to.

When I worked for Dominos in the late 80s, it was a lot like this sounds. No dining room, though customers could walk in and order in a small vestibule. The place was as efficient as possible, just ringing phones, an assembly line, cooler and ovens, storage and cleaners in the back, and delivery drivers running in and out.

There seems to be something special about pizza that sets it apart from everything else, that made it seem reasonable to order it delivered from a non-restaurant even back then.

They grew during the pandemic, for obvious reasons. Now that that's over, it's no surprise that they're dying off.

The main issue was that they relied on food delivery to sustain its model. I’m not going to pay $50 in food and $20 in tips and fees. Like anyone sane, I call in my order and pick it up myself. This idea died because of this missing link. I would entertain it if you have a pickup booth in a lobby.

> Quality control became impossible. Shared kitchen facilities meant that one staff member prepared food for multiple brands simultaneously. No ownership. No accountability. Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers. When food arrived cold or wrong, customers had no relationship with the brand to forgive mistakes. No loyal regulars. No servers to smooth over problems. Just angry reviews that destroyed virtual brands forever. No reason for repeat business.

That's a straight quality control problem. It ought to be solveable.

But that's hard to do.

The trouble is, the whole food app industry is based on someone else dealing with the hard problems. The drivers aren't employees, and the restaurants aren't employees. If an app company gets into ghost kitchens, they are now in a business where they are clueless. Some try to avoid being responsible for the food by just being landlords for people who buy a station in the kitchen

Bulk food prep is a solved problem. Every major hotel has it solved. There will be some senior people who went to a serious culinary academy. They look at food prep as a manufacturing problem, with batch quantity optimization, holding time limits, error tolerances on temperatures and quantities, and quality control points. It's factory planning.

The first "Doordash Kitchen", in Silicon Valley, is near me. It's still operating, but I don't see many drivers there.

> When food travels twenty minutes in a bag, quality suffers.

You'd think that would be a solved problem in packaging and prep by now. Insulated containers are not rocket science.

For traditional restaurants, what percentage of orders are for delivery (using Doordash, etc)? Excluding pickups where the customer comes and picks it up himself.

I can't imagine it's even close to 50%.

I don't know the patterns of regular folks, but for me the prices in general have crept up enough that's it rare I want to try some new place - unless I get multiple strong personal recommendations for it. You can forget about paying extra for delivery to home!

> The company then announced it would sell or close every remaining physical location and pivot to "software only".

What does that even mean? Sell an NFT image of a burger?