Comment by ikety
8 hours ago
I hate industrial/ghost kitchens so much. Accidentally ordered from one with friends and it was so off-putting.
Could see the kitchen areas through a window and they weren't necessarily dirty, but looked sketchy for some reason. Few people, robots delivering orders, one set of cooks making the food. Just dystopian.
We might as well just build ready to eat food factories that pipe the slop directly into your house. We got rid of the "inconvenience" of going out to eat and enjoying a restaurant. Why not get rid of the pesky delivery middle-man too?
Look up commissary kitchens. A ton of food is made that way, and I don’t see it as being all that different.
And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).
Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?
Many resstaurants are just heating up frozen portions delivered from Sysco or similar providers anyway.
A restaurant with a physical presence with dine in service has a reputation to maintain, a ‘cloud kitchen’ food seller does not have the same reputation to worry about.
Every restaurant and ghost kitchen has a reputation to uphold. They all still have customers, and those customers still chat with other people and leave reviews just like it's still 2010.
It can be easier to rebrand a ghost kitchen than to rejigger a restaurant to do other things, though. For instance: The decor doesn't even exist, much less match a certain theme.
A ghost kitchen can also do many things at once that would not traditionally fit together in a single restaurant.
I think that might be part of what some find off-putting, but there's no conceptual reason why the same location can't make awesome New Haven wood-fired pizzas, Texas smoked beef ribs, and Philly cheesesteak sandwiches on the same day. It can work as long as the volume supports each of them well-enough that they can retain workers who are able to master these things well-enough to keep a good reputation going.
It's just a building with a kitchen, and that kitchen does not have a size limit. It can do many styles of cooking at once.
And when compared to having several different sit-down restaurants to operate, management can be more-centralized while also keeping them closer to the work. This can improve quality and reduce costs.
(That doesn't make me a fan of the idea. I'd rather go to a restaurant and sit down than have anything delivered, aside from things that travel well. Pizza, BBQ, and cold subs can travel extremely well, for instance, while french fries and burgers usually turn into sadness in minutes. But other people want whatever they want and that's fine too.)