How do ghost kitchens work?
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a lot of people are putting forward the notion that ghost kitchens are a separate set of employee’s operating in a kitchen during its off hours. That could possibly be the case in some places, but I’ve personally never seen this before; its always just an additional menu the current kitchen staff adds to their workload.
There are two kinds of ghost kitchens.
One is kitchen space that is rented and used to deliver food. It’s just a kitchen with no space for people to eat and isn’t a full restaurant.
The other is an established restaurant that uses its kitchen to spin up additional businesses and serve more of the same food or test other types of food.
Both start with a menu online and the appearance of a new restaurant. You buy like you would from anywhere, the food is picked up and delivered to you, and you have no idea it came from a warehouse or different established restaurant.
There are pros and cons for both, and sadly most implementations are not better for us as the buyers of food. The biggest problem is dishonesty. Most ghost kitchens are marketed as new restaurants, and they aren’t, so people don’t know what they are buying.
For example, Dennys. For me, Dennys is a low tier place to get food outside of breakfast. I would never order a steak from Dennys, but they do sell them. Dennys can make up a steakhouse online, typically charge more, and sell you steak. And it works, you think you’re buying from a steakhouse, then Denny’s bags shows up at your house. You’ve been tricked.
So now Dennys sees a bump in sales and profit, but people are furious they are being tricked and review bomb the steakhouse. So Denny’s closes their fake online steakhouse, changes the name, and puts it back up. They are a new steakhouse again, none of the bad reviews stick to them. And worst of all, the online delivery places encourage this behavior as it increases their sales and deliveries.
An easy way to check this is all these places do report on the address the store is. Throw that address into google before you buy, see what you’re actually paying for.
I work at Chilis and our ghost kitchen is It’s Just Wings. We basically sell the same wings we sell if you get them from our restaurant, just different prices and different bags. It’s only available with DoorDash though.
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