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!
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.
Before that, of course, the fish and chip shop is an ancient institution, though they rarely delivered.
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".
>>"food someone would actually order, even if it was teleported to them instantly".
The article states >>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.
I'm not sure if it was impossible or if management never actually prioritized it, not bothering to understand what an actual customer would want. How much of it is the stupid management assumption that they can "just make a dish generally meeting description X on the menu" and deliver that and it'll be ok? «— Real question, did mgt fail at the product specification level, or was QC just as a practical matter, impossible?
On the economics, it really seems 30% for delivery is insane. It seems that same 30% might exceed the cost of the physical restaurant. And when it adds a 15-45min delay while homogenizing and cooling the meal, it seems an impossible problem. Maybe if the 30% transported it instantly and losslessly...
Probably good this soulless idea will die. Too bad so much perfectly good capital was squandered on it instead of better ideas
And this is how it works in many (not all) American airports. Local restaurants put their brands on the signs, but the food is prepared by probationary employees of Acme Baggage Displacement And Cafeteria Management Corp.
But the airport newsstands that are just someone selling candy in a room with the name of a random local newspaper are an interesting local sight.
One of my favorite dumpling shops in Brooklyn just had 2 tables... everyone just carried it out and back to home / work. And I think it worked well for them.
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.
Are you sure they're not?
So some places are optimizing their fries for delivery.
I've also noticed some restaurants are better at adapting the packaging, like punching out ventilation so fried products don't steam themselves in transit. Lawrence Seafood (which rules) did that for a side of tempura we got this weekend.
But I agree in large part. I wouldn't order fried chicken delivered via door dash in any event. People doing that are optimizing for something other than quality.
This was an example of a well functioning ghost kitchen. I don’t know how profitable they were, but it was very convenient. There are a lot of downsides to this approach, like pre ordering, reheating, and limited menu, but it was a very different approach to current ghost kitchens around me now or DoorDash from a local restaurant.
People have really funny ideas about restaurants. Somebody once left an online review of my family's establishment complaining about the fact that the hot chicken that was supposed to be on their cold to-go salad was in a separate container. They asserted that it was a "trick" to keep the chicken warm and moist, as though it would have been better to let the hot poultry heat their salad in the same container until it was lukewarm meat on top of wilted greens. Every day I wake up and mourn the IQ point that I lost reading it.
People are dumb.... but only for so long. I've been burnt so many times by delivery I've gone back to mostly ordering pizza and picking it up in person.
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.
> No ownership. No accountability. Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers.
> No loyal regulars. No servers to smooth over problems. Just angry reviews that destroyed virtual brands forever.
Pretty common pattern these days.
That, plus the hashtags at the end (unless Substack uses those and I was unaware of it), plus the fact that we know he's using AI in some capacity because of the feature images - it's a reasonable conclusion to draw.
What does that even mean? Sell an NFT image of a burger?
The kinda thing a regular restaurant is probably managing using a spreadsheet and a notebook.
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.
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.
JohnFen•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Copy the address into your maps app and look it up on street view.
kjkjadksj•1h ago
MangoToupe•30m ago