[joshstrange]

I absolutely hate ghost kitchens, I think they should have to be labeled as such since they are often only a step at best above straight up scams. The 2 times I accidently ordered from one ("Oh nice, I didn't know we got an X nearby") the food has been below subpar and generally a huge disappointment.

These days I really hate using delivery apps. You have to dodge the ghost kitchens which isn't easy (both the fake brand name ones and the fake made-up restaurants like "It's just Wings", "F*cking Good Pizza", and "Super Mega Dilla"), you have to compare the DoorDash/GrubHub/UberEats prices to the restaurant's app prices to see which it the better deal (sometimes even if they use DoorDash for the actual delivery it's cheaper to buy through their app), and unless you are paying for the monthly/yearly subscription you can get fleeced on fees even after wading through all the bullshit to find real restaurants that have real storefronts in town.

[leros]

There's nothing inherently wrong with ghost kitchens. A restaurant that only serves food for delivery is completely valid.

The problem is when existing restaurants pretend they're a ghost kitchen. You order from a cool new chicken wing restaurant and get an order from Chilies. You order from a new pizza restaurant and get a box that says Chuck E Cheese on it. That's just purely deceptive.

The other thing I see is the same crap food getting sold by a variety of names that are constantly coming and going.

So yeah, I was originally in love with the idea of ghost kitchens. We have so many good creative food trucks where I live and I thought we'd get good creative ghost kitchens, but instead you get tricked into buying a burger from Hooters.

[joshstrange]

That's the thing, I know there are 2-3 kinds of "ghost kitchen". The kind that is a real brand being sold out of a different restaurant, the fake brands sold out of a regular restaurant, and the fake/real brands sold out of a mixed kitchen that only does delivery.

Of all of those the 3rd is the only one that I'm even slightly ok with but I feel like the incentives for these kitchens don't favor the customers and it's just a race to the bottom of using the cheapest/crappiest ingredients to make a quick buck. I don't believe there are any "delivery-only, multi-brand kitchens" in my city (yet) but there are a ton of real and fake brands being sold out of other kitchens and the results less than stellar. I think the chicken tenders I got from one them would have better if I had made frozen chicken tenders in the oven verses what I got.

I too was intrigued by the ghost kitchen idea when it first came out but so far from what I've seen it's the worst of all worlds. The quality sucks and they can easily just rebrand under a new fake name after burning their reputation. Again, the incentives are pretty gross when you think about it and I won't support it.

[leros]

We have some actually legitimate ghost kitchens where I live that are good. We also have some shared kitchen spaces where you can pickup or order delivery from a bunch of different restaurants with a single order. It's just hard to find them in the delivery apps since those are flooded with the corporate fake ghost kitchens.

[trynewideas]

I was furious with ghost kitchens as soon as I saw REEF carts pop up in Portland even before the pandemic. These things were wrecking local food carts from the start, taking good walk-up locations to serve delivery drivers but not walk-up customers, hiring away cooks from restaurants during a labor shortage with typical startup overinflated wages that they cut as soon as the business hit any bumps, and data-harvesting information about people and neighborhoods from transaction data.

There is no good long-term result from ghost kitchens. The pandemic handed them a crowbar and they've wedged themselves into the landscape, and co-op/commissary kitchens are starting to push back, but now it's an infestation. There are fucking Wendy's ghost carts in my neighborhood now.

[LorenPechtel]

Yeah, there was a local place that went delivery-only when Covid came. They wanted to remain in business but they were Chinese and didn't want to take the risk.

(And it turns out that the owner had been playing games with the IRS and some other government stuff. He's in jail, all their places are gone.)

[antifa]

> You order from a new pizza restaurant and get a box that says Chuck E Cheese on it.

Do they actually do this? I at least expect the fake brand's name or generic brand. If it says Chuck-e-cheese I'd claim order never arrived.

[ac29]

Chuck E Cheese does operate a ghost kitchen brand: https://www.pasquallyspizza.com/

[Ekaros]

I wonder if it would make sense to actually report those clear cases to owners of trademarks.