This all feels eerily similar to the all the fake products on amazon that are just rebranded versions of the same thing.
In my experience many of these restaurants are all selling the same food. They're buying recipes and ingredients from a big nation supplier like Sysco so you end up getting the food just prepared in a different kitchen.
We've ordered Thai on UberEats and GrubHub from nearly a dozen places and despite different names the food is identical and is flat in flavor.
I've taken to finding real restaurants and picking the food up myself. It's more inconvenient but i'm getting better food for cheaper while building a relationship with a real business.
Brands in and of themselves are worthless when they can be bought and sold like commodities, or simply slapped on existing or even totally different businesses.
That's the definition of a bad brand. A truly good brand cannot be bought and sold in that way, takes decades to earn the trust of its rabid fan base, and with every slight imperfection creates legions of haters that declare the brand 'over'. E.g. Apple. But at the end of the day, Apple earns its margins with its brand, and entirely its brand.
> They're buying recipes and ingredients from a big nation supplier like Sysco...
One sees so much nostalgia among Americans driving across the heartland for "the traditional diner instead of fast food chains where the food is the same everywhere", when in fact so many of those traditional diners are sourcing all their ingredients from Sysco. You can have the exact same eggs or biscuits, for example, in supposedly mom and pop places in state after state.
I think it was already in the mid 20th century that the US lost the diversity of cooking found in some other regions of the world, and so this latest development with ghost kitchens is only continuing a long trend.
Well, the real answer of course is that some of the eaters don't care, at least some of the time.
I love good food and I'm a fairly good cook, but that doesn't stop me from picking up dinner at McDonald's when I just don't feel like cooking. I don't think that the existence of Applebee's proves anything other than sometimes people want to "eat a meal that someone else microwaved."
I think those who are aware of the problem definitely do care. Many people just don't think about it, because they're not old enough to remember a time where the local diner baked its own pies, simmered its own soups, etc..
For me, all my perceptions of food changed when I started traveling outside the United States. Basic staples like bread and soup taste so good in places like Germany and Japan by default, but food of the same quality in the United States would cost $20-30 per plate.
This is a big reason I started cooking at home. The quality simply isn't there in the American restaurants that are affordable to most people, especially outside of big cities.
> For me, all my perceptions of food changed when I started traveling outside the United States. Basic staples like bread and soup taste so good in places like Germany and Japan by default, but food of the same quality in the United States would cost $20-30 per plate.
So, what killed these restaurants in the US? They used to exist. Why did they go away?
My theory is cars. Everything is spread so far apart that local businesses can't rely on foot traffic to spur interest, and a 15-minute driving radius doesn't include all that many people. For many people living in suburbs there's no city center to speak of, and they meet all their needs at the local strip mall full of national and multinational restaurant and grocery chains with name recognition.
Also, it is my understanding that Sysco has a multitude of levels (of ingredients/products): some are crap, some less crap, and some “gourmet” in the processed, mass packaged sense of the word.
I got Applebee's because I know exactly what I'm getting everywhere on the country. If I got to an independent restaurant and get served something similar to Applebee's I'm probably going to choose Applebee's next time. If you can't differentiate yourself from a national chain with economies of scale you're going to be put out of business.
During an enlistment in the US Navy I had the opportunity to visit many exotic (to me) foriegn ports. My goal was to explore authentic local food and culture, but inevitably, the buzz when I got back to the ship was the location of the nearest McDonald's. Some peple just crave consistiency and a "taste of home". Each to their own. If I've spent months to get half way around the planet, I sure as hell want to revel in the experience!
Different McDonald's around the world have different menu items. It's not so different as to make up for reveling in the experience, but it would be mildly interesting.
You can see a version of this by going to https://www.pizzahut.co.in/, https://www.pizzahut.com.hk/en/order, different countries and see what they put on pizza.
My wife and I used to go to a great little restaurant near us. The owner sold and the food drastically got worse. The previous owner spent every single morning at the market picking out fresh meat and produce. The new owner told us her lawyer said that was a liability. They switched to Sysco because they guaranteed the food was safer then buying directly from the growers.
Lol yeah! Witnessed this since about 30 years ago in Germany also. Be it pizzeria, greek restaurant or whatever. Have recognized the people shopping in supermarkets with fully loaded shopping carts carrying the largest available packages. In case of the pizzeria it even was Aldi. I remember wondering about how that would make sense, given the existence of wholesale?
That's interesting. I live in Hawaii, and we have a lot of different Thai restaurants. They are almost all family-owned businesses staffed by people who either first- or second-generation Thai immigrants. Those ones are always the best, and they all serve the same types of dishes but they also all have their unique spin on things.
I haven't been to a lot of Thai restaurants on the mainland, but the few I've been to on the East Coast have all been similarly terrible. I've always wondered just where these places are getting their awful recipes from.
My $0.02 for a good Thai restaurant on the East Coast, crazy as it may seem, is to check and see if they have a picture of the late Thai monarch Rama IX displayed prominently near the coat-check/hostess station/bar. I don't know what it is, but the Thai places who have his picture up are invariably better quality than the ones that don't.
But yeah, Thai food on the West Coast was reliably better.
Well, it's also happening at your local restaurant(s).
Try to attend and "Fancy Food Show" and visit the booths of companies selling to restaurants. You'd be amazed at how streamlined production is from, prepared ingredients, to fully pre-prepared dishes ready-to-be defrosted/heated and served.
I would not be surprised if in the near future 80% of restaurant meals will be ready-to-serve meals.
Occasionally I'll walk in and order food from these places--the people working there always seem surprised that I'm not a DoorDash driver. One place I went had seemingly everything on the menu: Indian curries, fried food and burgers, pasta, bibimbap, donairs, salads, Chinese food. Which to me raises the question: if this is a sustainable and profitable menu for a restaurant to have, why don't we see bigger menus in established sit-down restaurants?
The CF seems like the in restaurant version of the 'ghost kitchen' by associating a combination of related kitchens under the kitchen sink, one stop shop to please everyone, option.
There are some core variations that only require an extra spice mix or a variation of pasta that's easy to keep stocked and share common cooking methods and ingredients with other items that I can get regularly. The salads are where I've personally noticed the most turnover. At least, pre-pandemic when I was still willing to get a salad from them because they were close to the office.
My mum was a restauranteur and I used to crunch the numbers for her on excel when I was a kid. Sit-down restaurants have more operating expenses because they have to pay more for labor for like waiters. People usually only buy certain products (a lot of profits came from some items like dumplings and also wine) which actually bring major profits to a restaurant. It is a lot harder to maintain selling many dishes at the same time because you need to hire more chef/cooks skilled in those dishes and also buy more ingredients and manage those ingredients' lifespan so its much easier to be profitable with a small menu of very profitable dishes or at least easier to cost manage.
Those restaurants have a fixed set of ingredients but many ways to combine them.
Take protein, take vegetables, take carbohydrate, take sauce--cook.
That gives you an explosive number of combinations.
The best dishes at the Chinese restaurants, though, tend to be the ones that aren't in that mold. If the restaurant keeps a dish that isn't a "combinatorics" recipe, there's a reason it stays on the menu.
That is part of it. A
lot of Chinese and Southeast Asian cooking is based on the wok (cut things into small pieces and stir fry at high heat). This lets them cook an entree fast. Others are partly cooked and finished when ordered. Lastly, they work, work, work.
You can actually see this in action at a Japanese togo place I frequent. They precook the chicken and then finish on the grill. The difference between Korean and teriyaki chicken is the sauce they finish it with.
Sweet and sour <insert protein> at Chinese restaurants has the protein cooked first and then finished when ordered with the sauce.
With fried chicken, you fry them earlier and when someone orders it, you fry it again. It’s great because double frying actually makes it crunchier and taste better.
You can mix and match as makes sense (bake chicken then grill them to finish).
If you want a whole <insert animal> it is going to take longer and cost more unless you go to a banquet place. Those banquet places are optimized for that by precooking and by have a few family dinner sets. If you order something outside that, it is going to cost you and take longer to reach your table.
The main exception I would note is American Chinese food, though that's because those menus tend to list every possible combination of a handful of core proteins, sauces, and side dishes.
Matrix menus like that are a clear "menu smell" as well: there's no way random combos like satay salmon actually taste good. In China itself, restaurants are so competitive that they tend to specialize in only a few items.
Storing fresh ingredients for all of those items takes a lot of space; a typical restaurant can't do it. Diners and do it by using canned ingredients from sysco.
Found a really excellent burger place on DoorDash, such that we wanted to find out where it was. Turned out it was the same address as a local steakhouse.
I was kind of wondering if it was the same company pulling double duty or if they were renting use of their kitchen to another company.
Any good tips for unmasking these restaurants, so you know what you're really getting? You can find their address and see what restaurant is listed there, but sometimes that doesn't work for large shopping centers with many restaurants.
Yeah look up the address on google maps and if its still a plausible location, look at the reviews. Guaranteed that a reviewer mentions its delivery-only or not.
Also you should try out finding a restaurant on google maps, then go to your delivery app.
I worked in a food production and delivery startup (meal prep), and while I was constantly surrounded by the 'buzz' of ghost kitchens, a part of me was sure -- absolutely sure -- that this would be a fad.
Why? Simple market dynamics. After 5000 years, the economics of running a traditional restaurant are essentially identical. That's because the lion's share of the value of a restaurant is the repeat and referral business, NOT in discoverability. That's why a fancy restro-bar on Glitzy Avenue shuts down after 3 months. For a good restaurant, the CAC should go to zero over time. The food should sell itself. By adding artificial market dynamics to this equation (mandatory advertising, artificially low unit costs, artificial discovery), you are removing that crucial, critical element, and the food will inevitably suffer. Burgers-R-Us can pay $1 per customer to appear at the top of your feed, serve you a shitty hamburger, then rename to Best Burger, and rinse and repeat.
Eventually consumers will wake up (many already have), and the traditional restaurants will escape with meaningful margins. Of course only a tiny fraction of restaurants that are started turn into surviving businesses, as has been the case since time immemorial.
I'll be back, post-pandemic, for my favorites. Delivery doesn't fulfill my desires.
As a consumer, everything I enjoy getting at a restaurant has three critical properties.
* Hot (or cold; extreme) temperature
* Fresh (IMO: short best by time)
* Annoying to make at home
The exceptions to the first two on this list were already delivery pre-'gig jobs'; pizza and most (American) Chinese food; those kept reasonably well in insulated or even warmed bags.
The last factor might involve the hassle of deep frying, or the need for food specific industrial equipment (like a pizza oven), or even just a ton of ingredients to keep fresh. Something a kitchen selling 50+ of that thing a week can easily accommodate but I can't.
The secret to the best sourdough bread and butter at the fish shop, pre-pandemic? That butter was farm fresh daily because they just used THAT much; and the bread fresh from the oven the same way.
> The exceptions to the first two on this list were already delivery pre-'gig jobs'
IME just about everything that wasn't awful when delivered was already being delivered decades before gig jobs existed. Indian and pizza work well with delivery but things like burgers or anything with a hot component and a salad component just become a soggy luke warm mess. A gourmet salad place is about the only exception I've come across.
The other big advantages of restaurants is that they get to "hide" the calories, if you make the same thing at home you're aware of everything that goes into it and half the time the restaurant version is only better because the amount of fat/sugar they put in things.
>pizza and most (American) Chinese food; those kept reasonably well in insulated or even warmed bags.
I don't necessarily find those to be good examples. A pizza fresh from the oven will steam its delicate crispiness away in a box. The same applies to a fried dumpling.
On the other hand, a non-crisp dish like a vindaloo or a soup will arrive almost entirely unchanged.
When I order anything time-sensitive, I prefer to get it myself. That minimises the amount of time it is sitting (e.g. awaiting a driver). I like to arrive early, so I can take it away as soon as it leaves the kitchen.
After the pandemic is more or less over, consumers will return to restaurants for the experience. These ghost kitchens will continue to shovel mediocre garbage at scale for those Friday nights when you just don't feel like cooking, but Sunday brunch on a patio is an experience you cannot get from delivery.
I think there is room for both the physical and digital experience. Any restaurant who hopes to survive will need to make a choice about who they are, though - are you commodity or an experience? I doubt any can do both well.
The sad reality is that most people just don't give a shit - look at how much whitelabel junk is sold on Amazon to people who don't care. Those same people are the perfect demographic for commodity food delivery - they want some abstracted version of what they think Chinese food is for a reasonable price, delivered to their door.
The real scale of the problem will be when DoorDash et. al merge/acquire themselves a monopoly and push orders to their own entities.
There are food services that are commoditized and physical, they just don't necessarily look like restaurants. Food trucks, the popup at a food hall, hot dog carts, the NY deli, etc. These various forms are commonplace all over the world, they're just less common in parts of America because they were largely made illegal. Here's cops in Texas shutting down a lemonade stand run by two girls: https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/11/politics/lemonade-stand-shut-...
Food delivery, even with all the complaints about how much they skim off the top, how much they underpay drivers, etc. still makes pretty meager margins. And consumers aren't blind to it; I know a lot of people who have grumbled about how much there is in fees.
So I see that this comment and a few others make the point that a great number of people are too lazy/poor/busy to make the distinction between good food and ghost kitchen drivel. I think this is an interesting argument, but in food the cheap end of the spectrum is not some unclaimed territory. There are fast food chains and cheap eats galore. These fast food chains survive by franchising and rabid supply chain optimization. But just because something is cheap and easy does not make it a winner. To build an audience, ghost kitchens have to become trustworthy brands, which they can never do by definition.
In your comment on Amazon, I think the difference is that often times, the white label goods are actually pretty good. So while it’s not branded, the reputation is overall positive, and sometimes these goods come from the exact same factories as the branded goods. While some ghost kitchens are derived from real, high quality restaurants, most of the time it is a distressed business that needs to rebrand or a new entrant of questionable quality.
> So while it’s not branded, the reputation is overall positive.
I agree. Trader Joes has a lot of white label stuff, I'd say I usually have a higher impression of their white labeled products than branded products at the same price range.
Moving isn’t easy so CAC can’t go to zero. The extra a restaurant pays in rent to be on the street with all the restaurants over being a few blocks away is a marketing cost. That cost is where the ghost kitchen finds their competitiveness and the delivery company finds their margin.
They won’t take over. Rents ability to change in the long term means that if ghost kitchens get too popular then restaurants will face less competition for rent and be able to drop prices.
But I don’t see what time immemorial has to do with it. For a long time paying high rent to be on restaurant st was the most effective way for a restaurant to spend their marketing dollars. For a long time buying carriages was the most effective way to spend your transportation dollars.
Its funny to hear doordash ads about supporting local businesses, when they're completely invested in turning them inside out.
A quick look at the doordash careers page shows they're targeting a future of hikikomori that order from restaurants they've never been to and buy from convenience stores that don't actually allow customers in.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadIn my experience many of these restaurants are all selling the same food. They're buying recipes and ingredients from a big nation supplier like Sysco so you end up getting the food just prepared in a different kitchen.
We've ordered Thai on UberEats and GrubHub from nearly a dozen places and despite different names the food is identical and is flat in flavor.
I've taken to finding real restaurants and picking the food up myself. It's more inconvenient but i'm getting better food for cheaper while building a relationship with a real business.
One sees so much nostalgia among Americans driving across the heartland for "the traditional diner instead of fast food chains where the food is the same everywhere", when in fact so many of those traditional diners are sourcing all their ingredients from Sysco. You can have the exact same eggs or biscuits, for example, in supposedly mom and pop places in state after state.
I think it was already in the mid 20th century that the US lost the diversity of cooking found in some other regions of the world, and so this latest development with ghost kitchens is only continuing a long trend.
The question is what level do you source from Sysco?
Source flour, shortening, sugar, etc. and make your own pie or cake. It will still be unique.
Source pie mix or cake mix from Sysco and, yes, you've lost your uniqueness.
The real question: do the eaters care? The continuing existence of places like Applebee's seems answer the question with "Apparently not."
I love good food and I'm a fairly good cook, but that doesn't stop me from picking up dinner at McDonald's when I just don't feel like cooking. I don't think that the existence of Applebee's proves anything other than sometimes people want to "eat a meal that someone else microwaved."
I think those who are aware of the problem definitely do care. Many people just don't think about it, because they're not old enough to remember a time where the local diner baked its own pies, simmered its own soups, etc..
For me, all my perceptions of food changed when I started traveling outside the United States. Basic staples like bread and soup taste so good in places like Germany and Japan by default, but food of the same quality in the United States would cost $20-30 per plate.
This is a big reason I started cooking at home. The quality simply isn't there in the American restaurants that are affordable to most people, especially outside of big cities.
So, what killed these restaurants in the US? They used to exist. Why did they go away?
I got Applebee's because I know exactly what I'm getting everywhere on the country. If I got to an independent restaurant and get served something similar to Applebee's I'm probably going to choose Applebee's next time. If you can't differentiate yourself from a national chain with economies of scale you're going to be put out of business.
No risk? No fun!
I haven't been to a lot of Thai restaurants on the mainland, but the few I've been to on the East Coast have all been similarly terrible. I've always wondered just where these places are getting their awful recipes from.
But yeah, Thai food on the West Coast was reliably better.
Try to attend and "Fancy Food Show" and visit the booths of companies selling to restaurants. You'd be amazed at how streamlined production is from, prepared ingredients, to fully pre-prepared dishes ready-to-be defrosted/heated and served.
I would not be surprised if in the near future 80% of restaurant meals will be ready-to-serve meals.
The future is not what it used to be.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/paxadz/the-surprising-reason...
There are some core variations that only require an extra spice mix or a variation of pasta that's easy to keep stocked and share common cooking methods and ingredients with other items that I can get regularly. The salads are where I've personally noticed the most turnover. At least, pre-pandemic when I was still willing to get a salad from them because they were close to the office.
Take protein, take vegetables, take carbohydrate, take sauce--cook.
That gives you an explosive number of combinations.
The best dishes at the Chinese restaurants, though, tend to be the ones that aren't in that mold. If the restaurant keeps a dish that isn't a "combinatorics" recipe, there's a reason it stays on the menu.
You can actually see this in action at a Japanese togo place I frequent. They precook the chicken and then finish on the grill. The difference between Korean and teriyaki chicken is the sauce they finish it with.
Sweet and sour <insert protein> at Chinese restaurants has the protein cooked first and then finished when ordered with the sauce.
With fried chicken, you fry them earlier and when someone orders it, you fry it again. It’s great because double frying actually makes it crunchier and taste better.
You can mix and match as makes sense (bake chicken then grill them to finish).
If you want a whole <insert animal> it is going to take longer and cost more unless you go to a banquet place. Those banquet places are optimized for that by precooking and by have a few family dinner sets. If you order something outside that, it is going to cost you and take longer to reach your table.
I was kind of wondering if it was the same company pulling double duty or if they were renting use of their kitchen to another company.
Also you should try out finding a restaurant on google maps, then go to your delivery app.
Why? Simple market dynamics. After 5000 years, the economics of running a traditional restaurant are essentially identical. That's because the lion's share of the value of a restaurant is the repeat and referral business, NOT in discoverability. That's why a fancy restro-bar on Glitzy Avenue shuts down after 3 months. For a good restaurant, the CAC should go to zero over time. The food should sell itself. By adding artificial market dynamics to this equation (mandatory advertising, artificially low unit costs, artificial discovery), you are removing that crucial, critical element, and the food will inevitably suffer. Burgers-R-Us can pay $1 per customer to appear at the top of your feed, serve you a shitty hamburger, then rename to Best Burger, and rinse and repeat.
Eventually consumers will wake up (many already have), and the traditional restaurants will escape with meaningful margins. Of course only a tiny fraction of restaurants that are started turn into surviving businesses, as has been the case since time immemorial.
As a consumer, everything I enjoy getting at a restaurant has three critical properties.
The exceptions to the first two on this list were already delivery pre-'gig jobs'; pizza and most (American) Chinese food; those kept reasonably well in insulated or even warmed bags.The last factor might involve the hassle of deep frying, or the need for food specific industrial equipment (like a pizza oven), or even just a ton of ingredients to keep fresh. Something a kitchen selling 50+ of that thing a week can easily accommodate but I can't.
The secret to the best sourdough bread and butter at the fish shop, pre-pandemic? That butter was farm fresh daily because they just used THAT much; and the bread fresh from the oven the same way.
IME just about everything that wasn't awful when delivered was already being delivered decades before gig jobs existed. Indian and pizza work well with delivery but things like burgers or anything with a hot component and a salad component just become a soggy luke warm mess. A gourmet salad place is about the only exception I've come across.
The other big advantages of restaurants is that they get to "hide" the calories, if you make the same thing at home you're aware of everything that goes into it and half the time the restaurant version is only better because the amount of fat/sugar they put in things.
I don't necessarily find those to be good examples. A pizza fresh from the oven will steam its delicate crispiness away in a box. The same applies to a fried dumpling.
On the other hand, a non-crisp dish like a vindaloo or a soup will arrive almost entirely unchanged.
When I order anything time-sensitive, I prefer to get it myself. That minimises the amount of time it is sitting (e.g. awaiting a driver). I like to arrive early, so I can take it away as soon as it leaves the kitchen.
It's not a coincidence that companies like Domino's specialize in spongy dough.
I think there is room for both the physical and digital experience. Any restaurant who hopes to survive will need to make a choice about who they are, though - are you commodity or an experience? I doubt any can do both well.
The sad reality is that most people just don't give a shit - look at how much whitelabel junk is sold on Amazon to people who don't care. Those same people are the perfect demographic for commodity food delivery - they want some abstracted version of what they think Chinese food is for a reasonable price, delivered to their door.
The real scale of the problem will be when DoorDash et. al merge/acquire themselves a monopoly and push orders to their own entities.
Food delivery, even with all the complaints about how much they skim off the top, how much they underpay drivers, etc. still makes pretty meager margins. And consumers aren't blind to it; I know a lot of people who have grumbled about how much there is in fees.
In your comment on Amazon, I think the difference is that often times, the white label goods are actually pretty good. So while it’s not branded, the reputation is overall positive, and sometimes these goods come from the exact same factories as the branded goods. While some ghost kitchens are derived from real, high quality restaurants, most of the time it is a distressed business that needs to rebrand or a new entrant of questionable quality.
I agree. Trader Joes has a lot of white label stuff, I'd say I usually have a higher impression of their white labeled products than branded products at the same price range.
They won’t take over. Rents ability to change in the long term means that if ghost kitchens get too popular then restaurants will face less competition for rent and be able to drop prices.
But I don’t see what time immemorial has to do with it. For a long time paying high rent to be on restaurant st was the most effective way for a restaurant to spend their marketing dollars. For a long time buying carriages was the most effective way to spend your transportation dollars.
* https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/recreate-the-menu-of-p...
* 2d ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26210774
Though probably more akin to street/fast food:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopolium
A quick look at the doordash careers page shows they're targeting a future of hikikomori that order from restaurants they've never been to and buy from convenience stores that don't actually allow customers in.
https://www.doordash.com/careers/