Our Ghost Kitchen Future
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Ie, zoning oversupplies parking spaces relative to commercial real estate, and so if you can put your business in a "van" and "park" it, you get to use land for cheap.
The article alludes to this ("Parking lots have long been attractive sites for urban designers, many of whom see them as wasteful, inefficient land banks."), but doesn't quite draw the connection.
If this wasn't required to be a public-transportation-providing parking lot most of the time, it would instead be some hyper-expensive privately-owned-and-operated building, just like the hundreds of other buildings in the city.
Buildings that Reef can't afford or use, and that most restaurants could not sustainably afford to operate within.
The fact that this land is used "inefficiently" is a feature, not a bug. It puts a soft-cap on the possible land value, which retains that land to be used temporarily in good ways. Without that cap, the land would just be permanently wasted in bad ways, because any good use would never be able to afford it.
If you look at places that have less regulation (or governments which have made this a more conscious priority) or the rent/land ownership structure is different, there are tons of little mom-pop restaurants that can survive situations like this. I'm all for regulation -- when necessary -- but even I can see that local licensing (as Obama administration acknowledged) is hindering affordability of industries where regulation has come to serve only local interests.
Look to Southeast Asia, even some parts of Europe. Hole in the wall restaurants can make it, because rent is cheap, they don't have city inspectors coming to ding you on fire supression equipment that is 2 inches out of spec. (Also, they don't have waiters and hosts other than the owners) There are food centers set up to foster small restaurants all located together in a high demand area, where the infrastructure is shared and standardized. In Italy, Spain -- restaurants run for generations in corners of small apartment blocks and aren't in fear of getting evicted for a chain.
If we want our cities to look like and cultivate a certain desireable feature, we need to put active work into fixing the things that disincentivize it in small daily doses. Otherwise it's crappy Panera Breads for everyone.
This is because food is cheap, salaries are cheap, and no one is reporting these guys for selling you rat that's labelled as chicken.
Plus, on average, most small businesses fail in ~5 years, not just restaurants (though they tend to fail extra hard).
This seems unnecessarily hyperbolic and maligning of Southeast Asians. Some of the best food in the world is in South East Asia, and even in less regulated places, no one serves inedible food. Market forces work even those places, and food places that are bad will naturally fail.
Restaurants have strict sanitary rules, what are the ones for parking-based-kitchens? From the article and the company's website, Reef looks like a business making the parking spot next to your flat a source of nuisances (the smell of frying out, the noise of a kitchen) while offering yet another way to make people pay a premium on warmed up frozen food.
> The Power of Proximity™.... We are creating a network of neighborhood hubs to bring you the goods and services you want, faster than ever before.
>But, for now, customers may find themselves paying a premium for meals similar to those found at a fast-food restaurant, or in a supermarket freezer.
>Reef’s kitchens are registered as mobile food facilities, which tend to have fewer permitting requirements.
>The branding and food are real, but the restaurants do not exist elsewhere in the physical world.
I can't say I'm exactly thrilled about another "disrupting" another couple of industries. The take up parking and seemingly tiptoe around regulations only to provide mediocre cookie cutter dishes via fake restaurants? I'll have to pass.
And what makes these fake restaurants? These are cheap spaces where entrepreneurial chefs who could never afford to start a full restaurant can open a delivery restaurant and start selling food quickly. They can still develop a name and a brand for themselves via delivery just like any restaurant could. Why does it have to be mediocre food? Surely some amazing food will come out of spaces like this.
Once you're at that point getting take-out isn't about getting better food for a special occasion, it's paying for something better than frozen that you don't have to cook. Ordering take-out is a function of how tired I am, not the quality of food I want.
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery"
- Chinese Yum! Yum!
- Szechwings
- Kuri Sashimi Bowls
- Send Noods Pho
- Veggie Stir Fry House
- Sushi Sendai
- Panang Panang! Thai Curry
- Save the Fish Vegetarian Sushi
- Fire Ass Thai
I don't know if I believe that this is a problem (beyond the usual kinds of problems in restaurants) and I'm mostly curious about how the logistics are managed. is there a wall of iPads so each "restaurant" front gets all its own orders on one? does whatever company that facilitates this kind of thing provide a solution where manifold orders can come in on a more traditional kitchen display system with some flag added for which "restaurant" it belongs to?
making the various menus work doesn't seem like as big of a challenge: the majority of the client restaurants are offering whole subsets of the host restaurant's menu or food easily reconstructed from those items.
It does rather defeat Yelp or other attempts at reviews if "restaurants" can be spun up and down like AWS VMs. I suppose the limit case would be personalised restaurants, where everyone thinks they're ordering from a slightly different customised-for-them place but which all come from the same kitchen.
I guess the parasocial relationships are the next thing to automate?
Already had those -- the frozen-grill trend of the 90s, aka the TGIFridays, Bennigan's, Applebees, etc. With COVID they just ditched sit-down part and went straight to delivery.
In my experience, a restaurant with a large menu is a sure sign of mediocre food. It's like when you order Thai cuisine at a Chinese restaurant - you end up getting sweet and spicy Chinese food.
When you have so many menu items, how do you ensure consistency and train cooks how to prepare the recipes?
My guess is short term it’s a matter of checklists with largely common underlying ingredients. Or perhaps everything is prepackaged and unfrozen upon order. (The larger the menu, the more likely the former)
If there's demand for higher quality food, then I'm confident the doomsday scenario of "all the real restaurants go out of business" is not going to happen. We just might have to wait a little longer for delivery or travel a few more minutes to get to such a place.
This Twitter account gives you a fun look at what we don't have to deal with anymore, thank god: https://twitter.com/70s_party?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcam...
ETA: In case this isn't clear, what I'm trying to say is that sometimes powerful economic forces can provide us with deeply suboptimal results. It would be an objectively bad thing if every good pizza place in my city went out of business and got replaced with Freschetta. But it really could happen.
That would just mean that the people prefer Freschetta. It's not like it's going to replace every single good pizza place by getting little to nobody's business, in your scenario where it replaces all restaurants it's going to get all the business because everyone wants lower priced shitty frozen pizza; and that's why these thought experiments are a stretch.
As long as there's still people willing to pay more for a better pizza, there will still be kitchens providing them, and if no one's doing it, that is your cue to open or invest in one and get some of that business yourself.
I’m not opposed to the idea of ghost kitchens in theory, but in practice, the food is almost always mediocre and the costs are designed around being able to profit alongside the fee-laden third-party delivery service model.
That means optimizing your food and labor costs and spamming a million different types of restaurants so you can try to attract a wide swath of customers.
For the end user, it means paying a ridiculous premium (especially once all the delivery fees, city-specific fees (at least with Uber Eats in Seattle), handling fees, driver tip) to get poor-quality food that definitely tastes like it went from freezer to flash fryer, delivered — and usually delivered lukewarm at best. No thanks.
Restaurants are already suffering right now and I’m sympathetic to actual kitchens who are trying to traverse a pandemic while also being fleeced by external delivery companies (it is unrealistic for most non-pizza restaurants outside of a densely populated area like New York City to employ their own drivers/bike delivery folks), particularly since I don’t cook — but as a consumer, I avoid all ghost kitchens at all costs. If I’m going to pay too much for delivery, I want it to at least be real food.
usually when a restaurant has a large menu, each dish is just some combination of a relatively small set of ingredients. like if you go to a typical pizza/sub place, they'll have a cheesesteak, steak sub (cheesesteak with no chees), italian cheesesteak (cheesesteak with marinara sauce), and a chicken cheesesteak. each will be available with your choice of toppings, most of which are also ingredients for the salad options or toppings for pizza. the total number of combinations is huge, but it's really not hard to consistently make a bunch of variations on the same core idea. chinese takeout is the same deal; three or four protein options combined with a bunch of different sauces/vegetables. having a large menu shows a lack of creativity/focus, but the way they're constructed makes it pretty easy to train cooks how to make them consistently.
The latter. Chowly, Deliverect, etc are solutions to manage the plethera of tablets.
https://www.sysco.com/Products/Products/Product-Categories.h... https://www.usfoods.com/great-food.html
It's just another one of the ways life is getting a tiny bit harder. Before if "Fire Ass Thai" sucked then I won't order from them again and I'd try "Panang Panang! Thai Curry" next time. Now I gotta put the effort into disentangling this web of restaurants to find one that might not suck.
>That "Cloud Kitchens" enterprise is a dystopian horror show, too. It means that Kalanick and the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund own the first part of restaurant take-out -- the menu and online ordering; they own the third part -- delivery; and now they also own the second part -- actually making the food. The "restaurant", at that point, is just a brand logo. Their sweatshops make the same food for everybody and paste whatever name on it. The restaurant isn't even a franchise at that point. It's a sticker.
These are rental spaces, just like almost every restaurant in the world operates out of. How is it a sweatshop or anything close to a franchise if someone starts their own restaurant under their own brand with their own menu and rents kitchen space to work/deliver out of?
Say you want to eat steaks tonight. You go to your fancy restaurant, and order up your $50 filet mignon. The waiter put in the order on his terminal, and it gets relayed to a cloud kitchen 5 miles away.
There, the order is received. A Food Technician pull out the raw meat, cook it, then package it for delivery inside a heating container to keep the food warm.
Then, it is handed off to an Uber driver to deliver it to the restaurant. Delivery time is about 7 minutes.
The restaurant receives the food, and the local food technician unpackages it, does a final Quality Control check to make sure it’s not raw, and is cooked to specifications, then he re-plates it on a nice plate, with some garnish for the final touch.
Your filet mignon is now served, to your exacting specifications: medium rare. Along with an expensive bottle of vintage red wine.
Same goes for any other fancy restaurant, serving say seafood linguini, or anything else. It’s cooked at a food factory, and delivered to your plate, hot to the touch. You wouldn’t even know the difference.
And in the future, instead of using an Uber driver, the food will be delivered by aerial delivery drones. Over time, you’ll end up seeing drones criss crossing the skies above a city, just delivering hot and freshly prepared meals to fancy restaurants and eateries.
No more need for the restaurant to hire a dedicated cook. Instead, they’ll use the services of a centralized cook, that is busy every single minute.
Then, over time, even the cloud kitchen cooks will get automated out, and replaced with a robotic cook. And the cloud kitchen will hire a Quality Control technician to watch over the cooking robots.
Then the entire process is automated. The food packaging technician is replaced with a food packaging robot. Then the food package is automatically attached to the delivery drone, and sent off. Then it lands at the restaurant on a specialized receiving platform, which accepts the food package, and puts it on a shelf for the waiter to pick up, and serve to the customer.
Dystopian indeed. Perfect for the post-pandemic world.
What’s interesting is that this is, in part, a response to things that aren’t as fast as the (increasingly online) marketplace itself, like finding a suitable storefront for a restaurant, building out a commercial kitchen, and all of the waiting for permits and licenses, which together impose a number of risks on a new business.
I find it hilarious there is even such a publication. Over the years I have read about other, similar hilarious ones, but I forgot which.
Emphasis mine.
Parking is a ten-billion dollar industry in the US alone. Doesn't surprise me that it can support a magazine. How many magazines do you see that are part of much smaller niches?
https://magazine.parkingtoday.com/issues/ParkingToday2020-07...
Even them are touched by the BLM protests and the editorial ask unsurely if parking can be racist?
http://www.theplumbingmuseum.org/
Where is it located? Watertown, MA. Where else?
N.B. I haven't been, and they're closed at the moment (presumably for the same reason as everybody else).
If you make it there and haven't had your fill of water-related museums, there's also the pumping station at Chestnut Hill:
https://waterworksmuseum.org/about/
They have 3 large steam engines that pumped water in the Boston area for the better part of a century. I have been to this one, and it's amazing.
And, more on-topic, Restaurateur Magazine, with an ad for "Sizzle! Paint-on Char Marks for any meat, for that fresh-from-the-grill look!"
(Names of magazines and products approximate; but I'm sure about "BarfClean".)
Actually, maybe I don't really want to know.
Are people that bad at peeing that there's a need for urine remover in extra as well as regular strength?!
Products like that aren't for when someone pees on the toilet. It's for when someone's toddler pisses in the corner or an incontinent elderly person has an accident. The supplier probably only stocks the extra strength one because for "regular" urine removal normal janitorial products are used. The special stuff only comes out when piss is somewhere it really shouldn't be and needs to be as gone as possible as fast as possible. Given the choice between the $10 bottle and the $20 bottle that supposedly works better most commercial customers are gonna opt for the latter for that use case so that's what the supplier stocks.
Personal favourites were ones specifically for hotel designers, packaged food companies, airline service suppliers, and boat builders.
If you ever want a reminder about the scope of opportunity there is in the world, look for the niche industry magazines. They're a delight.
Stage 2: Plenty of adverts. It's not like a company making car park barriers is advertising in the New York Times.
Stage 3: Profit
At least, that's my theory as to how there are so many different rail industry magazines...