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Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

I just can't believe that aggregator sites would be gamed by bad actors... Shocked, I tell you.

Also, on all of these delivery services I desperately just want a "no cloud kitchens" option. I want to support local businesses — actual restaurants. It's annoying having to research any new place I want to try to make sure it's not operated out of the back side of some warehouse.

(Also: "Curate," don't aggregate. It's a little more expensive and requires actual knowledge, which is why no one wants to do it. But then you actually become a service people can trust.)

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Many so-called cloud kitchens are independent restaurants, though. I see ads for ghost kitchen spaces a lot because I was a chef. They're essentially office buildings with commercial kitchen space instead of office space, and a unified ticket/pickup area for customers and drivers. They're often housed in industrial areas that see little negative impact from their presence since they do most of their business outside of business hours, and around me at least, are the cheapest way to break into the "restaurant" business.

The model has been tainted by larger chains (e.g. Chili's, Chuck E. Cheeze) notoriously branding multiple menus to look like indie places for online orders, and bigger quick-serve franchises (e.g. McDonalds) doing standalone delivery-only build-outs in cheaper neighborhoods that could probably benefit from an actual restaurant, but instead just get the traffic and smells. It's too bad because I think the ghost kitchen tenant model is a clever way to share resources for folks just starting out.

Here's one I got a bunch of ads for when they first opened up and I lived nearby.

https://bathfoodco.com/#order

I live in a place where in-person restaurants are an important part of the culture and community. Even when I order food, I want to support those places.

I respect that operating out of a warehouse might be a way to break into the restaurant business, but it’s also a way to suck money away from more valuable institutions. And I don’t really have the energy to figure out which it is. (And I have had enough shitty experiences with cloud kitchens that frankly I want to avoid all of them.)

Around here if you want to pilot a restaurant idea you get a food truck.

Usually people's motivations for ordering in are entirely different than going out to eat. If their importance was tied to their having neighborhood storefronts, wouldn't their primary competition be other storefront businesses in the neighborhood? Are they not sustainably serving their purpose as such? Why wouldn't you support them in person? Also, ordering using online services probably hits their bottom line harder than any given competing business across town.

Food trucks are as or more expensive to run than brick-and-mortar restaurants. Electricity is a lot more expensive coming from a generator, propane is a lot more expensive than natural gas, legally required commissary kitchens are less expensive to rent than brick and mortar restaurants but offer vastly less for what you pay, you can't purchase ingredients in the same quantity or store the same amount of prepped product because of limited storage in a commissary, lack of full-scale dishwashing facilities on the truck means relying on disposables, local laws and tight commissary access logistics might make it impractical or impossible to use unserved food left at the end of the day on your truck, your cooking schedule is tightly constrained by those who share your commissary and might be unpredictable if some of them do event-based business which is murder for planning and labor, your business is tightly coupled to the weather, etc. etc. etc. You're just swapping one set of operating expenses out for another. Not even in the same ballpark as opening a ghost kitchen.

A pop-up in another restaurant or unused restaurant space with a profit sharing or rental agreement is the only cheaper way to start out, but it's not sustainable, and at that point, you're pretty damn close to a ghost kitchen, anyway.

I think you're aiming your reasonable distaste for corporate entities at indie ghost kitchens when they don't deserve it.

Maybe what we really want is an “independent and locally owned” option on these apps. I’m just as disinterested in corporate ghost kitchen pop ups as I am high end chains that venture capitalists have money in.

I’m still with the OP, though, since I think that option would filter out 90% of ghost kitchens.

It really depends on where you are. About 90% of the ghost kitchens in my city are independently owned because about 95% of the restaurants that offer delivery are independently owned. Also, I've yet to see an actual unbranded corporate pop-up, let alone one that offered delivery. Maybe you mean an alternate menu produced in a corporate restaurant operating under a different brand?

This could be SF specific, but I mean whatever comes out of CloudKitchens [1] and the like, regardless of whether or not CK calls its ghost restaurants “independent contractors” or “small business owners” or whatever.

1. https://cloudkitchens.com/locations/san-francisco-bay-area

Whatever comes out is what... Corporate? The tenants highlighted on that page seem independent. Their copy entirely targets independent small vendors. I've seen one or two franchises operate from them but we're talking single digit percentages.

A successful independent restaurant gets a 2 or 3 percent profit margin. Big name restaurants get a lot more than that. They've got a plan, workshopped broadly appealing products, and name recognition that gets butts in seats even in the most competitive, epicurean scenes because they're a known quantity. Many people value comfort and safety over new, fashionable, and refined experiences in their food choices, even occasionally. If a Michelin starred restaurant in the US served a burger at their bar, it would probably be the best selling item they had.

If corporations can tack a few new delivery menus onto their existing kitchen for the price of some web consulting, then sure. If it means shedding all the value they've built over the years to do a no-name pop-up located in an office building outsourcing the technical infrastructure they've already built? Not likely. Even for medium sized local restaurant groups it's probably not a great fit unless they already had the big expansion plan in place.

I think you're subconsciously reacting to the bland, tech-ish aesthetic these places adopt because their uniform online presence is included in the rent and their branding was done by someone on fiverrrr who wouldn't know the difference between the food scenes in San Francisco and Cheboygan if you funded their yacht, let alone for the $60 they bid on the project.

If eat-in restaurants become less viable, they will start to die off until enough are left to bring their viability back up (more people interested in eating per restaurant). We can't keep business open for the sake of the few who want to feel good about them existing, unless they serve a crucial role, which I don't think can be said about restaurants. If people strongly prefer cloud kitchens, there's no economic point to expensive, seat-in restaurants.

That being said, the seat-in scene in London seems to be thriving, though I'm curious if the inflation is hitting them (or us, the diners).

In my opinion this is all a good thing, a sign of increasing efficiency enabled by the Internet.

My hack has been searching with the “Pick Up” option selected, which removes any cloud kitchens because one cannot pick up at those, and then switching to “Delivery” when I’m ready to order.

The only caveat I’ve found is that sometimes places that are too far away are available for pick up but don’t deliver that far.

The cloud kitchen near my house absolutely allows pickup by non-delivery drivers

I just tried this on Grubhub, and it worked perfectly. I live in a restaurant-dense area and all the fake restaurants have made the site nearly unusable. Thanks for sharing the tip!

Every ghost kitchen outfit near me offers pick-up. Heck, even the two fake restaurants that run out of Chili's locations around here have their own separate pick-up entrance at Chili's.

Guy Fieri opened up a pop-up restaurant in my town, only available via Grubhub or Seamless or whatever, and my family wanted to try it out. I'm not a Guy Fieri fan so I wasn't expecting much, but at the very least I was expecting moderately good food. What we got was something you would see at a high school cafeteria, and I'm not exaggerating. It was nearly inedible, so bad that some members of my family felt compelled to write a letter to Guy Fieri's company.

This has been my experience with every cloud kitchen "brand" I've dared to try (because it was late and they're usually the only ones still open.)

I think fundamentally the concept just doesn't attract the right kind of business owners. To open a restaurant of your own you must, on some level I assume, be interested in cooking or cuisine. Cloud kitchens as a concept seemed like they were marketed more to investor/vc types as a vertical to invest in. Typically this group would have gravitated towards franchise ownership where some other corporate entity has figure out the "food" part of the equation. It may not be the most healthy or even the best but they take care of making something palatable and most importantly consistent.

> Guy Fieri opened up a pop-up restaurant in my town

Translation: Some anonymous people that know more about spreadsheets than cooking decided to open a business in my town. They realized that making decent food is a slow and expensive way to build a brand recognition, so they entered into a licensing agreement with Guy Fieri instead.

Not anonymous, and that's important. It's Virtual Dining Concepts,[1] who also did the Mr. Beast[2] ghost pop-up, the Barstool Sports ghost pop-up, and the Cake Boss spinoff ghost pop-up, and Steve Harvey's ghost pop-up, and the Kitchen: Impossible ghost pop-up, and Mariah Carey's ghost pop-up cookie shop, and the Five Nights at Freddy's ghost pop-up.[3] Their next step after Fieri was mass-licensing TikTokers and giving them restaurants. Their co-founder is Robbie Earl, one of the OGs of licensed restaurant chaining - he's a co-founder and still CEO of Planet Hollywood, who's using this trend to prop up some of his other restaurant properties.

For instance, some of the Guy Fieri restaurants are run out of Buca di Beppo restaurant kitchens. I'll give you one guess who's chairman of Buca di Beppo.

[1] https://www.foodandwine.com/news/guy-fieri-flavortown-kitche...

[2] https://www.foodandwine.com/news/tiktok-recipes-delivery-res...

[3] https://joinvdc.com/brands/

A person very close to me is pretty darn senior at The French Laundry.

Arguably the best restaurant in the world for a long time (yes it spawned a whole bunch of other restaurants...)

But I have some pretty intimate knowledge about their business, and let me tell you - even though TFL knows a ton about cooking. Their payment to the employees and whatnot is not so great.

For example, one of the things they do is put "Service is included" on their menus and such, which gives the customer the impression that tip is include.

So imagine serving a table that spends $50,000 (yes this is common) on dinner -- and they dont leave a tip, and the servers are making $12 per hour.

Seriously - this happens all the time.

> For example, one of the things they do is put "Service is included" on their menus and such, which gives the customer the impression that tip is include.

Did they just translate a european menu without thinking about what it means?

Because that customer's impression would be the correct interpretation.

So who was hurt in that scenario? Seems ok unless the servers were mislead during hiring.

https://i.imgur.com/t2P8jJG.png

What’s the best things on their menu?

Oysters and Pearls. And yes this is not a euphemism.

How would a pop up restaurant have local connections for high quality ingredients? Spoiler: they don't. They use Sysco. A company that specialized in cafeteria grade food anywhere, anytime, cheap as the dirt it is made from..

FYI if you see a Sysco brand truck at a restaurant it means you should never eat there, just go to mcdonalds as its the same quality.

I own a bar and restaurant and while we don't use Sysco, we totally would for some items. You know, frying oil, canned soda. Maybe glassware, knives. Toilet paper, napkins, baskets, ladles, ticket books. Flour, sugar, salt, pepper. Bleach, oven cleaner, simple green, sponges, bar towels.

I'm just getting started, and none of that is really food. We drive ourselves to buy meat and produce.

Getting all that shit into the building is a full time job. It's nice to outsource (some) of it to a truck.

We're lucky to have a local old school warehouse literally next door. They have computers that run dos on green monochrome screens and print on that wide, green-lined paper from the 80s. We use them instead of a truck, but the concept is identical.

> I desperately just want a "no cloud kitchens" option

Me too. I'm simply allergic to the whole idea of it. I've actually stopped using online food delivery services to avoid it, and have gone back to just calling the restaurants directly and picking the food up myself.

It’s like Amazon being swamped with hordes of nameless low quality junk sellers.

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