Hacker News Reader

Comment by richbell | Hacker News Reader

The YouTuber Eddy Burback has a video called "The Deceptive World of Ghost Kitchens" that I'd highly recommend watching.

https://youtu.be/KkIkymh5Ayg

View on HN

I remember watching this, and just skimmed it again at 3x. The video spends about half its time on the phenomenon of restaurants that are all relabeled versions of the same core concept --- that's, like, annoying, like I would feel taken if I ordered from a "restaurant" and really it was just one of 7 interchangeable labels for the same place, but it's not materially damaging in any way.

It then talks about health inspections, but doesn't really make a strong case for how ghost kitchens make health inspection harder; about the most it has to say is that it makes allergenic cross-contamination harder to evaluate, but that's not really something health inspections catch anyways!

> The video spends about half its time on the phenomenon of restaurants that are all relabeled versions of the same core concept --- that's, like, annoying, like I would feel taken if I ordered from a "restaurant" and really it was just one of 7 interchangeable labels for the same place, but it's not materially damaging in any way.

There's a restaurant on Polk St that does this with Ubereats. I know their address based on seeing it a few times and have learned not to order from it.

Here's a list, I won't add links because they're too long, but you can find them all on Ubereats. This restaurant from the outside is "Fresco Pizza Shawarma", here's nine storefronts they have on Ubereats.

- Ma's Meatballs

- Big Daddy's Wings

- Chateau Shawarma

- Angry Chicken

- Uncle Sam's Pizza

- Polk St Pizza

- Wingman Co.

- Little Italy's Calzones

- Little Italy Pasta

They probably have more too this was just a quick search. It's spammy and I've learned to check the address of restaurants to see if they're a "ghost kitchen". I suspect a lot of "real" restaurants with just one authentic storefront get drowned out in the "ghost kitchen" spam.

Easy to fix by UberEats's starting to charge a monthly fee for each storefront. UberEats gets a new revenue stream, and the customer experience improves.

Idk if they can make the fee high enough to discourage this behavior without also discouraging legit businesses from signing up.

This is another reason I don't mess with food delivery. Also, you're talking about SF. Isn't the point of living in SF that you can walk to places?

No? I mean, in the sense that it's a dense urban area, sure, but nobody is really walking from Noe to Soma or whatever just for a meal? Basically every restaurant in San Francisco is, in Chicago terms, in everybody's delivery radius. You can walk to some places, but not all of the places.

Also: Manhattanites basically kicked this whole Internet restaurant delivery thing off with Seamless. Sometimes people just don't want to go out.

Not Noe to Soma, but there are a ton of restaurants (and other businesses) in easy walking distance in SF. That was the only thing I liked about living there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com