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Comment by khy | Hacker News Reader

A Wonder just opened near my house, and the "different restaurants" seem to really be just different sections of a large menu with distinct branding. I.e., there is a single physical kitchen that makes food from the different "restaurants".

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There are a bunch of "restaurants" in our town that are just different menus serviced at the same ghost/cloud/dark kitchen. The quality is generally not good. I wonder about the quality at Wonder -- the broader the menu, the harder it is for the preparers to get good at it.

I'm thinking here of an Indian place near my office that graduated from ghost kitchen to food hall restaurant. I had their food both before and after, and the difference was night and day. I actually didn't want to try the food hall version, based on my experience with their ghost kitchen incarnation. But a friend convinced me to give them another chance, and now they're one of my favorite places for when I want to splurge on lunch.

I don't really know what the difference is, but I'm guessing it's that they didn't get to have a kitchen setup that was well adapted to their menu at the ghost kitchen.

You can change the name, the brand, of a ghost kitchen startup 'restaurant' overnight if you think it's stale due to bad consumer experiences. So you need to care less about those.

Yeah, it's a cloud kitchen with a eating area.

I don't think anyone thinks this is "innovation"... it's just a slightly different take on Uber Eats / Spoonrocket / food courts / cloud kitchens / etc.

And if there is an "innovation", it's the vertical integration... it's a business "innovation," not a tech one.

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