How a shadow army of ghost kitchens took over America’s restaurants
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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.
* Hot (or cold; extreme) temperature
* Fresh (IMO: short best by time)
* Annoying to make at home
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
No risk? No fun!
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 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 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 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.
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...
Also you should try out finding a restaurant on google maps, then go to your delivery app.
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.
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.