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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

> A single kitchen operating under many names to increase its algorithmic “surface area”; another shape of things to come.

I find this infuriating. There's one dominican restaurant in my city that's listed on DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats under over 20 different names with different subsets of their menu. All of these duplicate listings for the same place make it harder to search or browse the actual restaurant options in the area. Any time I come across a restaurant that looks worth trying out, I have to look up the address to see if it actually exists, or if it's just IHOP masquerading as a burger bar.

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I wonder if that's a consequence of the "gig economy" working in the wrong direction. Perhaps the relationship should be between the delivery service "gig fleet" and the restaurants themselves. The ratings and feedback information would actually be more useful and would allow different restaurants to post different contract rates through the service based upon these ratings.

That would actually provide a service that doesn't dilute their brand. As it is, these restaurants have just found a way to counter this negative outcome by diluting this third party marketplace itself.

It's really bewildering when this happens. I've accidentally picked up food from one of these places and I nearly could not find it. It was a faceless nondescript commercial building that looked abandoned until I saw someone else walk out the door with their food order. Then I walked in and the place looked like some industrial building versus a restaurant. There was just cement floor in a small room, and I gave my order through a metal lined hole in the wall and they gave me my bag. Very oddly, in the background, I noticed Chic Fil A also being prepared in this ghost kitchen by people in tshirts. Such a strange concept. I made sure to never order food from a place that wasn't a brick and mortar again, and to call up restaurants directly.

> I made sure to never order food from a place that wasn't a brick and mortar again

What's wrong with food from a ghost kitchen?

In my experience, it's inferior in every way, perhaps because they have no accountability the same way a standalone restaurant has. For example, a pizza place near me opened multiple ghost kitchens, including a Saladworks and Guy Fieri's Flavortown.

There's no Saladworks if you visit their address, just the pizza place. They offer the same menu as Saladworks, the chain of fast service salad shops, but don't have the same supplier or training or equipment as a Saladworks. This pizza place just attempts to recreate the same salads using inferior ingredients, pizza toppings, generic dressings, and generic plastic takeout containers. The result doesn't taste like a Saladworks salad and is smaller than a Saladworks salad. I've tried it twice and neither recreation of Saladworks was faithful, missing ingredients both times, with a different lettuce mix than Saladworks uses, etc.

There's no Guy Fieri restaurant if you visit their address either. The food from this brand of the ghost kitchen is just inedible. It has 5 reviews on Yelp locally so far, and all are one star. They're microwaving burgers, sending out raw pasta, sending out easy mac with pizza toppings as a fancy loaded mac & cheese, using the same generic plastic takeout containers they do for Saladworks.

And yet at least they have a brand to burn. What I was actually frustrated with in my comment a few levels up is the places that list their own menu, sliced and diced in different ways, under 20+ different names. If someone complains about the quality of "Simply Crepes", they can just remove that listing, since those crepes are also available under "Morning Times Cafe", "Morning Breakfast Sandwich Bar", "The Daily Fare", "The Coffee Creperey", etc.

It tasted like it cost about $6 too much for what it was

Haha, right on. I love me some Indian food, and there's ten different Indian "restaurants" near me, all located at the same address. I looked it up on Google Maps, and it's basically a hole-in-the-wall restaurant space that can barely hold one restaurant, never mind ten. Yet Grubhub et al. don't seem to care one way or another

There's also ghost kitchens cranking out food for delivery without any traditional restaurant space at all.

Here's a commercial ghost kitchen explanation to restaurateurs:

https://cloudkitchens.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-ghost-kitch...

Isn't it really easy to avoid all these fake restaurants, since the fakes only appear when you're searching for takeout? Just pretend you want to dine in, find a restaurant that you want that way, then pull it up in your takeout app of choice.

That's not really easy. That's a lot of work.

How is that a lot of work? Is it a lot of work if you really are looking for a restaurant where you can dine in?

On the delivery services, you can search all of the menus of places that deliver to you at once. If I want a club sandwich, I can find what 32 restaurants will deliver me a club sandwich. There is no other place I know of that will tell me what restaurants in some radius of me sell club sandwiches for dine-in, that I'd then have to cross-reference with which are available on my preferred delivery service anyway. It's a lot more work.

Google Maps shows food delivery options now.

I don't mind it myself. If you like the food it's OK if a downtown bar and grill is also sidelining as a chicken restaurant online. They have slow times and a paid kitchen staff. Go for it!

And some of the other ghost kitchens / home address food prep is pretty good. Like there was an ice cream place that delivered until midnight ( out of somebodies garage ) their ice cream was cooled down to well below zero so it was not melted when you got it.

I remember looking out of the window with my girlfriend trying to find a restaurant that Grubhub claimed was across the street. It was a ghost kitchen inside of another place and the food is pretty good, but I have generally stuck with places I've at least seen with my own eyes since then.

Seriously wonder why this isn't taken down. Should be pretty trivial given overlap of physical or payment addresses if they're registering the same restaurant several times on the same platform. Probably even possible to do it by hand.

If it generates revenue, it's not going down. There is absolutely no incentive at all to remove it. In fact, it gives the consumer more choices, and more ways to give money to the gig delivery service, and acts as a bulwark against being bullied by chains.

> it gives the consumer more choices

How? If a choice of "this restaurant" or "that restaurant" both take you to "this restaurant", is that really a choice?

The equivalent on Spotify are not generating revenue, though. The existence of these algorithmically generated spam artists doesn't factor into anyone's decision to buy premium or not - at least not in a positive way. And still they're there.

(Shrug) This is how hotel restaurants, including some very good ones, have always worked. What difference does it make what other ethnicities/varieties of food the restaurant delivers?

What? Hotel restaurants have always convincingly appeared to people as 20 different restaurants while operating at the same physical location? A place serving a lot of different types of food is not the same thing, it's still one restaurant and they're not making any effort to hide that from the hotel guests.

The multitudes of different places at Disneyworld that all operate out of the same massive underground/hidden kitchen complex might be a better example.

What? Hotel restaurants have always convincingly appeared to people as 20 different restaurants while operating at the same physical location?

Yes. Hotels with multiple restaurants tend to have only one kitchen, because why wouldn't they?

Again, I don't understand what's so offensive or controversial about this concept. I'm probably misunderstanding the objection.

Do you truly believe those situations are equivalent?

Uh, well, yeah?

I'm obviously missing something important in the argument you're making.

I think you kinda have a point when it's one physical location presenting itself as multiple different options whose food would never belong on the same menu together at a dine in restaurant in the first place.

Where I think it's shady is one kitchen pretending to be 10 different restaurants all serving the same type of food under different restaurant names, just to basically game the system into presenting them to more consumers.

The main difference between this and the hotel case is that when a business lists another "restaurant" on Uber Eats/Grubhub/whatever they're effectively taking away some advertising space from all the other restaurants on the platform. Whereas when a hotel adds another "restaurant" frontend to their kitchen, nothing really changes for all the other places in town. And it would be painfully obvious if one hotel opened up 10 nearly identical e.g. indian restaurants on the same premises.

TLDR: It's not possible for the practice to get to a predatory level in the physical world so it's less of a concern, even though it's fundamentally very similar.

> multiple different options whose food would never belong on the same menu together at a dine in restaurant.

Any halfway decent hotel in a major Asian city will happily serve up (approximations of) Chinese stir-fries, Japanese sushi, Indian curries, Italian pizza and American burgers from its restaurant.

My thinking is, if the food is good, I couldn't care less if they are selling sushi, lawn furniture, plumbing supplies, and car insurance out of the same building.

If the food is not good, see above.

And if Uber Eats is dumb enough to fall for 10 Indian restaurants with the same physical street address and controlling interest, well... party on.

But that's just it. If the food is no good, then you may avoid "Wing Bucket" in the future. But then you try out "Thrilled Cheese" and it sucks, too! Okay, mark that one down as crappy. A month later you check out "Super Mega Dilla" and damn if it isn't shitty microwaved food as well.

A real restaurant in the real world can't play this game. Sure, there are combo KFC/Taco Bells out there, but it's not some sort of subterfuge. Obviously those locations are combining the two brands into one kitchen. Do with that info what you will.

When browsing options on an app, there is no similar affordance. You have to play detective to discover that IHOP, Super Mega Dilla, Wing Bucket, and Thrilled Cheese are all the same place. And only one of those is a real brand that carries any kind of reputation. The others can be burned at will if they don't work.

What frustrates me is that this scheme seems to be working? It's been like this for a while now, and I don't understand why people keep using these delivery apps. Cold food, delivered late, for twice the price, from a phony restaurant, by a gig worker that is more often than not getting shafted on their own expenses. What's not to love?

This is a really interesting comparison! And good context. Is the hotel operating multiple restaurants from one kitchen really different (as some comments here seem to imply) because each has its own physical space? In a way that’s more “skin in the game” for a hotel vs a ghost kitchen proliferating brands bounded only by their ability to cook the food. On the other hand, that’s a pretty significant bound.

Virtual restaurants don't have the reputation to burn like a brick-and-mortar with a well-known brand does. Normally if a restaurant presents itself as primarily selling one menu item (common examples: pizza, wings, milkshakes) you expect them do do it really well. But with virtual restaurants there's no need to build up a good reputation by serving quality food since your strategy is to drown out competitors by putting up dozens of fake brands, each with a supposed "specialty". If one of your identities is tarnished it is trivial to spin up a new one.

I remember the first time I got caught by this, I excitedly ordered from a "Korean fried chicken" place on Uber eats, and when the food arrived it was heat-from-frozen chicken tenders drowned in unappetizing sauce. I felt scammed, and the food was so bad, I didn't even manage to finish what I had ordered. Later I looked up the restaurant and discovered it shared an address with an unremarkable local burger chain. I had a similar experience with another virtual restaurant and at this point I always check if it's a VR before ordering delivery from an app and treat it as a strong negative signal to the quality of food.

This is obviously a lot different from your hotel example because the hotel restaurant's reputation is inextricable from the hotel itself; not only do patrons always know where their room service is coming from, bad food/service reflects poorly on the hotel as well. The hotel has a lot more to lose than the virtual restaurant.

It's just SEO I think

And this is why the semantic web will never work.

No, they will just all be marked "owl:sameAs" (though it's not as smooth as one would think [1]) in semantic web.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/papers/ws21

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