(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?
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.
The multitudes of different places at Disneyworld that all operate out of the same massive underground/hidden kitchen complex might be a better example.
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.
I'm obviously missing something important in the argument you're making.
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.
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.
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.
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?