'It gets scary': Neighbors say these Bay Area ghost kitchens are out of control

Ironically what the parent poster implied is the solution (parking minimums?) only makes the problem worse, by making businesses/neighborhoods even more spread out to accommodate parking lots, which entrench cars even more.

Enforcing the existing laws would fix this. These delivery cars always stop in the middle of traffic or bike lanes because there simply isn't enough space in SF.

If I went through the expense to buy a tow truck, I wouldn’t have have the self control to not use it against my newfound parking nemeses.

Some places in the US might be set up that badly, but it seems unlikely that scooters wouldn't work for like 95% of the time here.

Order locally then

In Doordash at least, I click pick-up instead of delivery, and just go to the address given. When I get there, there's a tablet, and lockers, and I follow the instructions to pick my order of food. Everyone else there is picking up for Doordash/whatever.

I have literally walked in to the one in Redwood City and ordered from someone sitting at a folding desk.

Your understanding is not correct. You can either a) schedule a pickup using any app or b) stroll in and place an order off the menu. A) is way more convenient so I haven't done B) in more than a year though.

For two reasons. First, I want my food to come from the restaurant I ordered it from, not from some mystery supplier somewhere. Getting food from a restaurant is about more than just the food. Second, ghost kitchens are mystery kitchens. I equate them with factory food. I also simply don't trust them.

It does not taste the same. But also, I don't know who the ghost kitchen is and they may be a company I don't want to do business with.

Most restaurants have actual kitchens, with people moving around and making plenty of noise, and you can generally see the food leave the kitchen as it is delivered to your table. Unless you think the kitchen and its staff is a complex and expense ruse, the food served in a restaurant is not from a ghost kitchen.

Have you ever been to a restaurant?

Extrapolating from what OPI is saying, I would guess they mean is something along the lines of being unable to check for secondary proxy indicators of care and quality prior to choosing to order food at all, such as cleanliness of restrooms, the number of critters buzzing/crawling around in the dining area, the quality and cleanliness of tableware, the taste of the water etc. the overall customer facing aspects of a normal restaurant which allow you to get a general sense of how the places you cannot see are run.

While not a completely reliable or quantifiable metric, the dining experience conveys information that is absent entirely with a ghost kitchen. Ghost kitchens are essentially the opposite of an open kitchen dining establishment. Everything about the preparation of substances you're going to put into your own body is hidden from view, and because this is inherent to the model it's not even something that can be criticized or measured. And unlike restaurants with a public facing facility, there is a much greater likelihood that a ghost kitchen that poisons its customers vanishes and reappears under a different name in the very same location. This would be extremely difficult for a regular restaurant, or even a fast food drive-thru, to pull off without strident public blowback at the place of business.

If you agree to eat food from such establishments, there's an implicit acceptance of this blindness to conditions in which the food is prepared. Given the inevitable race to the bottom economics of any food service industry I can understand why this would be a non-starter for a lot of people. Even if you trust people to do the 100% right thing structural forces favor the ones doing the 99% version of it, and then the ones doing 99% of that, ad terminum, ad (literal) nauseam.

Often, yes. Also most of what ChainOfFools said.

Also, when I'm ordering food from a restaurant, I am dealing with real people, seeing them in person, and they see me in person. Eating from a restaurant is about much more than just the food. Ghost kitchens eliminate all of that.

Not online. It's becoming more common for online ordering from real restaurants to be actually serviced by ghost kitchens rather than the restaurant.

I don't know about calling them, but I expect that's no different. If a restaurant is outsourcing their cooking for online orders, it would make sense for them to do so with phone orders as well.

It is incredibly difficult and time consuming. Choosing what to eat is already a fraught experience for many. In the Uber Eats app, I find myself changing from Delivery to Pickup so that the UI will expose the address of the restaurant. There are about 3 addresses that are heavily used for ghost kitchens that I want nothing to do with after being delivered heated up trash. I feel bad for the local authentic Vietnamese restaurants around me that are now competing with 10 new pho places.

I just wish there was a filter to exclude them from the options. The more friction I encounter with food delivery, the more likely I am to rethink just making something at home and save me the frustration.

No, because sometimes those restaurants operate (or license) secondary ghost kitchens.

Have you ever been to a Taco Bravo? It's a window with a cash register and a greasy spoon kitchen. That it.

Have you ever ordered a pizza for delivery?

Have you ever had catering?

There is no requirement or law to have dine-in patrons or walk-up service to sell food made to order.

I understand the dunk here, but what I'm saying is that a lot of this is on Bay Area municipalities. This isn't like Uber where an entire new business model created a brand new set of regulatory challenges. This is a bog standard regulatory challenge every city already has to be set up to address, because it comes up every time a new retail business gets put somewhere that wasn't already precisely zoned for it. This is seriously every liquor license kerfluffle ever; just in slightly different form.

(I had a lot of problems with what Uber did with regulatory arbitrage; in particular, for a decent amount of time, Uber managed to recreate the Chicago redlining map with their service areas. It's not that I'm disinclined to regulate; it's that it's not Kalanick's job to regulate himself.)

It worked well in the U.S., not so well for their plans for global expansion. Hence the existence of companies like Grab/Didi.

One of the other things is that a lot of the food delivery people don't actually live in SF, so they drive from out of town and do Uber things and then go home. So that also makes it harder to support more sensible logistics.

The picture of that car-snarl leading that article implies it's a lot of cars (lots of scooters and bikes in the UK too - I doubt the cost of fuel and keeping a roadworthy car in general, makes cars economical for it here, not to mention the need for a licence which you don't need on most small bikes).

I don't get delivery super often, but for SF, my estimate would be 80% car, 19% moped scooter, 1% bicycle.

This is true. What works in Bangkok can't necessarily work in Los Angeles. It's usually American cities that lack the critical density by design for the automobile that results in an inability to support efficient local logistics.

Always seemed a shame to me that megacities didn't lean into Mail Rail-style[1] logistics. Arterials of goods from depots outside, feeding into local hubs within the city via light rail or narrow-gauge and then last-mile dispatch via small vehicle, bikes etc from there. So there are sort of "wellsprings" of supply throughout the city. In my factory-builder-rotted mind's eye some kind of semi-automated AS/RS kind of system shuttling small-ish containers like those that go into planes now onto and off trains.

Of all the things to wish to automate away, driving 40 tonne vehicles with notoriously poor sightlines (though they have imposed safety minimums in London[2], but not after many, many deaths), often with steering wheels on the wrong side, down urban roads seems one of the better ones.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway

[2] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/direct-vision-standard-and-...

> 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.

>Dear God, why does everything have to be a ghoulish march to "scale".

Scaling makes it possible for more people to enjoy higher quality goods/experiences. You're making this post on a device that exists thanks to "scale". You likely live in a city that exist because of "scale". You enjoy modern amenities like electricity and running water thanks to "scale".

Restaurants have pretty much the highest attrition rate of any type of small business.

Ones that aren't "flash-in-the-pan" are generally outliers, sometimes extreme outliers in areas that have a lot of competition.

> Yep, call me a NIMBY but I don't want this kind of business operating in my residential street. There are plenty of business zones where this economic progress can take place.

That's basically the standard NIMBY line. "I don't oppose [thing], I just don't want [thing] near where I live."

I took a look into the origin of the food truck once (internet rabbit hole ftw), and originally they moved - some still do these days. Usually serving a different area each day or if you have two areas with non-overlapping break times even midday. But when it got more popular people started to complain that trucks would just stop where they wanted to and cities started to demand permits (I'm not saying they were wrong, just how it is). That made in uneconomical and sometimes even impossible to move around all the time. It's rather hard to just stop spontaneous and serve a crowd if you need a permit for each stop.

So, these days, food trucks are mostly for show (that's the ones you saw) or company events. Company wants to feed all their employees something different than the usual grub, but not leave the campus for the event: Rent a food truck.