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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

I’ll look up the addresses of restaurants on Uber Eats, using street view, before ordering. Most of them are at bodegas or otherwise non-restaurant spaces.

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I recently saw a new burger joint pop up on Uber Eats with an address not far from my home. It turned out to be the address of the last remaining Ruby Tuesday restaurant in my area, but the burger place did not advertise any connection to Ruby Tuesday. Seemed very sketchy to me.

A ton of places are doing that. Restaurants that want to price things differently from their main. Or primarily in-store restaurant chains that don't want branding impacted by crappy delivery reviews. Keyword competition to improve sales. Menu, naming, picture, process experimentation. Additional placement in search results with different ranking. Bad review evasion. Limiting blast radius of bad reviews (eg, they still have a second high-rated listing for those X months they get less orders until a spat of negative reviews expire).

Basically, 'cheating' because it's not very honest, or can also be putting in extra effort to sell more and/or limit risk.

The way you put it doesn't sound like almost the mirror-image of the whole "ghost kitchens" thing. If established, reputable restaurants with known food quality are operating unde alternative branding in order to experiment with new marketing strategies, it doesn't really seem like 'cheating' to me.

Definitely not in the same category as a fly-by-night operation in a warehouse pretending to be an established restaurant.

Agree, it's all in how it's actually used. There are ghosts kitchens renaming themselves to avoid bad reviews, or to inflate their presence. But there are legit reasons to do it too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_restaurant

Also chuck e cheese, tgi fridays run these.

Denny's has two or three different brands they will advertise as different restaurants in a single area.

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