With the rise of food delivery services, there has been a new trend associated with food delivery: ghost restaurants. A ghost restaurant is a restaurant that operates out of another restaurant's kitchen. Intentionally, not as some chef having a side gig while the boss isn't watching. Frequently, it is done to give an air of respectability to a restaurant with a less-than-stellar reputation, or make it sound like the food is coming from a local specialty restaurant, and not a disgusting national chain. For example, food ordered from a Pasqually's Pizza and Wings restaurant actually comes from the kitchen of a Chuck-E-Cheese restaurant (eww! I just pictured waiters coming back to the kitchen covered with the sneezes and slobber of hundreds of children and interacting with the food in the kitchen). DoorDash driver issues warning about ordering from ‘local’ restaurants: ‘How is [this] allowed?’ Has anyone experienced this?
I am seeing restaurants that share a kitchen. Adjacent to each other, separate entrances, separate menus, shared kitchen
Yeah, I’m not eating Chuckie Cheese food but I couldn’t care less if some other “restaurant” uses Chuckie Cheese’s kitchen.
Its actually pretty genius. Let's say you run an amazing breakfast/lunch spot. You open at 6AM and close at 2PM. Then, your kitchen sits empty for 16 hours until you open tomorrow. If I can make some money on that kitchen while not having to pay any staff, it makes a lot of sense.
I ate at a rotesserie chicken small chain recently. My kid wanted fried chicken strips or nuggets which they didn’t have on the menu but they had this other menu / restaurant out of the same kitchen. I paid for it separately on a different register at the same counter.
A popular YouTuber Mr. Beast owns a burger business. My kids saw it was available for delivery and insisted we order from it. It was out of a ghost kitchen at our local Buca DiBeppo. Burgers and fries were decent but overpriced.
I think it is the same people making the same food, but selling it under a different name. You're still eating Chuck-E-Cheese food. A chain restaurant owned by a corporation is typically not going to share its kitchen with another company--the liability (food poisoning, etc.) is just too great. A lot of corporate decisions are driven by fear of lawsuits.
[QUOTE="chemgator, post: 14674967, member: 813"]I think it is the same people making the same food, but selling it under a different name. You're still eating Chuck-E-Cheese food. A chain restaurant owned by a corporation is typically not going to share its kitchen with another company--the liability (food poisoning, etc.) is just too great. A lot of corporate decisions are driven by fear of lawsuits.[/QUOTE] It sometimes seems like most of what we consume is this way, the difference primarily being presentation.
Beast Burger does this. Mr. Beast is a YouTube star that my 12 year old son loves. He is a millionaire many times over. He runs a pretty cool ghost outfit. Burgers are pretty good for fast food.
Not sure about that case, but generally ghost restaurants have their own recipes that are basically pre made and prepped at the chain. They generally have a very small menu that is just a few steps. Add the branding and viola. Its pretty brilliant really. Beat Burger has hundreds of locations with like zero employees.
Until: a) You get a lawsuit for food poisoning because the other restaurant does not insist on safe handling practices of food, and your customers start getting poisoned (as well as theirs) because the food prep areas are not sanitized and rats have moved in. b) Things in the restaurant start disappearing or being damaged because the night restaurant allows wild parties, or their employees like to take things home with them. "We had silverware yesterday--what happened?" c) Expensive food preparation equipment (Hobart mixer, pizza oven, etc.) stops working because of abuse and the other outfit refuses to pay to fix it because they say you are not maintaining it properly. I could see if the night restaurant was run by a trusted family member or a close friend, but otherwise, no thanks. It's too easy to ignore the details of doing something right when you are not the owner. Same thing often happens when people rent a house. I could see a lot of these arrangements winding up in front of a small claims court judge.
