Molly Jewkes found a new restaurant featured on Postmates while browsing the food delivery app last month.
She decided to order dinner at the restaurant, Chicken Sammy’s, thinking she was supporting a local Portland business.
But his chicken sandwich arrived in a red container with Red Robin utensils. A sticker with a picture of a chicken was glued to the plastic bag in which the food was delivered.
“It made me feel like I had been tricked into buying something that was not what I thought,” said Jewkes, 29. “Red Robin is a large national chain. I don’t know why they would advertise their food in different restaurants, except to confuse people. “
What Jewkes was asking for was Red Robin’s version of a “ghost kitchen”.
Phantom kitchens began to emerge before the coronavirus pandemic with startups like REEF Technology and CloudKitchens offering a delivery-only model, where the same kitchen team cooks food from various brands in a small space or food cart trailer.
The concept exploded during the pandemic because it offers a way for brands to offer food for delivery without the overhead of running a full restaurant. Market research firm Euromonitor believes that ghost kitchens could represent a $ 1 trillion industry worldwide by 2030.
Portland residents were introduced to the ghost kitchen model last April, when chef David Chang’s fried chicken chain, Fuku, began appearing on food delivery apps in the Portland area. It turned out that Chang’s company had not expanded to Portland, but had licensed the right to sell its chicken sandwiches to REEF Technology.
The move was met with a wave of criticism from local chefs, who felt that the national network was profiting from the pandemic, while local companies struggled to stay afloat. This prompted Fuku to pause the launch, but it did not prevent ghost kitchens from settling in Portland.
There are countless ghost kitchens advertising their food only for delivery in Portland on Postmates, DoorDash, Grubhub and other delivery apps. It is often very difficult to distinguish between these brands and local restaurants that use the same online delivery services. DoorDash labels virtual tags, but it takes a little scrolling to locate those tags. Other apps have no label that distinguishes ghost cuisine from local restaurants.
What Red Robin is doing, however, is a progression from the phantom kitchen model that makes it especially challenging for consumers to know who is actually selling the food.
Red Robin is a publicly traded restaurant chain based in Colorado, with 570 locations across the country. He reported nearly $ 870 million in revenue last year.
The company operates three ghost brands – Chicken Sammy’s, The Wing Dept. and Fresh Set – in restaurants across the Portland area and across the country.
These brands appear in various delivery apps and have their own logos, but outside the brand there is nothing that sets them apart from Red Robin. They offer practically the same menus and have the same addresses as any other Red Robin.
But at first glance, it is unlikely that a customer will recognize that brands are just branches of the national network.
A Red Robin spokesman asked questions in writing, but did not answer those questions. Marc Burrow, a New York art director who said he designed the The Wing Dept. logo, did not respond to a request for comment, but removed a web page discussing his concept of ghost cooking for Red Robin the day after an appointment. by email.
The national network Red Robin operates three ghost brands: Chicken Sammy’s, The Wing Dept. and Fresh Set. Brands appear in delivery apps and have their own logos, but outside the brand there is nothing that sets them apart from Red Robin.
“There are doubts about the truth in advertising,” said Kurt Huffman, owner of ChefStable, one of Portland’s most prominent restaurant groups. “Are you selling us Red Robin, but with four different labels? For me, this is what they are doing. There is nothing substantially different about the different brands that sell. There is no personality in it, there is nothing that differentiates it in any real way. “
ChefStable is among a handful of local companies that have entered the phantom kitchen game in recent months in an attempt to survive the pandemic and resist what they consider sterile concepts and brands offered by national phantom kitchen operators.
After the catering industry plummeted due to the pandemic, ChefStable Catering was left with little use for its 3,000 square foot commercial kitchen. In December, the group transformed the kitchen into the ChefStable Kitchen Collective, a virtual food room where six different menus are prepared in the same space for delivery on the same ticket.
Unlike other phantom kitchen operators, the collective presents all six menus under the same banner in delivery apps like Postmates, DoorDash and Grubhub, offering the concepts as different sections of a menu. All six menus were designed by local chefs who work together in the kitchen to prepare food for delivery.
Huffman sees the virtual kitchen as a place where these chefs can test execution menus with the long-term goal of opening brick and mortar restaurants, if customers respond to the concepts.
However, he said he hopes the ghost kitchen model is not here to stay. For him, it is a temporary measure that allows ChefStable to overcome the pandemic.
“Personally, I hope everything falls into an abyss of fire,” said Huffman. “I think it’s a race to the bottom in terms of product quality if you’re really looking at it as the future. If that happens, it will be fascinating to see how independent restaurant owners can differentiate themselves in a space that is really built for conglomerates. “
Diane Lam has spent the past few months working on a concept to try to compete with out-of-town corporations and national networks that have come to dominate the take-away scene with their ghost kitchens.
Late last year, Lam closed his Cambodian-influenced pop-up restaurant at North Mississippi Avenue’s Psychic Bar and opened Prey + Tell, a phantom cuisine focused on his popular lemon chicken wings. Lam debuted the virtual restaurant briefly in January, before taking a step back to build the concept and focus on marketing and branding. Prey + Tell reopened Friday. She is hopeful that the quality of the food she can provide will set her virtual restaurant apart.
But she said she is also concerned about how quickly the phantom kitchen model is growing and evolving and how little consumers now know about the meals they are ordering online. She said that large corporations are taking advantage of the application ecosystem to flood the market with their various brand concepts.
“It disgusts me,” said Lam. “They are trying to saturate the algorithms so that when you are looking at these sites, you see five of the same product in a location in the same pool as a one-page restaurant.”
The model of the phantom kitchen itself does not necessarily bother Chris Cha.
Hawaiian restaurant Cha’s Smokin ‘Fire Fish was touted as one of the best new restaurants in Portland when it opened in 2019, but the restaurant struggled after the pandemic hit it.
Cha was closing the restaurant forever and selling his equipment when Jaime Soltero Jr., the owner of Tamale Boy, offered to rent space in the kitchen at his restaurant on North Russell Street.
Taking advantage of the shared kitchen model advocated by phantom kitchen operators, Cha was able to limit indirect costs and survive on just one part-time staff member. The setup allowed him to survive, offering only takeaway food and delivery directly through his website. He credits Soltero with saving his business, and the two restaurant owners are now thinking about a partnership in a new venture in Beaverton.
Cha said he does not blame any company or corporation for trying to do whatever it takes to stay afloat during the pandemic, even if it means adopting the ghost kitchen model. But he also said that consumers have a right to know where their food comes from.
“These restaurants may be closing on their own, even if they are a corporate entity,” said Cha. “However, it would bother me if they were trying to impersonate a local restaurant. It is kind of superficial if they are using it as an advertising tool to make it look like they are something they are not. “
– Jamie Goldberg | [email protected] | @jamiebgoldberg