It’s never been easier to scroll through third-party delivery apps like Uber Eats and order takeout from a wide range of offerings in your area—a suspiciously wide range of offerings in your area. Perhaps an impossibly wide range of restaurants in your area. That’s because one of the biggest scams in the modern food delivery game is that your meal not even be coming from a real restaurant, but from an online-only storefront that might be one of many fronting for the same kitchen.
As noted by Mashable, this week Uber Eats announced plans to remove about 5,000 of these virtual restaurants—known as ghost kitchens—from its delivery service.
To get a more personal perspective on these fronts, I called up David Dietz, owner of BBC Tavern and Grill in Greenville, Del. (Full disclosure: Dave Dietz is my dad, and I grew up working in the restaurant. Fuller disclosure: I thought I knew what his opinions would be on ghost kitchens, but I was totally wrong.)
Here’s what to know about why delivery apps are cracking down on these ghost kitchens, and how you can avoid ordering from them yourself.
What are ghost kitchens?
Ghost kitchens are physical spaces where takeout orders are made, but with no brick-and-mortar dining room for customers to eat in, or even a storefront which they can visit and order from. Food from the seemingly real online store—with its own name and logo—might actually be prepared in the kitchen of a restaurant that typically serves another type of food entirely. So while the digital branding might be selling you a sandwich from a hip-seeming BBQ joint, your meal might have actually been prepared by the local chain franchise that typically sells nothing of the sort.
Compared to in-person dining, ghost kitchens see significant savings on start-up costs, rental space, and staffing. This makes them “invisible” compared to traditional restaurants. So are they spooky because of haunted spirits? Sadly, no. Are they spooky because of the threat they pose to the future of your restaurant experience? Definitely.
Although ghost kitchens existed pre-pandemic, COVID accelerated their rise. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Uber Eats is now home to more than 40,000 ghost kitchens, up from just 10,000 in 2021. Last year Hospitality Technology predicted that the ghost kitchen industry will be worth $71.4 billion by 2027. In short: Ghost kitchens aren’t going anywhere soon. So, what does the growth of ghost kitchens mean for you?
Why ghost kitchens matter for you
Some argue that ghost kitchens are unethical and mislead customers. Others predict ghost kitchens threaten the sustainability of traditional food service business models. Here’s a breakdown of how ghost kitchens might affect your takeout experience.
As a consumer, a primary concern about ghost kitchens is probably the quality of food. From a taste standpoint, there’s nothing to suggest that these outsourced kitchens take a sudden dip in quality—especially if you’re ordering from a smaller brand that is using the ghost kitchen model to expand their existing operations.
When it comes to health and safety, ghost kitchens must abide by restaurant regulations. However, one red flag is that customers can’t access health inspection letter grades for ghost kitchens like they can at traditional restaurants.
Outside of your culinary concerns, your concerns are economical (like trying to save money on takeout and delivery) and ethical (like, cough-cough, third-party services that keep their employees’ tips, cough-cough).
Ghost kitchens aren’t replacing in-person dining
Some think pieces compare the threat of ghost kitchens to restaurants as that of Amazon delivery to in-person retail shopping. Dietz, however, sees it differently: “People are always going to want to sit down and eat at a restaurant.”
In other words, sure, the Amazon-killing-retail analogy might describe services like Instacart and grocery shopping. Going out to eat, however, is a fundamentally different experience compared to running errands, or needing to stay in and order Chinese food. Then again, as a formerly avid movie-goer, I understand the concern.
Still, Dietz says that ghost kitchens are a way for smaller restaurants to compete in the marketplace, allowing them to expand operations and streamline deliveries during a time when everyone is ordering in. Likewise, The New York Times points out that ghost kitchens can be “a lifeline for the independent restaurateur.” At the same time, given the exploding marketplace, the fact of the matter is that ghost-franchise brands (MrBeast Burger comes to mind) are able to pay third-party apps to prioritize their offerings, while independent restaurants (like my family’s) get pushed further and further down.
How to spot a ghost kitchen
Whatever your concerns are when ordering takeout, maybe you simply want to know exactly where your food is coming from. Here are out tips to spot a ghost kitchen:
Look up the restaurant name. It sounds simple, but put on your detective hat and see whether the restaurant has a physical location, pictures, reviews, or even seems to exist. Just like with people on dating apps, a lack of online results could mean it’s a ghost.
Expand the full description of the restaurant in the delivery app; the ghost kitchen brand might include fine print about their parent company (e.g. Applebee’s as Neighborhood Wings).
Cross-check the address of the restaurant you are considering and the brand’s headquarters. If they list the same address, it’s a ghost kitchen.
Look at the addresses of several offerings in your area. If you start to notice that there are impossible amount of restaurants all located on top of each other, it’s a ghost kitchen operation.
Given all this information about ghost kitchens, I’m going to keep doing what I think has been the best guidance for years now: Try to order from restaurants directly whenever possible to support them instead of the big-name apps.
This article was originally published in May 2022 and updated on March 28, 2023 to offer new context about Uber Eats removing ghost kitchens from its listings.