Ghost kitchens
When you order food from a ghost kitchen, what are you eating? You order the food because it’s a restaurant name you recognize, or some celebrity chef has their name attached to it, and it looks good in pictures online. But you get it, and there’s something off about it—it feels fake. Like a photograph of food. Warmed over, reheated…like a sequel, or remake (or requel) of food. Gamey, slimy, small, undercooked, shameless. The seasoning and presentation make it appear like it is real food, the kind you would get from a high-end fast casual place…maybe something beyond fast casual, which was the last big restaurant industry innovation.
This article “Delivering the Digital Restaurant” in Nation’s Restaurant News asks exactly this question—where does the restaurant industry go after fast casual, and how can digital space and bullshit branding help? They come up with something called “Digitally Native Restaurants” (DNRs). DNR indeed.
DNRs combine “ghost kitchens, virtual brands, digital engagement, delivery fulfillment, electric cooking, intelligent software automation, and hardware robotics. When this segment is fully developed, like QSRs, the Digitally Native Restaurant will spread widely and quickly.”
(My personal favorite part of that is “electric cooking.”
The idea of DNRs seems to be to develop QSRs (quick-service restaurants, aka fast food drive thrus) but in digital space, using ghost kitchens, bullshit branding, and social media trickery to pump low-quality junk into our faces, at premium prices. It doesn’t even have the pleasure that actual fast food has, but it costs way more—and it doesn’t have the quality of higher end food…
The ghost kitchen is a real kitchen. They do make the food there. But the kitchen is not a real kitchen—if you take a peek behind the register, you can see the kitchen just looks weirdly underused. They are just reheating, warming up, throwing together, putting together a nice facade of food.
You can taste it—that’s what “electric cooking” means. They are just warming the food up on the counter, basically. The food is so mediocre, that it isn’t meant to be eaten there—it’s for delivery only. There’s something so fake and shameless about the food, you can’t eat it there, it is meant to be moved.
It’s an innovation, not an actuality…it doesn’t actually exist, in the way that food should…it’s just a business innovation, relying on branding, digital space, and fake electric cooking…it just has to maintain its form just long enough to be slopped up. It is meant to be slopped up—that’s why DNRs are compared to QSRs—but at premium prices, and with the aura of restaurant quality food.
Ghost kitchens sell you an idea, which is not unusual—what is unusual is that you are actually eating the idea they’re selling. It isn’t food that a restaurant is making, it’s the idea of food, that is made to pass itself off as food, an idea taking the form of food, in order to be eaten.