Molly Jewkes came across a new restaurant that appeared prominently at Postmates while she was flipping through the food delivery program last month.
She decides to order dinner at the restaurant, Chicken Sammy’s and thinks she’s support a local Portland business.
But her chicken sandwich arrives in a red container with tools from Red Robin. A sticker with a photo of a chicken was affixed to the plastic bag on which the food came.
“It made me feel like I’m buying something I did not think of,” said Jewkes, 29. ‘Red Robin is a big national chain. I do not know why they would advertise their food as other restaurants than to confuse people. ”
What Jewkes ordered was Red Robin’s version of a ‘ghost kitchen’.
Ghost kitchens started popping up before the coronavirus pandemic with startups like REEF Technology and CloudKitchens offering a single delivery model where the same kitchen staff cooks food from different brands from one small space or a cart.
The concept exploded during the pandemic because it provides brands with a way to offer food for delivery without the overhead cost of operating a complete restaurant space. Market research firm Euromonitor believes that by 2030, ghost kitchens could be operating a trillion dollars worldwide.
Portlanders were introduced to the haunted kitchen model last April when the famous chicken chain, David Chang’s fried chicken chain, Fuku, started on the food delivery programs in the Portland area. It appears that Chang’s company did not expand to Portland, but did license the right to sell its chicken sandwiches to REEF Technology.
The move is under criticism from local chefs, who believe the national chain is benefiting from the pandemic, while local businesses are struggling to stay afloat. That prompted Fuku to interrupt the rollout, but that did not stop ghost kitchens from taking up post in Portland.
There are numerous ghost kitchens advertising their delivery food in Portland on Postmates, DoorDash, Grubhub and other delivery programs. It is often very difficult to distinguish between the brands and local brick-and-mortar restaurants that use the same online delivery services. DoorDash gives labels for virtual brands, but it is necessary to find these labels. Other programs do not contain any labels that distinguish ghost kitchens from local restaurants.
What Red Robin is doing, however, is a progression of the haunted kitchen model that makes it especially challenging for consumers to tell who is actually selling the food.
Red Robin is a publicly traded restaurant chain in Colorado with 570 nationwide businesses. It generated nearly $ 870 million in revenue last year.
The company operates three ghost brands – Chicken Sammy’s, The Wing Dept. and Fresh Set – from restaurants in the Portland area and across the country.
These brands appear on various delivery programs and have their own logos, but outside of the brand, nothing can be distinguished from Red Robin. They offer virtually the same menus and have the same addresses as any other Red Robin.
But at first glance, a customer is unlikely to acknowledge that the brands are merely an offshoot of the national chain.
A Red Robin spokesman asked written questions but did not respond. Marc Burrow, an art director in New York who said he designed The Wing Dept. logo, did not respond to a request for comment, but removed a website that discussed his haunted kitchen concept for Red Robin. , a day after an email interview.
The national chain Red Robin operates three ghost brands: Chicken Sammy’s, The Wing Dept. and Fresh Set. The brands appear on delivery programs and have their own logos, but outside of brands, there is nothing that distinguishes them from Red Robin.
“There are questions about truth in advertising,” said Kurt Huffman, owner of ChefStable, one of Portland’s most prominent restaurant groups. ‘Do you only sell Red Robin for us, but with four different labels on it? To me, that’s what they do. There is nothing substantially different about the different brands they sell. There is no personality to it, and there is nothing that really distinguishes it. ”
ChefStable is one of a handful of local businesses that have landed in the haunted kitchen game over the past few months in an effort to survive the pandemic and return against what they see as sterile concepts and brands offered by national haunted kitchen operators.
After the catering industry declined due to the pandemic, ChefStable Catering left little use of its 3,000-square-foot commercial kitchen. In December, the group transformed the kitchen into ChefStable Kitchen Collective, a virtual food hall where six different menus in the same space are prepared for delivery on the same card.
Unlike other haunted kitchen operators, the group offers all six menus under the same banner on delivery programs such as Postmates, DoorDash and Grubhub, which offer the concepts as different sections of a menu. All six menus are designed by local chefs who work together in the kitchen to cook the food for delivery.
Huffman sees the virtual kitchen as a place where chefs can test the menus, with the long-term goal of opening brick-and-mortar restaurants as customers respond to the concepts.
However, he said he hopes the haunted kitchen model is not here to stay. For him, it is a temporary measure that enables ChefStable to get through the pandemic.
“Personally, I hope it crashes into a fiery abyss,” Huffman said. ‘I think it’s a race to the bottom in terms of product quality if you really consider it the future. If it takes off, it will be fascinating to see how independent restaurant owners can differentiate themselves in a space that is truly built for conglomerates. ”
Diane Lam has been working on a concept for the past few months to try and compete with the out-of-town corporations and national chains that have come to dominate the hollow scene with their ghost kitchens.
Late last year, Lam closed her Cambodian-influenced pop-up restaurant in the Psychic Bar on Northern Mississippi Avenue and opened Prey + Tell, a haunted kitchen focused on her popular pepper-lime chicken wings. . Lam made a brief debut on the virtual restaurant in January before taking a step back to expand the concept and focus on marketing and branding. Prey + Tell reopens Friday. She is hopeful that the quality of the food she can deliver will distinguish her virtual restaurant.
But she said she is also wary of how fast the haunted kitchen model is growing and evolving and how little consumers often know about the meals they order online. She said large companies are using the app ecosystem to flood the market with their different brand concepts.
“It disgusts me,” Lam said. “They try to satisfy the algorithms so much when you look at these sites, you see five of the same product from one place in the same pool as one restaurant with one page.”
The haunted kitchen model itself does not necessarily bother Chris Cha.
Cha’s Hawaiian restaurant Smokin ‘Fire Fish was considered one of the best new restaurants in Portland when it opened in 2019, but the restaurant struggled as soon as the pandemic hit.
Cha was closing the restaurant for good and selling his equipment when Jaime Soltero Jr., the owner of Tamale Boy, offered to rent space for him in the North Russell Street kitchen in his restaurant.
By using the shared kitchen model advocated by ghost kitchen operators, Cha was able to limit overhead costs and cope with just one part-time staff member. The essay enabled him to survive while only picking up and offering delivery directly via his website. He is acknowledging Soltero to save his business, and the two restaurant owners are now considering working together on a new business in Beaverton.
Cha said he does not blame any company or corporation for trying to do what is necessary to keep afloat during the pandemic, even if it means accepting the model for the ghost kitchen. But he also said that consumers have the right to know where their food comes from.
“These restaurants can no longer operate on their own, even if they are a corporate entity,” Cha said. ‘However, it would rub me wrong if they tried to reject themselves as a local restaurant. It’s quite sketchy when they use it as an advertising tool to make it look like it’s something they are not. ‘
– Jamie Goldberg | [email protected] | @jamiebgoldberg