Notice a strange new restaurant in your neighborhood? It might be a ghost kitchen.
In recent months, a slew of not-quite-believable restaurants have been popping up on delivery platforms like DoorDash: 45 locations of “F*cking Good Pizza”, a mini-chain of places called “Pimp My Pasta”, a smattering of “Cupid’s Wings”. Even stranger, Vice reported, was that many appeared to share the same address in Durham, North Carolina. A little sleuthing revealed that the brands corresponded with buildings owned by CloudKitchens, the ghost kitchen company led by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Ghost kitchens have proliferated throughout the pandemic as people look to order delivery—sometimes from restaurantless restaurants, it turns out.
