To stay afloat, many restaurateurs offer a drop-off or pick-up service. The ghost kitchen concept goes even further. No guest room or staff – only cook and kitchen. It already exists in many places.
Kitchen which saves money
This concept has enormous cost advantages. We don’t need a bartender, we don’t need any service staff – we just have our kitchen, our chef is in there and we can actually try out the whole concept while keeping our costs pretty low. Because if the concept fails, you have not entered into any major financial commitments in advance or have to fulfill long-term lease agreements. On the other hand, if things go well, they’ll even want to open a small shop at some point.
Quality in food and marketing
A professional presentation on the Internet is therefore extremely important for these kitchens. Because they don’t have a real shop presence, they have to be convincing at first glance on the screens. But that doesn’t mean that blenders would get far: the internet presence has to be right, but so has the quality of the food.
The concept of these kitchens has been practiced for a long time in many restaurants. The dining room is empty, but the kitchen is busy. Half a dozen men and women stand at the work surfaces, cutting sushi and packing. A soup is simmering in the background, it smells of rice vinegar and soy sauce.
The unique quality and image that a brand offers in the hospitality industry through a personalized service can be compromised if not carefully controlled.
Possible combinations of the virtual kitchen model:
# 1 You can create a brand, set up a kitchen, and connect that to an existing delivery service. If it works, you can scale it up and add more kitchens in more locations.
# 2 You can start with the concept of your own restaurant, use that brand as your face and set up a thesekitchen to produce the best-selling dishes and ship them via your own delivery service or a third-party delivery service that offers a good price-performance ratio.
# 3 You can cooperate between a few restaurants – that offer different types of cuisine – and set up a ghost kitchen hong kong together to expand the reach in a city, generate more sales and together reduce investment costs and risk.