A man has gone viral for talking about the rarely discussed phenomenon of ghost kitchens. In his video, he looks up a restaurant’s address, goes there and discovers a building where only takeout food is made.
Scourge Bliss is a TikTok and Instagram creator whose content mostly focuses on what it’s like to live in New York City, as well as highlighting things that happen there.
He has gone viral a few times before, and his latest viral video goes over a phenomenon that is rapidly spreading through many cities: ghost kitchens.
In his video, Scourge Bliss discovers that a restaurant from which he occasionally orders delivery food isn’t a restaurant, but a building that houses several restaurants that only exist as such online.
“So I keep ordering from Meat + Rice,” he says as he walks down a street and speaks to the camera while holding a tiny microphone. He briefly shows an UberEats screenshot of his last order from said restaurant, “because it’s apparently 19 minutes from my house, but every time I order it takes about 40 minutes to come,” he continues.
“And so I finally decided to Google the address,” he says, showing a screen recording of him searching 356 Devoe Street on Google Maps, “and here’s what I actually realized.”
“It’s not actually just Meat + Rice; it’s about 10 different restaurants in this one location,” he states, showing the Google Maps directory for the previously mentioned address, “so I wanted to go check it out.”
He cuts to a shot of himself standing in front of a building, the words “Williamsburg Eats” painted on its side. “This building right here is what you would consider a ghost kitchen,” he states, pointing behind himself. “It has about 10-plus restaurants inside, and you’ll never actually see any of the food being made,” he states.
Then, he cuts to a shot of himself standing close to the building, and delivery drivers, as well as their bikes and motorcycles, can be seen in the background. “Instead of having a dining room, these businesses only exist on delivery apps, like Uber Eats and DoorDash.”
He again cuts, now to a shot of himself in front of another side of the building, where the words “Take out” can be seen written in white, alongside a white arrow pointing to a door.
“All the pictures that you see online are actually just AI-generated,” he says, showing a screenshot of a bowl of food on an AI detector that determined that the image was likely to be AI-generated. “One kitchen can actually cook a ton of food for a bunch of different restaurants,” he adds.
Now, he cuts to a shot of himself inside the building, in a white room with delivery drivers in the background. “This is how the actual inside looks; they have lockers for you to pick up your food,” he says, showing said lockers in the background.
“And then the delivery drivers pick up from the tablet,” he says, panning over to show said tablet, “and they have a front receptionist.”
Back on the street outside of the building and walking away from it, he says, “The craziest part is I guarantee that a lot of the items are probably shared too. You could probably order a burger from one restaurant, and the other ‘restaurant’ that’s here will have the same exact burger, and you won’t even know the difference.”
“Something also interesting to know about ghost kitchens,” he continues, “is that delis are kind of doing the same thing, a lot of these delis and bodegas,” he says, showing an Uber Eats screenshot of a restaurant called Sandwich Palace, “what they do is they open a restaurant on DoorDash and Uber Eats, get AI-generated pictures and AI-generated captions.”
He then shows a screen recording where he obtains Sandwich Palace’s address in Uber Eats and then puts the address on Google Maps, where a deli shows up on Street View. “And then they’ll sell the food that doesn’t really sell well in their deli on Uber Eats and DoorDash,” he says.
“And a lot of people who don’t look at the addresses of where they’re ordering food at will order from these delis thinking they’re ordering from a regular restaurant,” he continues.
“Now, ghost kitchens aren’t illegal, and I’m pretty sure some of them probably make good food,” he says, “but the thing is, most of that stuff is probably just reheated, remicrowaved food from Sysco,” he adds.
“And most of the restaurants aren’t quality, because it’s just one big restaurant,” he says, “and then, on top of that, even though something on paper could be 19 minutes from your house, now it actually might take 40 additional minutes to get delivered to you because of how long it takes for them to make all the other food and all the other restaurants in there,” he concludes.
In the comments on both TikTok and Instagram, people expressed their distrust of ghost kitchens and restaurants with names like “Meat + Rice,” while others said that they themselves never ordered from places they hadn’t been to in person. Others compared ghost kitchens to Wonder.
Read the original article on Know Your Meme.
Dining and Cooking