As a consumer, everything I enjoy getting at a restaurant has three critical properties.
* Hot (or cold; extreme) temperature
* Fresh (IMO: short best by time)
* Annoying to make at home
The last factor might involve the hassle of deep frying, or the need for food specific industrial equipment (like a pizza oven), or even just a ton of ingredients to keep fresh. Something a kitchen selling 50+ of that thing a week can easily accommodate but I can't.
The secret to the best sourdough bread and butter at the fish shop, pre-pandemic? That butter was farm fresh daily because they just used THAT much; and the bread fresh from the oven the same way.
IME just about everything that wasn't awful when delivered was already being delivered decades before gig jobs existed. Indian and pizza work well with delivery but things like burgers or anything with a hot component and a salad component just become a soggy luke warm mess. A gourmet salad place is about the only exception I've come across.
The other big advantages of restaurants is that they get to "hide" the calories, if you make the same thing at home you're aware of everything that goes into it and half the time the restaurant version is only better because the amount of fat/sugar they put in things.
I don't necessarily find those to be good examples. A pizza fresh from the oven will steam its delicate crispiness away in a box. The same applies to a fried dumpling.
On the other hand, a non-crisp dish like a vindaloo or a soup will arrive almost entirely unchanged.
When I order anything time-sensitive, I prefer to get it myself. That minimises the amount of time it is sitting (e.g. awaiting a driver). I like to arrive early, so I can take it away as soon as it leaves the kitchen.
It's not a coincidence that companies like Domino's specialize in spongy dough.
I think there is room for both the physical and digital experience. Any restaurant who hopes to survive will need to make a choice about who they are, though - are you commodity or an experience? I doubt any can do both well.
The sad reality is that most people just don't give a shit - look at how much whitelabel junk is sold on Amazon to people who don't care. Those same people are the perfect demographic for commodity food delivery - they want some abstracted version of what they think Chinese food is for a reasonable price, delivered to their door.
The real scale of the problem will be when DoorDash et. al merge/acquire themselves a monopoly and push orders to their own entities.
In your comment on Amazon, I think the difference is that often times, the white label goods are actually pretty good. So while it’s not branded, the reputation is overall positive, and sometimes these goods come from the exact same factories as the branded goods. While some ghost kitchens are derived from real, high quality restaurants, most of the time it is a distressed business that needs to rebrand or a new entrant of questionable quality.
I agree. Trader Joes has a lot of white label stuff, I'd say I usually have a higher impression of their white labeled products than branded products at the same price range.
Food delivery, even with all the complaints about how much they skim off the top, how much they underpay drivers, etc. still makes pretty meager margins. And consumers aren't blind to it; I know a lot of people who have grumbled about how much there is in fees.
They won’t take over. Rents ability to change in the long term means that if ghost kitchens get too popular then restaurants will face less competition for rent and be able to drop prices.
But I don’t see what time immemorial has to do with it. For a long time paying high rent to be on restaurant st was the most effective way for a restaurant to spend their marketing dollars. For a long time buying carriages was the most effective way to spend your transportation dollars.
* https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/recreate-the-menu-of-p...
* 2d ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26210774
Though probably more akin to street/fast food:
Why? Simple market dynamics. After 5000 years, the economics of running a traditional restaurant are essentially identical. That's because the lion's share of the value of a restaurant is the repeat and referral business, NOT in discoverability. That's why a fancy restro-bar on Glitzy Avenue shuts down after 3 months. For a good restaurant, the CAC should go to zero over time. The food should sell itself. By adding artificial market dynamics to this equation (mandatory advertising, artificially low unit costs, artificial discovery), you are removing that crucial, critical element, and the food will inevitably suffer. Burgers-R-Us can pay $1 per customer to appear at the top of your feed, serve you a shitty hamburger, then rename to Best Burger, and rinse and repeat.
Eventually consumers will wake up (many already have), and the traditional restaurants will escape with meaningful margins. Of course only a tiny fraction of restaurants that are started turn into surviving businesses, as has been the case since time immemorial.