Chuck E. Cheese is now selling pizza under a different brand.
A lot of places created ghost kitchens in door dash and Uber. An example is the dennys near me is also “the burger den” that sells burgers exclusively, and “the meltdown” which serves melts exclusively. Both come right out of the dennys kitchen.
I’m sort of boggled by this. Do people just open the delivery app and type “pizza” and not care where it comes from?
Pretty much, yeah. Or are thinking, “I’ll give a new business a try today.”
This is how fucking Applebees got me, thought it was a new wing place. Never againnnnn
There’s a certain subset of consumers for whom price is the most important deciding factor in where and what to buy. No surprise - an assembly line shoveling Sysco is priced pretty competitively.
DoorDash, Uber Eats and all their ilk are awf for other reasons anyways. If you want pizza, call the pizza place directly.
I mean, Chuckies pizza is slightly better than Domino’s pre-recipe change, and that went on for decades. It’s not like there’s a high bar for selling pizza. You can sell a stale cracker, with tomato sauce on it, for a long time before going bankrupt. If the crackers are cheap enough.
Also my bet is that it was just a way for them to keep some revenue flowing, keep people employed, and not have to shutter their entire business. I mean lets face it, their business model is spreading diseases while, entertaining children whose parents are ordering beer by the pitcher. Not exactly a winning model during a pandemic. They had to do something.
In the pandemic, I wanted to support struggling mom-and-pop restaurants instead of big conglomerates. So I went out of my way to order from places with names I didn’t recognize, both to try them out (you never know if “Alberto’s Tacos” has the best taco you’ve ever had in your life) and to make sure that tiny places could stay afloat.
I still remember the first time this came to bite us in the ass. We ordered from this cute little shop called Thrilled Cheese. They had cute little sandwiches… that both looked and tasted horrible. I was wondering how on earth they had stayed in business with food like that and so I looked up their address from the app.
It was an IHOP. Specifically, an IHOP that we purposely avoid because it’s a terrible IHOP that got a “B” from the health inspector and once gave us food poisoning.
Now we have to triple-check that the little family-owned place is really a little family-owned place. Too often it turns out that it’s an Applebee’s or an IHOP or a Denny’s or something. (We did discover some great local restaurants though. Shout-out to “I Heart Pancakes” in Santa Ana, CA - best pancake place ever.)
Yup. This was it for me. Ordered a burger from a no name local place. It came in a Red Robin bag and container. Apperantly they gave no fucks. Since then if I found a place, and it turned out to be real, I just marked it with the heart. Anything not marked it either a big name chain restaurant, or it’s suspect. Especially since we also know about ghost kitchens where it’s one place posted under at least 10 different restaurants.
Edit: Just for shits and giggles, I just loaded up the app. First place I didn’t recognize I checked and Google shows it in the middle of an industrial complex. No restaurant signs anywhere to show where it’s at.
Then I saw “the burger den”, which another person said is Dennys. Google maps takes it to Dennys
Red Robin used to be a great regional burger place but it has just been destroyed. We used to go a few times a month but I haven’t been for at least 5 years.
At least doordash marks when places are virtual brands now, a lot less googling addresses for me lol
There’s a great video on the concept of ghost kitchens that I highly recommend
I think this is common now. Honestly not a bad idea for a company that was completely reliant on in person and not exactly top of mind for take out.
A lot of chains had ghost kitchens. Off the top of my head, Applebees had Neighborhood wings, and Cosmic wings. Boston Marlet had Rotisserie Roast.
