The Uber Eats Vegan Ghost Town

More and more NYC vegan virtual restaurants have been popping up on Uber Eats.

Last week, as lunchtime was fast approaching, I opened up Uber Eats and typed in “vegan.” I was surprised to find nearly two dozen places I had never heard of. I then methodically copied and pasted each one into Google Maps (as you do), only to find that literally none of them existed as standalone brick and mortar restaurants (Searches for “vegan” on Doordash/Caviar and Grubhub/Seamless yielded a couple of virtual restaurants, but not nearly as many as I found on Uber Eats).

One Address, 64 Virtual Restaurants

113 East 125th Street has the most vegan virtual restaurants on Uber Eats in NYC, with six at the time of writing:

• The Vegan Pizza Society
• The Vegan Square Pizza Co.
• The Vegan Burger Experience
• Celebrity Vegan Burger
• Fiona’s Vegan Pizza
• Oliver’s Vegan Square Pizza

While Google Maps searches for the names of each of these six restaurants yielded nothing, a search for 113 East 125th Street shows that 2 Bros Pizza is located at that address. Is 2 Bros Pizza hosting multiple virtual restaurants?

Matt Newberg, a journalist specializing in food and technology, testified for an NYC Council’s public hearing on ghost kitchens back in 2020. In his testimony, he urged readers to google a particular address on Postmates’ site to see how many “restaurants” list that address. Following Newberg’s template, I googled instances of “113 East 125th Street” on the Uber Eats (which now owns Postmates) website and found 64 (!) hits. It turns out the six vegan restaurants were just the tip of the iceberg.

The Pitch

I was curious to learn more about this odd phenomenon. After some deep research (also known as googling “ghost kitchen”), I came across Anna Wiener’s New Yorker article from 2020, titled “Our Ghost-Kitchen Future.” Her reporting was eye-opening. Not only is Uber Eats allowing virtual kitchens, but it has also actively recruited thousands of restaurants to spin them up.

Using data from in-app searches, Uber Eats identifies opportunities for certain cuisines in various neighborhoods, then approaches existing brick-and-mortar restaurateurs to pitch them the idea of launching a virtual restaurant.

She then goes on to quote a representative from Uber Eats, Kristen Adamowski, who says that the goal is for these virtual restaurants to become a “demand-generation tool” that fills a “cuisine gap” based on their data.

“We’ll provide the high-level cuisine insight. And then we take it one step further, and provide a list of menu items within that cuisine type that are also in high demand. So we provide that granular menu-level insight.”

Sure enough, Uber Eats markets their Virtual Restaurant program directly on their website, with an odd disclaimer stating that “This product may not be available in your country.”

Both virtual restaurants for existing brick-and-mortar spots as well as cloud kitchens (delivery-only shared cooking and prep spaces like these) certainly have their appeal for investors. But how does their growth impact consumers?

Leaving Vegan Patrons in the Dark

For vegans who have been ordering from the same restaurants over and over during the COVID pandemic, finding a new vegan place seemingly around the corner can be exciting. Perhaps the plethora of vegan virtual kitchens on Uber Eats is, overall, net positive. More choice is better, right?

Newberg’s testimony at the city council public hearing wasn’t anti-ghost-kitchen in its entirety; he was interested to see where this trend might go:

“… ghost kitchens could create positive efficiencies, like lowering carbon emissions through batched delivery orders or enabling restaurants to rapidly test new concepts…”

At the same time, his testimony didn’t shy away from the hard truths (bolding is my own):

[Ghost kitchens] simultaneously add another intermediate layer that makes it incredibly difficult to trace our food back to its source. On a recent investigation, I discovered that a Rachel Ray virtual restaurant concept on UberEats was originating from Reef Technologies’ kitchen trailers in Chelsea and Long Island City parking lots, the latter of which was adjacent to a porta potty. These kitchens were recently shut down by the fire department due to their abundance of propane tanks that posed a safety hazard.

Not being able to “trace our food back to its source” can be a big problem for people who need information about how their food is prepared and cooked, like vegans with dairy or egg allergies and folks who keep kosher. In the absence of kosher certification, as I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ll usually reach out to the restaurant before adding it to the Manhattan Kosher Map to find out more about the food prep process, including whether or not they share dishes, pots/pans, and ovens with neighboring restaurants. How do I know that a pizza shop isn’t using the same oven for their pepperoni pizzas as they use for their six virtual vegan restaurants?

The Uber Eats Virtual Restaurant program FAQs note that “Each virtual restaurant has a unique name, listing, and endorsement in the Uber Eats app that links back to the physical, parent restaurant (you). This way, your customers will always know where their food is coming from.” Linking back to a physical parent restaurant would certainly go a long way towards adding transparency to virtual restaurants, but while all the restaurants on my initial list have an address, none of them link back to a parent restaurant. It’s possible these restaurants aren’t using the Uber Eats Virtual Restaurant program at all; they could be using any number of third party cloud kitchen startups.

This Forbes article identifies a handful of different names for cloud kitchens, including the term “dark kitchens.” That moniker is an apt metaphor for their lack of transparency. In describing a warehouse run by CloudKitchens (founded by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick), Newberg comments, “These superstores provide a quick and convenient selection of a location’s best offerings, without the hassle of knowing where your food is being prepared.”

All of this is to say that the future of food delivery is looking pretty bleak for patrons and restaurant workers alike. Wiener’s analysis of a video Newberg posted in 2019 is spot-on:

Newberg posted a video online, which depicted line cooks packed into a windowless warehouse, yelling over the sounds of tablets and phones chiming with order alerts. For the people working in ghost kitchens, there is nothing spectral about this environment. As in most restaurants, the apparition is for customers; the ghosts are the workers themselves.