The strange, underground world of ghost kitchens in Hampton Roads

I have arrived at a neutral location — the parking lot of a Virginia Beach Barnes & Noble — to procure a bag of hamburgers that can’t be found at any restaurant.

The burgers in question are not good, as it turns out. They are, in fact, barely edible. But they arrive with a pedigree of sorts. They come from MrBeast Burger, a fast-food chain that launched overnight in December with a boggling 300 locations, stamped with the name of a 22-year-old North Carolina YouTube star famous for filming himself giving away stacks of money to randomly selected people.

MrBeast is not a traditional restaurant, in the sense that you can’t actually go there. They also lack so much as a phone number. The burger spot instead has a shadowy and somewhat tenuous existence: findable only on delivery apps, and only if your address happens to fall within the delivery radius.

And because my home didn’t fit into this category, here I was in a Town Center parking lot, flagging down a bemused driver who’d traveled only three blocks to reach me.

MrBeast is part of a massive nationwide trend toward ghost kitchens — also known variously as virtual kitchens, dark kitchens or shadow kitchens — an undercover version of restaurant whose revenues already add up to billions of dollars nationwide.

The idea is simple. Ghost kitchens are restaurants without the restaurant: delivery-only food brands that often make food in the kitchens of more traditional businesses. This might be a commissary kitchen for multiple brands, or a restaurant that had its business decimated by the pandemic. In some ways, the ghost kitchens are the outsourced gig work of the restaurant world, an invention of the decentralized Internet economy.

MrBeast’s burgers, as it turns out, were cooked at a corporate location of Bravo! Italian Kitchen, a chain that does not otherwise serve hamburgers — a fact you’d only discover through moderate online sleuthing.

While MrBeast Burger’s menu was ostensibly conceived by online celebrity Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, it was executed by a corporate chef from a company called Virtual Dining Concepts, co-owned by the founder of Planet Hollywood. And like Planet Hollywood, the company leverages celebrity clout to sell food. The company also pushes chicken “bytes” from rapper Tyga, and Italian subs from the Jersey Shore’s Pauly D. Mariah’s Cookies, a bakery branded for Mariah Carey, also sells out of the same Virginia Beach kitchen as MrBeast.

Ghost kitchens are often a bit like Mardi Gras masks for chain restaurants. Look on Doordash or Grubhub and you might find something called “It’s Just Wings.” While it may appear to be a new restaurant, it turns out to be a delivery-only wing brand cooked by Chili’s and Maggiano’s Little Italy.

Meanwhile, The Captain’s Boil will deliver you bags of crawfish from locations of Ruby Tuesday. “Neighborhood Wings” turns out to be Applebee’s. Chuck E. Cheese sells its pizza online as “Pasqually’s,” named after the mouse-mascotted arcade’s fictional chef.

The results could be charitably called mixed (see below). Turns out, it’s often smart to be afraid of ghosts.

But delivery-only kitchens are also one of the only categories of restaurant whose business has grown during the pandemic, as dining rooms have been shut down or limited across the country. Michael Schaefer, with market research company Euromonitor, estimated in a presentation last year that ghost kitchens could be a trillion-dollar industry by 2030.

The restaurant-industry trade press has filled with headlines claiming that the ghost kitchen will either bring the death of the restaurant or become the food industry’s savior, propping up revenues for pandemic-stricken restaurants by lowering overhead and making use of fallow grills and fryers.

“Build a food concept without losing your shirt,” reads the marketing copy for CloudKitchens, a ghost-kitchen company from Uber founder Travis Kalanick. “Open a kitchen in one month. Test multiple food concepts out of one kitchen. Experiment with low risk. Minimize cost, maximize profit.”

A few local restaurants in southeastern Virginia have gotten in on the ghost game, as well. Last summer, Norfolk Indian restaurant Tamarind received a sales pitch out of the blue from an Illinois-based company called Ghost Kitchen Concepts, which promised to market Tamarind’s excellent chaat and curries online under the name “Gunpowder Cafe.”

“It was another platform we could use for delivery service,” said Tamarind co-owner Tejas Patel. “They market it for us, and like any third-party service, it costs a fee.”

The Gunpowder Cafe concept has surfaced at various small Indian restaurants from Baltimore to San Francisco. But as it turns out, Gunpowder is less a restaurant than a shiny new name badge.

Ordered side by side for delivery, dishes from Gunpowder Cafe and Tamarind were indistinguishable except by price. Gunpowder’s “Peshawari” butter chicken costs $18.74. Tamarind’s costs $14.99. But it’s the same chicken, Patel says. Tamarind’s delicious chickpea-blanketed samosa chaat, rebranded as a “deconstructed samosa,” also receives a 25% markup.

But Patel says the extra business has been helpful to their restaurant, whose business has suffered during the pandemic. Though he credits his loyal regulars for keeping the lights on, the Gunpowder Cafe brand has allowed them to reach new customers they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

“I don’t mind if they give our food a different name,” Patel says. “It’s helped a little bit here and there. We get more orders per day — it’s two or three extra orders we’d never have had. The way we look at it is, it’s better than zero orders. We have a full running kitchen: If Gunpowder sells a couple dishes, why not?”

Local hot pot spot Fire Ninja also hosts a ghost kitchen, selling noodles under the name Ramen Hero. And in some of the country’s denser food cities, from New York to Portland to Washington, small entrepreneurs have launched ghost kitchens serving off-track Thai or Burmese food.

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But in much of the country, including Hampton Roads, the ghost kitchen has been a largely corporate phenomenon.

Large companies are far more likely to have the infrastructure in place to set up ghost brands that can crowd out struggling local businesses on delivery apps, says Pat Garafalo, a director at anti-monopoly advocacy group the American Economic Liberties Project.

“It’s generally a bad situation for small, local business,” Garafalo says. “The pandemic has become an opportunity for these companies that have financial backing to surge into all these areas, and take advantage of the struggles of small businesses. "

Ghost kitchens are sometimes set up in partnership with app companies such as DoorDash, he says, who use data they’ve gathered from their own clients to conduct pinpoint marketing of dishes sold in direct competition with local restaurants.

The ghost kitchen concepts can, of course, also help local restaurants, says Virtual Dining Concepts spokesperson Tamar Aprahamian. She notes that while many MrBeast locations are chain spots, others are small restaurants who’ve been kept afloat during the pandemic by the added delivery business provided by fans of Mariah Carey or Jimmy Donaldson.

But in the long run, Garafolo considers the ghost kitchen an existential threat to traditional small restaurants, especially as the delivery market expands.

“The question is, do we want small businesses to survive?” he says. “Or do we want a world where the only option is SEO-optimized stuff that comes from a warehouse down the street?”

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Hampton Roads Ghost Kitchen Taste Test

In a spooky and sometimes grueling odyssey, often taking delivery at odd locations dotted around Hampton Roads, I sampled the wares of 10 ghost restaurants available in southeastern Virginia.

It turns out that the hastily assembled brands often serve food worse than what you’d find at the chain restaurants that cook them — odd hodgepodges of ill-advised sauces, dubiously cooked meats, or inexplicably tiny wings.

And one local ghost kitchen, Peek-a-Boo Oatmeal, with an address listed cryptically at Harbor Tower apartments in Portsmouth, purported to sell the “highest quality farm-fresh oats in the world.” Instead, Peek-a-boo lived up to its name. I ordered their Nutella-bacon oatmeal three times on DoorDash. And, each time, the food order disappeared into the ether of my phone.

Ghost name: It’s Just Wings

Actually cooked at: Chili’s locations

The wings at “It’s Just Wings” have one sole benefit: They are significantly cheaper than the ones you get at Chili’s. Eight wings will arrive with curly fries and a drink for a mere $10, with options on a vast variety of sauces.

But when I ordered Chili’s and IJW delivery side-by-side, the wings that came from the ghost kitchen were significantly smaller, and soggier than Scotland. The Chili’s drums were nearly twice the size, with variegated crispness and tenderness within, though they were also a bit gristly. But with their indistinct “black truffle” sauce, the IJW wings tasted like the chickens they came from had drowned in a vat of syrup. The other novelty sauces didn’t fare much better. That said, the ghost kitchen does make an excellent argument that Chili’s should add curly fries to their menu.

Ghost name: The Wing Experience

Actually cooked at: Smokey Bones locations

Turns out Smokey Bones knows how to make some decent smoked wings — lightly charred, crisped on their skins, with a not-overpowering smokiness and moistness within. But unfortunately, the expanded sauce repertoire at the Wing Experience can’t be trusted. The delivery app recommended a strawberry-chipotle as the “featured flavor” for bone-in, and so I obliged. This was a mistake: The near-heatless sauce was an uncanny replica of those pink-tipped dental swabs you get on your gums before your teeth get drilled. The “Nashville Hot BBQ” was neither recognizably Nashville nor in any way hot — one of those strange corporate word salads that make you question all human language.

Ghost name: Pasqually’s Pizza and Wings

Actually cooked at: Chuck E. Cheese

Apparently the cartoon chef who makes your pizzas at the mouse-themed pizza spot is named Pasqually P. Pieplate. And so that’s who you get your virtual pizza from. The company’s CEO promised that the pizza served by Pasqually’s would appeal to a more mature palate than the kid-friendly restaurant, with a thicker crust and more sauce. If this is true, I’d hate to see what they were serving before. The sauce is almost indiscernible even if you lift up the cheese, and the crust is cracker-thin. The pizza is also marred by an unplaceable and bitter aftertaste. That said, a large pepperoni pizza is a mere $10. Pick your battles, I guess.

Ghost name: Rotisserie Roast

Actually cooked at: Boston Market

I have a half-remembered fondness for Boston Market, whose food I haven’t otherwise eaten in years. And so I wish this meal never happened. Rotisserie Roast’s rotisserie half-chicken arrived in discrete breast-wing halves, with the wing tips charred beyond recognition as meat. The breast was chalky-dry and mealy, with a sour note reminiscent of fridge burn. I raided my fridge for sauces that could make it taste better, or make me forget. I never found one that worked.

Ghost name: MrBeast Burger

Actually cooked at: Bravo! Italian Kitchen in Virginia Beach

To promote his burger chain, YouTube star MrBeast opened a pop-up burger shop in Wilson, North Carolina, in which he paid each customer $100 to eat his hamburgers. Based on our experience, that’s almost not enough money. The grilled cheese sandwich was a bit like plastic wrapped in rubber buns, and the chicken sandwich contained breading of equal rubber. One burger was a cold hockey puck, while the other was so crumbly and indistinct it resembled the beef chili on a hot dog. Online reviewers have posted still grislier experiences.

These grim results are likely a paradoxical byproduct of MrBeast’s popularity. So many millions of his young fans downloaded the MrBeast Burger ordering app that its server crashed; it was briefly the most-downloaded app on iTunes and Google Play. MrBeast kitchens around the country were then flooded with far too many orders, immediately upon opening — with perhaps predictable results.

Ghost name: Mariah’s Cookies

Actually cooked at: Bravo! Italian Kitchen, Virginia Beach

One could balk at the price and be correct: $26, including tip, is a lot for a dozen cookies that arrive cold in plastic containers. But if you’re the sort of person who finds joy in eating a Mariah Carey cookie, you can also find it here. The Heath bar and lemon flavors, in particular, had all the pre-packaged, easy-to-digest sweetness of early Mariah Carey.

Ghost name: The Captain’s Boil

Actually cooked at: Ruby Tuesday

At its brick-and-mortar locations, Canadian Viet-Cajun chain the Captain’s Boil offers a gallimaufry of sauces and heat levels, shaken into bags of corn and potatoes and seafood — not to mention a whole mess of other options. The ghost version of Captain’s Boil is more streamlined: one type of sauce, and one type of protein per bag on small orders, even if this means ordering a plastic bag filled with wet sausage for $11. The crawfish bag arrived as an intimidatingly oily jumble of spare parts: legless bodies and bodyless legs and the occasional missing head or tail, all crumpled into plastic.

Ghost name: Gunpowder Cafe

Actually cooked at: Tamarind, 415 N. Military Highway, Norfolk, 757-942-5611, tamarindnorfolk.com.

The food at Gunpowder is just the wonderful Indian food that Tamarind always serves, except somebody else gets some of the money. Order directly from Tamarind instead, and you’ll have access to a much broader variety of their terrific chaat dishes, including a chutney-and-yogurt-slathered khasta kachori that is a little bit like the world’s best take on wonton nachos. The food will also cost significantly less.

Ghost name: Ramen Hero

Actually cooked at: Fire Ninja Sushi & Shabu Shabu, 4000 Virginia Beach Blvd, Virginia Beach, 757-631-6831

From a newly reopened hot pot spot from Tony Wong, former owner of local all-you-can-eat sushi chain Volcano, you can now also get delivery ramen in flavors from curry to tonkotsu. It’s far from the most accomplished version in town — the tonkotsu, in particular, is oddly sour — but it’ll do in a pinch. And the seafood ramen bowl is very generous with its proteins.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com