No waiters or dining area, just restaurant fare

WINTER PARK, Fla. (AP) - Jeff Covington called out orders as a display of multiple tablets chimed during a Friday night dinner service.

“Build-your-own, Bolognese, side Caesar,” he relayed to the rest of the kitchen staff.

Another chime, this one triggered by the door, signaled when it was time for a meal to leave the kitchen. That sound let the chefs know when a delivery driver, working for Uber Eats or another app, had entered the waiting area of KitchenAF.

Known as a ghost kitchen, the only public space inside the business is a small seating area outside a pickup window.

Ghost kitchens, which are popping up across the country, have no dining rooms, waiters, cashiers or busboys. The restaurant, located near appliance repair and jiu-jitsu self-defense businesses in the Winter Park Commerce Center off Aloma Avenue, only offers its menu through apps like Uber Eats or DoorDash. Customers can select between delivery or pickup of burgers, pastas and pot pies.

“The reason they call them ghost kitchens is because they’re an apparition,” owner Jim Marshall said. “There is no physical form to the restaurant.”

‘A tremendous overhead advantage’

When the burgers chef Dan Weber cooks are ready, they don’t end up on a plate.

Instead, the hot patty is put into a part of a to-go container separated from the toppings. The setup is one of the ways the ghost kitchen prepares food specifically for delivery.

“Our concept is that the only way to order from here is through cyber, is through an app,” Marshall said. “That eliminates us from having somebody to answer the phone, key an order into the (point-of-sale) system, take the payment. That’s labor, and it’s distraction.”

Marshall, whose previous culinary ventures included the 789 sandwich shop in downtown Orlando, said before switching to the delivery app model he had a catering operation that was listed online with different cuisines. The arrival of delivery apps allowed him to go to individual meals.

“Dan and I just said, ‘Hey, let’s start a night time, delivery-only version of what we do,’” Marshall said.

After an experiment last year that didn’t last, the kitchen launched its burger delivery menu in March.

The business pays about $1,500 a month for its space, and there are six kitchen staffers, Marshall said.

“We have a tremendous overhead advantage, and a tremendous labor advantage,” he said. “We have a bare minimum crew.”

In addition to cheap rent near Winter Park, the space is also close to Full Sail University and about 15 minutes from the University of Central Florida. Marshall said the kitchen is centrally located and near people in the right age group for its model.

Ghost kitchens can go in areas where rents aren’t as high, but they need to be close to major thoroughfares to grow their delivery radius, said Miami-based Rafael Romero, senior vice president retail advisory at JLL, a real estate and investment management professional services firm.

Romero and Marshall point toward the West Coast when talking about where the ghost kitchen concept took off.

The company Kitchen United started in 2017 and has facilities in California and Chicago. It plans to continue adding kitchen centers, with one targeted for South Florida, according to its website.

CNBC has reported former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is also involved in ghost kitchens, with a controlling stake in the Los Angeles parent company of CloudKitchens.

Uber Eats launched in Orlando in 2016. The app also launched in Miami that year and by mid-2017 rumors were circulating about real estate dedicated to the service, Romero said.

- PastaAF, BurgerAF, CheesyAF…

KitchenAF serves up its “smoking pig burger,” with pulled pork and macaroni and cheese as toppings, and its build-your-own pasta dish through different restaurant names on Uber Eats, including PastaAF, BurgerAF and CheesyAF.

“They’ll look at the first page and they’ll swipe it once and they’ll look at the second page and if they don’t see what they want, they’ll close you and go to the next restaurant and start looking there,” Marshall said. “If I made a KitchenAF menu that had burger and pasta and Southern and all these things on it, no one would ever get past the second page to see any of that other stuff.”

KitchenAF was up to six cuisines as of earlier this month, with plans to launch a seventh any day. Additional menus were also in the works.

One restaurant having multiple listings in Uber Eats is not unique to ghost restaurants like KitchenAF.

Uber shares opportunities with existing brick-and-mortar restaurants to start “virtual restaurants,” said Juan Pablo Restrepo, director of top cities for Uber Eats. For instance, if there are not enough chicken wings being offered in an area, an existing pizza restaurant might create a wings concept to be listed on the app.

“Our mission is to help them grow their business,” Restrepo said.

There are about 50 of that kind of virtual restaurant in the Orlando market on Uber Eats and 2,100 nationally, the company reports.

As for what the “AF” in the KitchenAF brands stands for, Marshall said the business wouldn’t ever “officially confirm” its meaning. A board in the lobby area, however, gives visitors a chance to write their best guesses.

Suggestions included: “Awesome food,” “Always Fresh!” and “Aerosmith & Foreigner.”

‘We reverse engineer our menu’

When outside delivery services started, restaurants were charged about 30% in addition to what customers were charged for delivery, restaurant analyst John Gordon previously told the Orlando Sentinel. Now, large restaurant chains are working to negotiate that down.

“We reverse engineer our menu,” he said.

Before delivery fees and the driver’s tip, the smoking pig burger available through BurgerAF costs $11.25. A chicken and waffles dish, available through CheesyAF, is $10.95.

The build-your-own options are the most popular, Marshall said. With KitchenAF offering delivery from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. Monday through Saturday, some unique creations can come in during the late night, weekend hours.

“We’ve made burgers for people so big we’ve had to package them in two containers,” Marshall said.

The new model raised questions about how a ghost kitchen would be licensed in Florida.

KitchenAF has been operating under a permit from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which Marshall said was the same as when he was in catering, but a recent inspection report said that while no violations were found the department was recommending a licensing change.

“It has been determined that due to expansion and alteration of the business towards an immediate service model, the firm more accurately lies within the jurisdiction of the Department of Business and Professional Regulation,” the inspection said.

On Oct. 23, Marshall said the Department of Agriculture license allowed his business to do more, such as produce ice cream to sell to a grocery store, but when the current license expires KitchenAF will need to go through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

“We’re completely legal to operate,” he said.

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Information from: Orlando Sentinel, http://www.orlandosentinel.com/