Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

This part feels like The Onion. 30 private taxis coordinating for your meal. "customers can order from upwards of 30 restaurants in a single order, with each item being made-to-order in a sequenced fashion so that they finish simultaneously and can be delivered to the customer together."

Agree, I don't think that's going to work in practice.

A Wonder just opened near my house, and the "different restaurants" seem to really be just different sections of a large menu with distinct branding. I.e., there is a single physical kitchen that makes food from the different "restaurants".

Yeah, it's a cloud kitchen with a eating area.

I don't think anyone thinks this is "innovation"... it's just a slightly different take on Uber Eats / Spoonrocket / food courts / cloud kitchens / etc.

And if there is an "innovation", it's the vertical integration... it's a business "innovation," not a tech one.

There are a bunch of "restaurants" in our town that are just different menus serviced at the same ghost/cloud/dark kitchen. The quality is generally not good. I wonder about the quality at Wonder -- the broader the menu, the harder it is for the preparers to get good at it.

Upon seeing this, I first thought "a bread company is buying Grubhub?" Then I clicked the article and realized no, this is a different company I've never heard of, apparently because they're only located in five US states all in the northeast nowhere near where I live.

As others have said, they appear to have physical locations and you can even go eat in person there, and they don't pick up food from 30 different restaurants to deliver to you. They seem to just get licenses to use the names and recipes of celebrity chefs or other restaurants. That raises the question of what the point of a restaurant even is. Seemingly, there has to be some quality gain from using a particular kitchen and particular staff, a particular source of ingredients, whatever it is. There has to be a reason some enterprising businessperson can't just hire random cooks, buy recipes from celebrity chefs, and recreate the experience and quality of a meal at 30 different top rated restaurants in a single kitchen.

That seems just as impossible as delivering from 30 different places at the same time.

I'm thinking here of an Indian place near my office that graduated from ghost kitchen to food hall restaurant. I had their food both before and after, and the difference was night and day. I actually didn't want to try the food hall version, based on my experience with their ghost kitchen incarnation. But a friend convinced me to give them another chance, and now they're one of my favorite places for when I want to splurge on lunch.

I don't really know what the difference is, but I'm guessing it's that they didn't get to have a kitchen setup that was well adapted to their menu at the ghost kitchen.

Microsoft cafeterias manage it by just contracting out most of the stations to local restaurants. They provide the trained staff and get a consistent revenue stream in return. They’ve even got a local celebrity chef branded restaurant in the executive building (34) with a 3 course fixed price menu. It’s not a single kitchen per se, but the equivalent is commercial kitchens that are all over the place with multiple clients sharing the space simultaneously. This just adds online ordering and centralized management.

Its a ghost kitchen. It isn't 30 restaurants, its one restaurant with 30 brands.

This idea was tried years ago (they'd claim to be the first) by a company based out of Indianapolis named Clustertruck (https://www.clustertruck.com/); though their branding was more "one restaurant, 30 food truck brands". The aim was: you can order a bunch of stuff, the software in the kitchens times it to all come out at the same time, and ETAs the driver to pick it up for delivery.

The company is still around but isn't all that successful. They split the software portion into a second company, closed down a bunch of kitchens, raised prices, etc. I think the reality that hit them was: It really doesn't matter all that much that you can order tacos and pasta all in one order, except for large parties but that's an uncommon situation. The genre of food matters less than the specific food being ordered (e.g. I don't just want a burger, i want a five guys burger). Additionally, the food might have usually been delivered at a higher quality than a typical Uber Eats/etc delivery, but that's still a distance away from restaurant quality; but the prices were obviously higher than eating at a restaurant.

Uber Eats/etc are barely successful, and the only reason they can find that success is because they don't have to manage all the typically lossy parts of food delivery (restaurants & the drivers). Gig apps are good businesses because they avoid this vertical integration: No depreciating assets, little real estate, low competition, no worry about managing minimum wage workers, no health inspections, no stoves breaking down, just some software engineers and marketing (I'm simplifying but you get my gist). Why anyone would think vertically integrating something involving a restaurant is a good idea is, well, crazy. Even ghost kitchens on the typical range of delivery apps are stupid; oh sure your startup is one of the most classically unprofitable kinds of businesses on the planet, I bet that'll survive when interest rates rise.

Because an enterprising businessperson has no idea how to run a kitchen.

Recipes are in many ways the least important part of what a chef provides. They're not secrets. If there's a "secret ingredient" it's that they're using more butter and salt than you'd use at home.

What a chef provides is a process. They get the ingredients ordered, at the quality level they want for a price they're willing to pay. They ensure that the ingredients show up, in the amounts needed, without waste and without falling short -- and have backup plans. They staff the kitchen, and ensure that they have all prepared their stations before service begins. They train the expediter to ensure that all of the food comes out together, without things waiting under the warmer.

The chef also provides a menu, which is more important than the recipes. It has something for every guest, and every item can be finished before the guest gets impatient.

It's not impossible for a business guy to hire a top-notch executive chef to do that work, but the business guy cannot do it. It requires years in the kitchen to know what factors are important. It requires a deep understanding of the culture of kitchen workers, and how to get the best out of them. It would require an enormous staff to do that properly, and training them extremely well.

You can see this at work at a place like The Cheesecake Factory. It's hardly great food, but it's reliably good. The menu is enormous, on par with a dozen restaurants at once. It can be done. You're just not going to do it Silicon Valley style, learning as you go.

I have enough trouble getting food on the table at the right time when I'm making a relatively simple meal for my family. Reading this description (which seems spot-on to me, though I don't have experience working in foodservice) is making me anxious just imagining it.

Uber Eats in the USA, yes, it's more hands off in terms of gig workers. In the UK and Germany and many other countries though, there have been many court rulings to essentially ban gig-working and enforce employee protections.

It is definitely nerve-wracking. But when things are going well, there's a kind of zen to it. They have the advantage of doing the same thing every day. They know the plan, and they stick to it.

Until something goes wrong with the plan -- somebody calls out sick, the refrigerator fails, an order gets messed up and has to be re-cooked -- and the rhythm gets disrupted. The dining room is full so new orders are getting backlogged, and more mistakes get made because you're off your game...

It's not for the faint of heart. It doesn't have to be as unpleasant as some TV shows make it out to be. But it's a whole different kettle of fish from cooking at home.

You can change the name, the brand, of a ghost kitchen startup 'restaurant' overnight if you think it's stale due to bad consumer experiences. So you need to care less about those.

I was in Bloomington for college and ordered from ClusterTruck multiple times. I did think the food was notably more fresh than other delivery services.

What does a ban on gig working look like?

That workers must be essentially treated as employees and everything that comes with that, including the minimum wage