People have really funny ideas about restaurants. Somebody once left an online review of my family's establishment complaining that the hot chicken that was supposed to be on their cold to-go salad was in a separate container. They asserted that it was a "trick" to keep the chicken warm and moist, as though it would have been better to let the hot poultry heat their salad in the same container until it was lukewarm meat on top of wilted greens. Every day I wake up and mourn the IQ point that I lost reading it.
"Wilted soggy salad lovers hate this one simple trick!"
So some places are optimizing their fries for delivery.
I've also noticed some restaurants are better at adapting the packaging, like punching out ventilation so fried products don't steam themselves in transit. Lawrence Seafood (which rules) did that for a side of tempura we got this weekend.
But I agree in large part. I wouldn't order fried chicken delivered via door dash in any event. People doing that are optimizing for something other than quality.
This was an example of a well functioning ghost kitchen. I don’t know how profitable they were, but it was very convenient. There are a lot of downsides to this approach, like pre ordering, reheating, and limited menu, but it was a very different approach to current ghost kitchens around me now or DoorDash from a local restaurant.
I can't remember when I last used a service like that. The convenience isn't worth the disappointment and aggravation.
Are you sure they're not?
People are dumb.... but only for so long. I've been burnt so many times by delivery I've gone back to mostly ordering pizza and picking it up in person.
Food that travels well requires different recipes, different ingredients, different packaging.
This doesn't ring true, given the popularity of DoorDash and the fact that most of those restaurant menus are in no way optimized for delivery.
Having lower-quality multitasking staff serving multiple restaurants from the same prep and equipment seems like an obvious way to lose quality. But simply streamlining the process of getting a menu onto delivery? That seems like a solved problem.