Man gets catfished by a sandwich
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Food and Drink
CrystalRaindrops — 2 years ago(April 13, 2023 07:08 AM)
‘I got catfished by a sandwich’: Virtual kitchens boom on delivery apps
From Big Hot Dog Energy to Pimp My Pasta, there’s a growing wave of restaurants in the U.S. that are luring patrons with clickbait names and glossy imagery. But you can’t dine in them, because in the physical world they don’t exist.
“There’s no signage, no seating, no cute walk-up window,” said Jean Chick, a senior consultant specializing in food and beverage at consulting firm Deloitte. Unlike full-service restaurants, these virtual endeavors prioritize delivery and pick-up. They can be “ghost kitchens” — which operate out of trailers or commercial warehouses — or, increasingly, alter egos for existing restaurants known as virtual restaurants.
In New York City, a sample of 1,656 Uber Eats listings showed that more than 1 in 5 appear to be virtual, a trend repeated across each of the 12 cities NBC News examined, according to an analysis of restaurant listings. Data shows there are now tens of thousands of virtual restaurants, flooding the marketplace and prompting at least one delivery app company to make plans to rein in some restaurants.
Rich found that people were ordering from his virtual restaurants based on name alone. “You know, I want pepperoni pizza,” he said. “Wow, Pepperoniville, they must specialize in pepperoni. Let’s do that.”
“If they like the name, they order.”
Snappy names and convenience helped convince Ryan Benson, a marketer who lives in Los Angeles’ Sherman Oaks neighborhood, to order from The Meltdown.
“It was called the Giddy Up Melt and had things like burnt brisket tips; it sounded like a premium hipster joint,” Benson, 25, said. “I thought it was a hole-in-the-wall diner or a food truck that was selling on an app. I was not envisioning a Denny’s.”
In fact, the sandwich so enamored Benson that he only discovered the restaurant’s true identity after he made plans to eat there in person. While putting together a Yelp list of his favorite restaurants, Benson couldn’t find The Meltdown, so he searched the address from the app and was startled to see Denny’s listed there.
“I feel like I got catfished by my sandwich — everything I knew was a lie,” Benson said.
“[Virtual restaurants are] stealing attention from what I thought was a new or locally owned business,” Benson added. “It’s almost like they’re masquerading as a new small business — is this ethical?”
https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/virtual-restaurant-boom-uber-eats-data-rcna76532
Schrodinger's Cat walks into a bar, and doesn't. 