Ghost kitchens, also known as virtual restaurants, cloud kitchens, or dark kitchens, are food service businesses that serve customers exclusively by delivery and pick-up based on phone and online ordering. They are commercial kitchens optimized for third-party food delivery services. Ghost kitchens do not have a retail presence, which allows for multiple restaurants and brands to buy into them. They are separate food vendor entities that can help brick-and-mortar restaurants recoup their losses and minimize employee layoffs by allowing them to prepare food for multiple brands and keep themselves in business.

Some key features of ghost kitchens include:

• No storefront, no dining room, and no front-of-house staff.
• Physical spaces for operators to create food for off-premises consumption.
• Listings for restaurants operating out of ghost kitchens usually don’t look any different than those for brick-and-mortar operations on food delivery apps.
• Central, commissary-style ghost kitchens with multiple restaurants or brands working out of the same physical space are becoming more common.

Ghost kitchens are becoming increasingly popular due to the growing demand for home delivery of food, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. They can help small food operators get a foothold in the market during a time when opening a standard restaurant with a dining room would have been unthinkable. However, labor in ghost kitchens, like the concept itself, is often opaque, and there are concerns about exploitation of workers.