Ghost Kitchens: The post covid food delivery scam

Answer me this, if its ok for the Cheese Cake factory restaurants to have infinitely large menus with multiple varieties of food, why do the deliver places insist on lying to us and pretending that one kitchen is 30 different restaurants rather than one with a very large menu?

This is kind of mind boggling to me. So I’m back from my travels and in the Chicago area and my body clock is all screwed up (went to sleep at noon and woke at 9pm)
and as such I started looking DoorDash for places that do late night delivery

I was kind of impressed by how many places were listed … most being restaurants that I’d never heard of before … so I started to methodically pull up the addresses of said restaurants (which is kind of hidden on the site, but it’s there) and I’m finding it is IMPRESSIVE just how many of them are all ONE location
— 34 different places!!!! see list below — are actually all coming out of one kitchen

when I googled the address it’s a place called Bacolod Chicken House, a Filipino place on Lincoln ave in Chicago with about 200 good reviews on google …. so I looked at their menu (again on google) and it looks interesting, so then I tried to search DoorDash for delivery of THAT … and it’s NOT THERE… if you’re going to be open late making all this other stuff, why not still make your own stuff?

That said, how can ONE kitchen produce ALL of these different places, and how good could any of it be?

Chicken Shaq
SOUP KITCHEN- Lincoln
Tunisian Fusion
Spaghetti Bowl
Jack’s Fish Market
Ishtar Inn Assyrian Mediterranean Kitchen
FIREWOOD PIZZA- Lincoln
Taylor Street Dogs
Zucci Italiana Pasta & Pizza
Burger Bites – Lincoln
Brazilian Steakhouse
Main Spain
Breakfast Cafe
Olive Branch Express Fine Lebanese Restaurant
Juanito’s Burritos
O.G. Flatbread Pizza
Big Philly Cheese Steaks
Steak House
Pho- Sho 2
Anthony Kings Just Desserts
Fruit Bowl
Fresh Catch
Argentinian Fine Steak – Lincoln
Soup Hot Pot
X-Treme Sandwiches
Big John’s Red Hot’s
Joe Hood Pizzeria & Grill
EGGROLLS
Chef Mony’s Fish Market
Zuzu Wraps
Lily & Nats Breakfast Cafe
Uncle Tuntunji Middle Easter Cuisine
Flamingo Portuguese Cuisine
Paul’s Pierogis

OH, and as I was methodically going through and comparing the addresses I found there’s like a second different single kitchen that is responsible for at least 16 other places that deliver to me… I find this disturbing …. THAT place however has the decency to be somewhat transparent about what they’re doing, in that among the listed restaurants there ONE called “all day kitchens” which lists all the places on one page so you can pick and choose different foods from various well known chicago junk food places around town …. the “actual” places are out of my delivery zone so I have to think those restaurants have agreed to this as a way of expanding their delivery zones and probably get a certain percentage kicked back to them…

I’m looking closer and to DoorDash’s credit for the place with 32 different names (none of which I’d ever heard of before) they have a banner in red at the top of the page saying “This is a virtual brand.” …

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