Post-ghost, the redux

Thinking through some shared characteristics of the next phase of ghost kitchen evolution

The branding at Manhattan’s Citizens food hall is anything but invisible. / courtesy of Everybody Eats

I wrote Expedite’s first post-ghost post about two years ago. Now, the next step for the business has come into clear view.

First, here’s some fun ghost kitchen-adjacent news:

Sam Nazarian is acquiring assets from shuttered Kitchen United to pad his roster of restaurant concepts and important brand relationships.

I spoke to him in an exclusive interview for Fast Company — posted this morning — and he explained, multiple times, that the value in building a restaurant business at massive scale comes from its IP, intellectual property, which includes the brand and often the influencer or celebrity behind it. Also, he explained that the best virtual brands aren’t actually virtual; they have a physical presence, too. 

Nazarian, a notable hotelier, nightclub owner, and restaurateur as founder and CEO of SBE, became a loud voice in the digital restaurant space when he launched C3 just before the pandemic. It was a new home for SBE’s restaurant brands, from longtime favorites like Umami Burger and Katsuya to newer concepts like Krispy Rice and Sam’s Crispy Chicken. Over a few years he refocused efforts on physical spaces, opening a pair of food halls in New York and Atlanta to showcase the brands. Then his voice got louder in the space when he acquired Nextbite, which developed and ran virtual brands out of partner restaurant kitchens. Nextbite once raised over $100 million from Softbank before it split in two and sold itself. 

Now Nazarian is bullish about what he’s building, starting with a new name for a bigger restaurant group: Everybody Eats. And thanks to a decades-long and successful career, he has the channels to fill with restaurant IP, as he calls it, including a January deal with Wyndham hotels, strategic investment from public companies and hospitality operators, major celeb partnerships, and, now, the connections forged by the companies he’s acquiring (or partially acquiring, as it were).

This is the new future for the ideas formerly known as ghost kitchens: strong brands, virtual connectivity, physical spaces. It’s a trend that’s come to the surface recently: 

Earlier this week, journalist Elizabeth Dunn and the New York Times offered a peek under the hood at Wonder, the evolving restaurant concept from entrepreneur Marc Lore.