Junk(food)space

In the season finale of Hulu’s The Bear, it is revealed through an enterprising scheme that the only solution for the recently two-Michelin-star’d restaurant to financially thrive is via the franchising of its predecessor, The Beef, into the hinterlands of the Chicago Metropolitan area. The idea is that by removing a front-of-house, the famous and well-loved beef sandwich can be more expeditiously delivered to the mouths of suburban midwesterners while allowing investors to save on staffing costs and square footage. They exclaim, as if they’ve won their bet on Kalshi, that they will create a network of “ghost kitchens.”

Ghost kitchens have grown exponentially since the pandemic, particularly under Travis Kalanick’s company, CloudKitchens, which as of 2026 operates 90 locations in the United States. Like Uber, where Kalanick was previously CEO, the entirety of the ghost kitchen enterprise is predicated on the algorithmic optimization of space and labor: how to get from point A to point B in the least amount of time for as little as possible. Multiple companies lease silver shells within post-industrial buildings located near areas with younger demographics, who are more likely to order-in than cook. Kalanick envisions this real estate operation as the backend of an “internet food court” where the menu is “hyper-personalized” and logistics are fully automated. Another one of his startups, Lab37, boasts the robotic production of 300/unique bowls per hour with a labor reduction of 40%.
When form is sped up to the speed of logistics, it loses its legibility, like a projectile decaying as it enters the atmosphere, or a fast-casual Medi-Mexi salad rice bowl. The ghost kitchen enterprise, as a deployable model of culinary neutrality, averages taste into an analytical field to be tracked and predicted. In the effort towards the frictionless production of food, meals are increasingly treated as an agglomeration of statistics formerly known as ingredients. The menu is a placeless condition formalized.

Wonder, the main rival to CloudKitchens, is the newest addition to the Yale-subsidized Shops. It offers eating areas with millennial-neutral interiors and a hypermenu that has subsumed the contents of 99 restaurants, including 24 of their own in-house celebrity-chef-partnered culinary experiments. The back-of-house is described as being ventless, which, like a bacteria, permits the company’s expeditiousness and ability to spread. In a soggy game of telephone, meals are either prepared at local restaurants or at their commissary kitchen in New Jersey, then reheated in air fryers and microwaves. The desire for hyperpersonalization and instant gratification disintegrates otherwise distinct typologies into an anonymous matrix of water condensing onto plastic lids.

A shared meal has been the theatre of kinship and creation for time immemorial. A sense of attentiveness is evident in a well-prepared meal, and cooking one attunes your body to the space of a kitchen, the processes that supplied ingredients, and their preparation with chosen utensils. There is a spirit, an agency, in the cooking and the sharing of a meal that, like seemingly every facet of human life under capitalism, must be eradicated in favor of something that sucks. A craving for the alchemic spawning of undead dishes, the chimeric unknown unfolding behind closed doors, and a spectre of capitalist desire: ghost kitchens will haunt us, if we let them.