Restaurants ditch tables to turn into Deliveroo-style takeaways

In overpopulated cities, dark kitchens are appearing. Restaurateurs are reaching more customers by with delivery-only models
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Burger chain MEATliquor is well known for its cutlery-free eating. But walk into its new London branch this month and you might be surprised to find there are also no seats, nor tables. Instead, just a kitchen, in a space shared with other restaurant chains – and outside a queue not of hungry diners, but Deliveroo drivers. That's because it, like a growing number of the capital's new eateries, isn't a restaurant, but a "dark kitchen", whose food is only available for delivery.

Deliveroo, the unicorn startup launched by Will Shu in 2013 - launched Deliveroo Editions kitchens in April 2017; by the time this issue hits the shelves, it hopes to have 30 open across the country. Early adopters include MEATliquor, Clockjack, Motu Indian Kitchen – from the creators of the Michelin-starred Gymkhana – and sourdough-pizza chain Franco Manca.

London's dark kitchens (so far)

Motu: Five kitchens, covering much of London, dispatch "home-style" Indian takeaways to diners

**Supper **: The London company's Japanese "Supper scooters", with custom-made thermally-lined boxes, can deliver food for up to 30 diners at once

Crust Bros: A dark-kitchen trial preceded the 2017 launch of its outlet in Waterloo in central London

It's not just Deliveroo: in London, Supper is doing the same with its luxury meals. Why? Scale. A network of more than 5,000 delivery workers lets local restaurants expand and find new customers without committing to the overheads of a physical locations which may sit empty most of the day. "I started as a street-food stall in south London," says Joseph Moore, founder of Crust Bros, a pizza kitchen. "The low cost of operating at an Editions site has allowed me to test the Crust Bros concept before committing to a bricks-and-mortar site."

With more services, from Just Eat to UberEATs, offering delivery – and Facebook reportedly trialling delivery orders directly from its app – dark kitchens may become more attractive than renting premises for many restaurateurs. Seventeen per cent of restaurants fail in the first year, according to a 2014 study by the University Of California, Berkeley. (The industry cliché that up to 90 per cent fail in the first year is a myth).

The only drawback to delivery-only ventures? Scale requires living in dense, urban areas – where there are enough riders to support the volume of orders. If not, you're stuck with an older, less convenient technology. It's called a takeaway.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK