It's the crisis, beauty. There are those who cry and those who sell handkerchiefs, and in this moment, while almost all restaurateurs are counting the damage, others have seen an opportunity in the subversion of the status quo. It is not cynicism, Darwin simply defined it as evolution "because it is not the strongest animal that survives, but the one capable of adapting to changes".

The restaurants in phase 3

The restaurant sector has reacted, let's say, in three ways to the storm of Covid-19. Some restaurants are still in phase 1, that is, they are trying to buffer and stall while waiting for everything to return as before; someone has implemented a crisis management plan and adapted the business model by inserting new services such as delivery or by modifying the organizational structure (phase 2); others have already officially entered phase 3 and were born like the phoenix from its own ashes. The news of continuous closures will be a new war bulletin to get used to unfortunately, but the good news of new concepts exists, even if they have not yet reached the front pages.
We talk about delivery, dark kitchens, new alternative forms of service, apps and riders, but the gastronomic revolution we are witnessing is much deeper and concerns the kitchen itself: not just how we eat, but what. After years of waiting for the epochal change brought by Ferran Adrià in the 2000s, and before him from the French Nouvelle Cuisine, the world was waiting the next big thing. She has arrived but, like a silent messiah, she is still proselytizing a few apostles. It is logistics, which fully enters the creative and production process of catering.

Ghosts that communicate via social media

Dark kitchen, cloud kitchen, ghost kitchen: these are English terms that define (with some nuances) an innovative restaurant model. They are kitchens without a showcase, ghost in fact, located in places you do not know and which do not have access by road and where there is not even take away. They are kitchens that churn out from tacos to diet dishes, from spaghetti to noodles and serve their dishes at home with a rider system. You order via the App, website and delivery is by moped or bicycle. The fact is that they do not have a room, they do not have waiters, there is no talk with the cook, the order takes place via digital and the only human contact is the one with the delivery boy at the time of delivery. The restaurant as we know it disappears and is replaced by a digital sign and a so-called "virtual brand" in which the communication of one's service and culinary philosophy takes place in the ether and stamped on the product packaging.

From Glovo to KUIRI and Delivery Valley incubators

This is nothing new, shared cloud kitchens have existed for years: Glovo had inaugurated its Cook Room in 2019, hosting new brands or the delivery services of restaurants such as Pescaria, which instead of sending orders from the premises, had hijacked them in a third and functional kitchen. The one in Milan was the first in Italy, but the sixth in the world, a sign that what for us was a novelty accelerated by Covid, was already the norm elsewhere.
Also in Milan was born Delivery Valley, a shared cloud kitchen from which three different brands start on two wheels: Giga Burger, the pizza by Lievito Mother Fu ** r or the chicken by Gira Gira Arrosto. New for 2020 is also KUIRI, the consultancy firm that deals with start-ups and that from the location to the staff provides all the turnkey hardware and software for future catering entrepreneurs. We have already talked about how chefs and high-level restaurants have followed the trend, and so from the three Michelin stars to the local neighborhood, they have all thrown themselves into the business looking for alternative sources of income and parallel to the "mother" activity that now pays in dire straits.

What does ghostronomy mean

Delivery is one thing, there is one thing ghostronomy that will revolutionize the restaurant industry forever. Delivering means taking your own menu, adapting it a little and simply delivering it to your home, still steaming or to be regenerated at home. Fare delivery is a shipping system; ghostronomy, on the other hand, is a new way of understanding cooking and a new culinary proposal. Some would call it philosophy. Ghostronomy is different, in terms of preparation technologies, the concept of the dishes, the very idea of ​​catering.

In the beginning it was the foodtruck

Do you remember the wave of food trucks everywhere and the advent of street food as a trend? It seemed a fashion to us Italians, but in the United States the birth of restaurants on wheels and the need to put all your culinary knowledge in a sandwich was the result of the 2008 economic crisis. Rents too high, little money, layoffs and many chef they had to start their own business, looking for the best way to do it. From the large and equipped kitchens with rooms with white tablecloths they folded on itinerant kitchen trucks that were previously the right prerogative of the "paninari".

The recessions that change the rules

From serving food, the chefs' food trucks set out to offer recipes that combined gourmet preparation with a salable form in the middle of a street. The guides began to review them, while the boom of Facebook and Twitter. The rest is history (the funny film also tells it Food Truck).
Today the Great Recession / 2 has changed the paradigm. It is no longer the kitchen that huddles and goes around on four wheels, but the food travels on two while it is prepared in equipped, super-technological spaces and where, indeed, thanks to the presence of several brands or high numbers, you can count of modern equipment that can guarantee haute cuisine preparations.

The gastronomic implications

Ghostronomy therefore means rethinking the kitchen from a new point of view. The dishes must be transportable, designed from the start to arrive at their destination exactly as the chef would like. And then we talk about managing not only the orders as in the restaurant, but integrated services for orders from different providers such as Deliveroo or Just Eat, having riders instead of waiters and thinking about how to communicate your dish and your kitchen from the screen of a mobile phone, via social media or at the time of the order. The "let the chef do it" or the "I recommend the meatballs tonight" do not disappear forever, but they take on a new dimension and the shelf life of the dishes becomes as important as knowing how to make a brown base or a risotto on the wave.

Because it will be a revolution

The revolutions in the gastronomic field of the last centuries can be counted on two fingers; the trends have been many more. There Nouvelle Cuisine (we are simplifying with the hatchet) in the late seventies he had lightened French cuisine, rewritten the use of sauces, delivered forever the message that "seasonal and local is better" and introduced innovations such as the refrigerator and quick cooking, steam or on the plate, which would safeguard the nutritional and organoleptic properties of the ingredients.

Thirty years later Ferran Adrià he sets aside the product-sauce-decoration trilogy, strips the dishes showing a single element, and then puts together a real research laboratory in which, with the help of chemists, he studies new technologies to be introduced in the kitchen. Spherifications, foams, airs, nitrogen cooking are born and we play to change the shape and consistency of the ingredients. Kitchens go from having ovens and stoves to hosting new technologies.

The revolution not only changes the dishes in taste or appearance, but innovates the way of cooking, introduces technologies, changes the work inside the restaurant. Exactly what ghostronomy is doing: it introduces logistics as an integral part of the creative and production process of catering.