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Many ghost kitchens are now, well, ghosts.
Once lauded as the future of the restaurant industry, ghost kitchens are beginning to decline in popularity. Characterized by an emphasis on delivery apps and no physical space to dine in, ghost kitchens boomed during the pandemic, with CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment company, estimating ghost kitchens would account for 21% of U.S. restaurant sales by 2025.
But last year, Kitchen United MIX, Crave Kitchens, Maggiano’s Italian Classics and Wendy’s REEF Kitchens all closed, and ghost kitchen revenue in the U.S. is expected to decline 5.2% in 2024.
Still, some ghost kitchens are continuing to expand post-pandemic, including CloudKitchens, owned by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. With the recent addition of Sunny’s Food Hub, located at 1026 W. Evelyn Ave. in Sunnyvale, the Peninsula now has three CloudKitchens locations, including San Mateo Food Co and Redwood City Eats. The creation of Sunny’s Food Hub brought 28 new restaurants to the Peninsula, with tenants citing the food hub’s low startup costs as an attractive way to test out a new market.
While some concepts, like Craft Roots, hope to use Sunny’s Food Hub as a launching pad for additional brick-and-mortar restaurants, other concepts like Koshin Bento plan to concentrate on expanding within other ghost kitchens. Secondary uses like recipe development and producing food for other projects are of greater priority for concepts like Slice of Homage and Teo Chow BBQ Express.
But there are pitfalls as well. Some restaurant owners say marketing a ghost kitchen is more difficult than a brick and mortar, food options have to be well-suited to takeout and there’s consumer misconception about how food at ghost kitchens is produced.
I interviewed four local businesses that recently set up shop at Sunny’s Food Hub about their thoughts on ghost kitchens and their goals for their new locations.
Slice of Homage
Known for its crisp and chewy Detroit-style pizza, Slice of Homage began in 2020 out of owner Steven Barrantes’ San Jose apartment. Since 2022, he’s owned Slices by Slice of Homage at San Pedro Social in San Jose, and in late June he opened his ghost kitchen in Sunny’s Food Hub. Next year, he plans on opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant with an expanded menu in downtown San Jose.
Barrantes began his journey in the pizza industry at 16 years old as a dishwasher at a San Jose pizzeria. He went to culinary school and received a business degree from San Jose State University. But his passion for pizza particularly ignited while training under John Arena, World Pizza Champion and co-founder of Metro Pizza and Truly Pizza, Barrantes said.
“Everything is like a connection: the flour, the yeast, the tomatoes that we get, the cheese, everything,” Barrantes said. “There’s a connection to every aspect of it, and that’s really the craft, and that’s why it’s never ending. There’s so much technique and styles.”
While the primary reason Barrantes chose to open within Sunny’s Food Hub was to service a new market, he is also using the new location to prepare food for corporate catering and to test new recipes in preparation for opening a San Jose brick and mortar next year. Expect tavern-style and deep-dish pizza soon on Slice of Homage’s Sunnyvale menu, styles that Barrantes plans to offer at his future brick-and-mortar restaurant.
“There’s an actual art form to (pizza) in every capacity,” Barrantes said. “There’s no way I can get bored…I feel like I’m learning something every day as a pizza maker and as a business owner.”
Barrantes has previous experience working out of a ghost kitchen, formerly operating out of San Jose nightclub Myth Lounge. Because there’s less visibility operating out of a ghost kitchen, he’d only recommend it for established or niche brands.
“It could be challenging if you’re a new operator, if I’m really being honest, because the visibility is a little different,” he said. “You have to go heavy on marketing. It’s just a different strategy for this type of business.”
Another challenge he’s encountered at Sunny’s Food Hub is customer perception, with some customers interpreting the CloudKitchen as a delivery pickup zone with pizza being shipped over from San Jose.
“Everything is made on-site,” Barrantes said. “There’s nothing being transferred or traveled…We have a kitchen here, and we do everything exactly as it’s done and prepared in San Jose.”
Barrantes said he hopes to introduce San Jose and the South Bay to regional styles of pizza they haven’t tried before.
“Pizza brings people together,” Barrantes said. “It’s deeper than pizza for me. I think there are connections that happen. It’s a communal food…and who doesn’t love bread, cheese and sauce?”
Slice of Homage, 669-588-9238, Instagram: @sliceofhomage. Open Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 4-9 p.m. and Friday to Sunday from noon to 9 p.m.
TC BBQ Express
Established in September by husband and wife Calvin Ng and Winnie Chen, TC BBQ Express is a Cantonese-style barbecue concept serving barbecue pork, roasted duck and roasted pork belly. It’s the third restaurant under the Teo Chow name, which was created by Calvin Ng and his father, Kwong Ng, in Fremont in 2012. The brick and mortar, Teo Chow Noodle Shack, still operates today and focuses on Chinese noodle soups.
Teo Chow opened its first ghost kitchen, Teo Chow Express in Hayward’s East Bay Eats, earlier this year in response to customers asking for a Teo Chow location closer to the East Bay and the Tri-Valley. But the new Sunnyvale ghost kitchen wasn’t to please customer requests: The primary reason was to support production needs in Fremont.
“One of the biggest constraints we have has been our most popular dish, the roast duck and barbecue pork for the noodle soup, because our facility is not big enough in Fremont, as much as we want to just be able to produce more,” Calvin Ng said. “And that’s where Sunnyvale came in originally, is to really support the existing stores. But at the same time, it’ll be cool to give the option for customers around that area, Sunnyvale (and) Mountain View area, to try Cantonese barbecue.”
Calvin Ng said the ghost kitchen model attracted him because it bypassed the high costs of a building, renovation costs and the permitting process. As a consumer himself, he said he loves ordering from delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub, but that not all food translates well to delivery, which is why the menus at his ghost kitchens are limited.
Roasted duck produced at TC BBQ Express in Sunnyvale is used in signature noodle soups at Teo Chow Noodle Shack in Fremont. Courtesy Teo Chow. 
Barbecue pork from Teo Chow ($17.98 per pound). Courtesy Teo Chow. 
Roasted duck over rice at Teo Chow ($18.99). Courtesy Teo Chow. 
Barbecue pork from Teo Chow ($17.98 per pound). Courtesy Teo Chow.
“We’d love to keep expanding, to give our consumers more options,” Calvin Ng said. “I love eating noodle soup. I love that wherever I go, I can always find really good ramen, I can find really good pho. But one thing that I can never find is Chinese noodle soup. Personally, I feel like it’s not readily available. And that’s kind of the ultimate goal. We want to be able to expand that to where customers get to have more options.”
TC BBQ Express, Instagram: @tcbbqexpress_sunnyvale. Open Monday to Friday 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Koshin Bento
Koshin Bento is serving bento boxes featuring items like wagyu yakiniku, grilled mackerel and duck confit – all handcrafted by Koji Miyamoto, who hails from Yokosuka, Japan, but now lives in Sunnyvale with his wife Cecilia Miyamoto.
Koshin Bento was established in 2018 out of a shared kitchen in Santa Clara. It later moved to a shared kitchen in Campbell, and now it operates out of Sunny’s Food Hub – a decision mainly influenced by ease of delivery services and keeping labor costs down. While operating out of the shared kitchen, Koshin Bento had to abide by a time slot and wasn’t able to use delivery services. CloudKitchens provides Koshin Bento with its own kitchen space and has designated workers who manage food distribution.
Translating for her husband, Cecilia Miyamoto said, “He can concentrate on his cooking so he doesn’t have to worry about managing the restaurant, because there’s a lot of other things that you have to take care of when you’re in a restaurant. So this way he can provide food that has a much higher quality.”
And it’s not just about the quality for Koshin Bento – it’s about the cost too. By avoiding additional labor costs, the prices of his food can stay lower, at $14.50-$21, Cecilia Miyamoto said.
“Eating out these days is so expensive,” she said. “So for people who get off work being so tired and not wanting to cook, I think his business gives a really reasonable price with the quality of food that he’s providing.”
In addition to his ghost kitchen, Koji Miyamoto is also a private chef and does corporate catering. He doesn’t want a brick-and-mortar restaurant; instead, he hopes to continue expanding to additional ghost kitchens.
Koshin Bento, Instagram: @koshinbento. Open Monday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Craft Roots
Vegan food that doesn’t taste vegan is what owner Justin Gaich aims to achieve with Craft Roots, a family-owned vegan restaurant established in Morgan Hill in 2019.
“A lot of customers in my restaurant don’t even know it’s vegan,” Gaich said. “We’re not in your face about it…It’s more of just, ‘This is another way to eat, and we’re going to work on textures, flavors and unique offerings.’”
Gaich wasn’t always vegan. In fact, he was the general manager at Trail Dust BBQ in Morgan Hill for a decade.
“The wifey watched a bunch of documentaries one day, flipped a switch, and I just did it with her, and we never looked back on going vegan,” he said. “Running a barbecue restaurant really didn’t align with the values…So we got some cash together with the family members and bought a restaurant in downtown Morgan Hill.”
This year, Gaich was ready to expand Craft Roots, but he wanted to test how it would do in a fast-casual setting, as opposed to his sit-down restaurant with a full bar in Morgan Hill.
“(A ghost kitchen) was a perfect opportunity to test it with a pretty low burden of buy-in compared to a brick and mortar,” he said.
The biggest transition from a full-service restaurant to a ghost kitchen for him has been learning how to do delivery.
“I’m an old-school restaurant guy that has paper menus and glassware and silverware and no QR codes,” he said. “So I’m trying to keep up with the times and see how Craft Roots does.”
And while he doesn’t think ghost kitchens will ever be as popular as they were during the pandemic, he thinks habits stick.
“It’s the same with craft beer,” he said. “Once you drink craft beer, you don’t really go back to Coors Light, and craft beer’s popularity has completely plateaued and saturated. The demand is nowhere near as extreme as it used to be, but it’s still very viable income.”
Gaich hopes to eventually have three physical locations of Craft Roots: one in Morgan Hill, one in the Sunnyvale-Los Gatos area and the other along the coast.
“I get if you’ve never had vegan food why you wouldn’t want to spend your money on it,” Gaich said. “But I think if people could just take a leap of faith, they’d be pleasantly surprised and realize that maybe the stomach doesn’t hurt so much after their meal, or ‘I feel kind of good after all this.’”
Craft Roots, 831-515-8407, Instagram: @craftroots_mh. Open Wednesday and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday from 2-10 p.m. and Sunday 2-9 p.m.
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