Is The Place You Ordered From The Place Making Your Food?

Frisch’s Big Boy is not changing it’s mascot – turns out it’s a different chain with the name "Big Boy".

They are, however, changing their name. On delivery apps, at least.

Let me back up. The other day, I read on Cracked where Steve Aoki has a pizza place that pretends to be a bunch of different restaurants.

And those other people, scrolling through their delivery app, noticed that Aoki’s wasn’t the only pizza place said to be at 444 N La Cienega Boulevard. There was also a place called “Thick & Tasty.” And another called “Gabriella’s New York City Pizza.”…But then people thought to give the place a visit, and they reported seeing just two guys working there alone, surrounded by boxes with different labels. Phone, and they won’t know which restaurant to identify themselves as. Sometimes, you’ll order from one restaurant, and they’ll send you the pizza in the wrong box.

https://www.cracked.com/article_28015_5-celebrities-whose-side-projects-are-pure-yikes.html

It’s something called a “ghost kitchen”, where restaurants pretend to be something different. The reasons range from “we want to try something new” to “let’s change names whenever we get a bad rating.” And this isn’t just something done by small places.

Chick-Fil-A, The Halal Guys and Dog Haus are among top brands that have opened ghost kitchens through Kitchen United, a startup that builds kitchen commissaries for restaurants looking to enter new markets through delivery or take-out only.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/10/21/ghost-kitchen-virtual-restaurant-heres-how-works/4053659002/

Which bothers me. Quite a bit. I have issues with some restaurants, both chains and local. I don’t patronize them on purpose – whether it’s political stances, open racism, or owners mistreating workers and forcing them to work without masks. I don’t want people handling my food to be pretending to be someone else. So that brings us back to Frisch’s Big Boy… and Order XOXO. They seem like very different places… until you do a bit of sleuthing.

And this sucks. Because it was a little bit difficult to hunt down the addresses to check. And this is just one that my sweetie and I picked because we’d not heard of it before. I almost didn’t check, since there were several locations. Order XOXO’s website proudly proclaims that it is “now available in Ohio and Kentucky”. Mostly interesting since Frisch’s has been in Ohio since 1905, and in Kentucky since 1949. Look, I don’t have a particular problem with Frisch’s. I don’t particularly care for that restaurant, but that’s because of their food. It just feels… wrong that a place would want to hide who was actually making your food. So the next time you decide to order from a place you’ve never heard from before… maybe you should try looking up the address first, and seeing who is really handling your food. Featured Photo by Jay Wennington on Unsplash