Secret Sauce Barbecue
The concept of the “ghost kitchen” — that is, a restaurant that relies solely on delivery with no option for sit-down dining — wasn’t born out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ghost kitchens had very much existed before 2020, staying relatively true to their name as the trend began to catch on throughout the country.
Then the pandemic hit, and the growth of the ghost kitchen would only accelerate.
In Fort Worth, locals saw ghost kitchens emerge, thanks to chefs like Jesus Garcia and Lanny Lancarte. Garcia launched a ramen concept, Kintaro, off Camp Bowie Boulevard, while Lancarte launched Eat Fajitas out of his existing West Seventh Street restaurant, Righteous Foods. Meanwhile, the company that manages City Works Eatery and Pour House, Bottleneck Management, put its own spin on the concept with Secret Sauce Barbecue, opening the Fort Worth location in January within City Works’ brick-and-mortar at The Shops at Clearfork.
While all three ghost kitchens have benefited from the uptick in to-go orders brought on by COVID-19, all three don’t see the concept going away when the pandemic is over. In fact, there are many pros to remaining delivery only.
The first is obvious — less overhead.
“Restaurants [are always about] location, location, location,” Garcia says. “Well, with a ghost kitchen, it doesn’t have to be in the nicest shopping center or anything like that. It just needs to be accessible to your customer base.”
According to Lancarte, another benefit of running a ghost kitchen is having better control of the restaurant labor model. He says the traditional restaurant model has “always worked on really thin margins because of a lot of the labor and overhead. It’s been a hard system to disrupt.”
“Restaurant models got so exposed when the pandemic started,” Lancarte says. “When a customer comes in and spends $20 and decides to give $5 to one single employee of an entire operation, 8.25% of that goes to the state, and that only leaves a small portion for us to pay all the rest of the employees and all of our overhead expenses.”
Secret Sauce Barbecue
The cons of running a ghost kitchen? Well, there’s dealing with IT, for one, says Bottleneck Managements CMO Angela Zoiss — making sure delivery apps and procedures for taking orders are working properly.
But perhaps the bigger challenge is marketing, especially when there’s no flashy physical location potential diners can eye from the street — or, if you’re Secret Sauce Barbecue inside City Works, the kitchen’s signage reads a completely different name.
“There is a challenge around communicating that the brand does live in our current restaurant’s location,” Zoiss says. “That just means some extra communication to delivery drivers, to the guests.”
That’s when social media comes into play. For Garcia and Lancarte, both chefs had existing restaurants with established fan bases they could reach; Secret Sauce had the advantage of leveraging the following of City Works.
Spending a little money for better visibility on delivery platforms helps, too, Zoiss says, along with reaching out to local media for news coverage.
As far as what becomes of each restaurant in the future — well, Garcia, being himself a fan of in-person dining, has temporarily closed his ghost kitchen to focus on the brick-and-mortar version of Kintaro, which opened in February at Crockett Row at West 7th (coincidentally, in the former location of Oni Ramen, which Garcia used to own).
Meanwhile, Lancarte intends to build on the concept, with plans to move Eat Fajitas out of Righteous Foods and add more ghost-kitchen brands in the near future (though he keeps mum on specifics).
Zoiss says Secret Sauce is looking toward expansion. Fort Worth was the sixth location to open in the U.S. (others are located in places like Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Though it’s still early to determine each location’s success, she says they’re already showing signs that ghost kitchens are here to stay.
“In the early days, we’ve seen that Secret Sauce is accounting for about 25% of our off-premise business right now across the board. It’s a good chunk of all the off-premise business we’re doing, attributed to that brand,” Zoiss says. “It’s interesting. We looked at off-premise sales right now overall just year to date, and those are accounting for 16% of our overall sales. Just to compare that, last year at this time, it was about 3%. Granted, we had more locations open … last year, we weren’t making as big a push on delivery, so there’s quite a few things that are different obviously, but we’re seeing really great signs this is viable.”
Lancarte agrees, saying there will always be a need for food on the go with the fast-paced lifestyles of today’s society.
And good food — not necessarily fast food.
“Fast food is not an option in our house,” Lancarte says. “A cuisine with something that’s thoughtful and thoughtfully sourced needs to be available ... something that’s convenient and experience driven.”
Chef’s Recs
Secret Sauce Barbecue
2Meat2Sides (namely, 1/4 rack of smoked ribs and barbecue pulled pork, sides of creamed corn and maple bacon baked beans) Photo courtesy of Bottleneck Management
Kintaro
Karashi Tonkotsu Ramen (spicy, creamy pork broth with thin, firm noodles topped with tender pork belly, soy-marinated egg, pickled mustard greens, and bean sprouts) Photo courtesy of Kintaro
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Eat Fajitas
Fajitas Combination (beef sirloin and chicken fajitas, rice, beans, and flour tortillas) Photo courtesy of Eat Fajitas