What is a ghost kitchen?
A ghost kitchen is a kitchen with no dining room, no servers and no shopfront, cooking only for delivery orders from apps and the phone. It is also called a dark kitchen or cloud kitchen; in Turkish, a bulut mutfak. Customers only ever see the brand in an app. Where the kitchen sits rarely matters; delivery time does.
The three models
| Model | How it works | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Single brand | One brand, one kitchen, delivery only | New brands with proven delivery demand |
| Multi-brand (virtual brands) | 2–5 menus under different names from one kitchen | Existing restaurants with spare capacity |
| Shared kitchen (commissary) | Rented stations in a fully equipped facility | Founders testing with little capital |
The big advantage of the multi-brand model is running several menus from one ingredient pool. If the menus don't share ingredients, stock and waste get out of control quickly.
Cost structure: where you save and where the risk is
A ghost kitchen removes a classic restaurant's most expensive items: high-footfall rent, dining-room fit-out and a service team. In exchange, new costs appear:
- Platform commission: If most orders come through aggregator apps, commission is the biggest single driver of profit. Confirm the contract rate and any advertising or visibility fees before you set prices.
- Packaging: Good, heat-retaining packaging is a real cost per order and belongs in the food-cost calculation.
- Marketing: With no dining room or shopfront, visibility is entirely digital.
See our food cost guide to build menu pricing that includes these costs.
Permits
Having no dining room does not exempt a ghost kitchen from licensing. In Türkiye, the municipal workplace licence, food business registration and hygiene requirements apply in the same way as for a restaurant. We cover the process step by step in restaurant permits and licences in Türkiye.
The menu: dishes that survive the journey
A delivery menu should not be a copy of a dining-room menu. For every dish, ask: is it the same quality after a 25-minute ride? Fried food goes soft, sauces run into everything, thin pastry turns damp. A good ghost-kitchen menu:
- Has a small number of dishes that are easy to standardise.
- Packs sauces separately.
- Has short, consistent prep times, so delivery times hold even at peak.
Who it makes sense for
A ghost kitchen makes sense for restaurants that want to use spare capacity, founders who want to test a concept with little capital, and brands growing into neighbourhoods with strong delivery demand. For fine-dining concepts that put the dining-room experience at the centre of the brand, it is usually the wrong model.
To plan a ghost kitchen or virtual brand from feasibility to opening, see our restaurant launch consulting, and read the feasibility steps in how to run a restaurant feasibility study.
