JR: Hello, bienvenidos. Welcome to Mariscos by JR, a fictional restaurant created by Plain English
Jeff: Oh, wow, thank you JR! Look at this! This is great, nice job. And hello to all of you in the audience. Today, it is my pleasure to share with all of you, Mariscos by JR, the eatery I invented to illustrate how restaurants can benefit from ghost kitchens.
JR: I am kind of getting scared with the word Ghost, but ok, Jeff we will give you a chance to explain more about this.
This is episode 209 of Plain English, the best podcast for learning English, and you can find all our episode resources at PlainEnglish.com/209. Today is a little different from past episodes—the first-ever Plain English case study! A case study is a business term, and it’s when you study one individual example, one case, to study how a bigger trend is at play. The big trend is ghost kitchens and food delivery, and we talked about that concept on Monday. So if you have not yet heard Episode 208, go back and list to that one now. Otherwise, the rest of this may not make that much sense.
Mariscos by JR: a Plain English case study
Come join me at our fictional restaurant. It’s called Mariscos by JR. Mexican seafood. It has a delicious selection of ceviche, coctel de camaron, camarones al agua chile, mojarra frita, pulpo encebollado, tostadas de camaron. That’s shrimp in various forms, octopus with onions, and mojarra is like a lighter fish. Great menu. The atmosphere in person reminds you of your favorite playa, your favorite beach, with murals—it’s Mexican, so there are murals—murals on the walls showing seashells, palm trees and sandy beaches. The tables and chairs are decorated with a coastal vibe, lots of light blues and sand colors. It’s right on the main street in our town, so people can walk there after work or before going to the theater or the movies. There isn’t a ton of parking, but we don’t need it.
Our customers love it! They love it so much that they also want to indulge in their favorite Mariscos by JR dishes at home, and they love ordering on our web site. The ceviche is the most popular item for online orders. A while back, the restaurant got so busy with delivery orders that we were having a hard time keeping up with all the volume. And unfortunately, our service in the restaurant suffered. Customers complained about all the coming and going; service times in the restaurant slowed down because our kitchen was too busy. And our delivery customers, though they loved the food, weren’t thrilled with how long it took to deliver meals to their door. You see, the delivery people could never find a place to park outside. And when they got inside, they sometimes had to wait behind our in-person customers. It just wasn’t working.
That’s when JR heard on his favorite English podcast about something called a ghost kitchen. We decided to check it out, and here’s how it works. One company has rented a big space in our town – lots of kitchen stations, assembly lines, grills, stoves, plenty of wide open storage space. It’s near the main roads in our town, but not in the city center, so it’s more accessible. They’re willing to let us use a corner of the space to serve our delivery customers.
We signed up the same day and within a few weeks, we were serving delivery orders from there. This is a space with no customers—but it has all the kitchen space we need. We don’t have to be careful with ceramic plates or silverware; instead, we have our to-go packages. Because we don’t have customers in the space, we can set up the kitchen to maximize speed and efficiency and we can be as loud as we want. We have all the same ingredients as the in-person restaurant, and we prepare almost all the same dishes. But out here at our ghost kitchen, we focus on speed and efficiency.
When we’re ready to send an order out, the drivers don’t have to navigate parking or wait behind other customers. There’s a special loading area—they pull up and in moments they have their order and they’re on their way. Best of all, it’s close to the main roads and they don’t get stuck in traffic.
At our ghost kitchen, we are sharing the building with other restaurants, but we all have our own individual stations. We like the flexibility because as we grow more popular, we can easily expand.
JR always likes to experiment in the kitchen, and one day he got a crazy idea. Who am I kidding? JR gets a crazy idea every day! Sometimes multiple times a day!
JR: OH yeah, you guys don’t know me but I´m very crazy, sorry to interrupt you Jeff, I kind of like doing this. Don´t you think so?
Well, one day, JR’s crazy idea was to create a fusion of Mexican seafood and traditional Korean dumplings. He wanted to put pulpo a la braza, octopus, inside a Korean dumpling. I wasn’t so sure about that idea. I had no idea how that was going to taste. But JR knew—he just knew—it was a winner.
JR: oh crazy? I just remember you eating 5 of these dumplings and saying they were delicious, but I also remember the stomachache the next day, oops!
But I finally convinced him not to open whole new restaurant based on this idea. It’s so expensive to open a restaurant. You need to find a good location, get a sign up, hire a lot of servers and staff, outfit the kitchen, sign up for electricity and gas, pay a deposit, sign a lease with a landlord, design and print menus, design the whole interior, get plates and silverware, tablecloths, heck, the tables and chairs themselves. And all for a concept that you don’t know people want! It’s a big risk opening a new restaurant.
But I convinced JR to try out his new concept in our delivery-only ghost kitchen. He created a “virtual restaurant” online. It’s on all the apps; it has its own name; its own branding; its own unique menu. Users think they’re ordering from a traditional restaurant—and JR is serving those fusion dumplings just as if he had a physical presence. But he’s doing it from our shared space in the ghost kitchen, which costs a lot less to set up. Guess what? The dumplings started selling, so now JR has the confidence he needs to borrow some money and open a physical restaurant for his new concept.
Our customers have noticed a difference since we opened our ghost kitchen. The experience is better in person because our customers don’t have to compete with delivery drivers for space. And our delivery customers have noticed an improvement in the speed. We usually close the main restaurant at 11, when the traffic dies down. But people online want to eat later in the night, so we keep the ghost kitchen open later. We can afford to do that because we have fewer employees there than at our main restaurant.
There are some drawbacks, however. Not all our dishes keep well in the car, so we had to revise our menu for delivery. And JR likes the satisfaction of seeing our customers face-to-face. He likes to walk around to the tables and chat people up, see how they’re doing. As a result, we have a lot of repeat business in the restaurant—but there’s no such thing as customer loyalty online. It’s hard to have that connection with our customers.
JR: ¡Muchas gracias por venir! Thank you for coming! I hope you enjoyed this first-ever Plain English case study. And thank you Jeff for being brave and trying all my food, if you guys ever want to try my food, send me an email and let me know what would you like me to cook for you, maybe I can make a Mexican version out of it.
Jeff: Thank you, JR. And thanks to all of you for indulging this unique episode. I wanted to find a way to illustrate the concept without just explaining it, and I always like to work our favorite producer into the program whenever I can.
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