FEATURE
ON THE FLY
Tech solutions that helped Cleveland restaurants survive the pandemic are also driving long-term benefits for both owners and diners
By Douglas Trattner
RESTAURANT OWNERS HAVE been notoriously slow to adopt new technologies, preferring instead to cling to time-tested practices like hand-written guest checks, mechanical cash registers and analog reservation books long after better options were available. But that all changed on March 15, 2020, the day that Ohio bars and restaurants were ordered by the Department of Health to shut down their dining rooms. To cling to any hopes of survival, restaurant operators were compelled to put all their eggs into the take-out and delivery basket. While many continued to man the old landlines, others scrambled to establish online ordering, digital payment processes and expanded delivery. Before long, Cleveland diners were experiencing their first ghost kitchens, attending pop-ups they learned about from Instagram and pre-paying for meals using Venmo. If there is a silver lining to the pandemic, it is this burst of technological advancements that diners have been demanding and desiring for years. According to the National Restaurant Association,
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a full one out of two diners want restaurants to adopt more, not less, technology, mainly in the order and payment process. “I will emphatically say that this is here to stay,” says Drew Winick, senior district sales manager with digital point-of-sale (POS) system provider Toast. “As bad as things have been, it’s moved the restaurant industry at least five years forward for something that was coming. A lot of this technology is only going to improve and advance, but it is certainly not going anywhere.”
Online Ordering for Pick-Up and Delivery It’s difficult even to recall a time when everything wasn’t a few taps of a smartphone away, but pre2020, online ordering, payment and delivery still was extremely rare in the independent restaurant space. UberEats had an inauspicious local launch in 2016, DoorDash didn’t land here until 2018, and GrubHub routinely earned censure for adding non-partner restaurants to its roster. In July of 2020, just months after the Governor shut down indoor
| clevescene.com | December 1-14, 2021
dining, Doug Katz launched Chimi in Cleveland Heights, one of the first ghost kitchens in the area. The thenforeign concept relied exclusively on online ordering, curbside pick-up and delivery. The novel, seamless and satisfying technology allowed diners to view the current menu, order a complete meal, pay for it via the web and pick it up at a designated time with almost zero face-to-face interaction. The format proved so successful that Katz introduced a second ghost kitchen concept, Amba, just four months later. Ben Bebenroth took the ghost kitchen concept even further when he launched Keep the Change, a “virtual food hall” with multiple concepts under one roof. The robust technology behind the curtain makes it possible for customers to choose from four different “restaurants” when placing an order for pick-up or delivery. Because no money was invested in brandspecific menus, furniture, interior design or tableware, Bebenroth could easily mothball an underperforming concept and replace it with something else. The real-time tech also makes it possible to test out new
concepts – like Boom’s Pizza – on a trial-run basis. For restaurant operators who want to leave all those complex technological details (and startup expenses) to someone else, there are options like CloudKitchens. When the Cleveland facility opens soon in MidTown, it will have 29 rentable kitchens available to local, regional and national food brands. Leases come not just with gas hook-ups, sinks and a hood, but also proprietary restaurant management technology that streamlines everything from order taking and kitchen fulfillment to partnering with third-party delivery services like Uber Eats, Grubhub and DoorDash. “It’s a much smaller investment and that’s what’s attractive about the whole thing,” explains Bac Nguyen, who dropped a mini–Ninja City into the Columbus CloudKitchens. “You can get up and running in a matter of months with far less money than you would if you were trying to open your own ghost kitchen.”
Pop-Ups and Takeovers
