Eat out in

  The cliché is dead. Long live the cliché! So start many articles about the new wave hitting the world of convenient food. Actually, it's more like, 'The restaurant is dead. Long live the... well, I'm not quite sure what to call it but it's heading your way.' There is a great inevitability about it and though it is a sign of the times, the curmudgeonly side of me has to find a reason to moan. 

  I'm talking about dark kitchens, and if you've not heard of them, here's the juice. A long while back, restaurants started offering delivery to augment their take-away sales. About ten years ago, a company launched offering a website that grouped together all the restaurants offering their own delivery service. Just four years ago the first company that had a website offering myriad  restaurant choices and took care of the delivery burst on to the scene, and unless you live at the back of a dark cave in a remote part of the Australian outback, you'll be familiar with the sight of cyclists and moped riders emblazoned with the logos of said food delivery firms, either waiting in packs like bored strays or zipping through traffic as if they were auditioning for the part of the getaway driver in the next blockbuster heist film.

R.I.P. Adam West

  These companies charge the restaurants a few percent for drumming up the business and the diners a few quid for the convenience. Kerching, baby! However, because the restaurants are not always located next to the diners and because during busy periods the restaurants struggle to cope with all the orders, these food delivery firms have invested in shipping containers in well located car parks. The containers are fitted with kitchens which the restaurants use to cook exclusively for delivery. These are the dark kitchens and they are the future as more and more people chose to eat out at home.

  As the trend for home delivered meals grows, the opportunities forother restaurants than just those offering Chinese and Indian food, improve. These dark kitchens offer new ventures the opportunity to try out their product with much less outlay, a real bonus when you consider how many new restaurants don't even manage to stay in business for a year. The writing is on the wall and only time will tell if we see less restaurants offering dining in facilities. Wouldn't that be weird.

  Of course I see this as a sign of decline. In my vision of the grim future, food is grown in vats of chemicals and cooking is a skill viewed in the same way as barrel making or basket weaving are today. Fresh raw ingredients will come in tubes and astronaut food will be considered haute cuisine. Zombies will roam in... (We get the idea. What's your point? - Ed.) There's nothing to do with this information except file it away under, 'Here comes the apocalypse and the four horsemen have pizza deliveries to make on the way to armageddon.'

  Oh, there is one thing you can do; make sure you teach your kids to cook. When they grow up there'll always be a market for folk who can demonstrate the quaint and totally redundant ways of old. 

Kirk out

Chefsebastian.com