Will Deliveroo’s dark kitchens kill off your favourite local restaurant?

WITH a celebrity clientele, glittering reviews and a coveted Michelin star, Mayfair restaurant Hakkasan has long been a sought-after reservation. But since London’s elite dining scene was laid low by Covid, it has been offering gourmets a taste of the high life at home, including signature Chinese dishes such as Peking duck at £110 and roasted silver cod in champagne and honey for £52.

The freshly cooked dishes are transported to the customer’s door by turquoise-clad moped riders from the ubiquitous Deliveroo fleet, who ferry hot food on demand from local restaurants, fast-food chains and even coffee shops.

But Hakkasan customers might be surprised to know that, despite the chilli-hot price tag, there’s a good chance their gourmet Cantonese food has come no closer to rubbing shoulders with high society than they have.

They might find, in fact, their dinner has never been anywhere near the kitchens of Hakkasan’s flagship restaurant in Bruton Street. Instead, it has been knocked up in a windowless industrial shed in a shabby North London car park.

There, in a gated compound protected by two security guards, is one of Deliveroo’s ‘dark kitchens’, where food ordered from a number of major restaurant brands – including Indian chain Dishoom, popular burger joints Honest Burger and Shake Shack, and the curry house Moto – is actually cooked.

According to its own version of recent history, Deliveroo, which is backed to the tune of nearly £500million by internet giant Amazon, has been the saviour of the restaurant trade during the coronavirus crisis.

Yet for all the slick marketing, there are growing questions about the way this new ‘disruptor’ operates, including its use of dark kitchens, and rising fears that it will do to independent restaurants what Amazon has already done to small local shops here and in America.

For a growing number of restaurateurs, Deliveroo is not so much their saviour as a predator whose seemingly unstoppable growth, high commission fees and close control of customer data threaten to crush the life out of old-fashioned family businesses.

‘RESTAURANT’ MEALS FROM A BLEAK PRE-FAB

THE commercial model is deceptively simple: Deliveroo, founded in Britain seven years ago, takes food from restaurants to customers who order by app, then charges the restaurants commission. The system is easy to use and hugely popular.

The company dispatches thousands of meals every day around the country. Soon it will float on the stock market, advised, it was reported yesterday, by Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs.

Deliveroo customers might be less delighted, though, if they fully understood where some of the food has actually been produced. Take

Hakkasan, which is, after all, a name synonymous with fine dining. Would food-lovers familiar with its luxurious restaurants expect their meals to be cooked by chefs rubbing shoulders – literally – with colleagues preparing meals for Honest Burger and Shake Shack?

The clue is the word ‘Editions’ marked on the app, along with an address that might not be familiar.

When we visited the satellite kitchen in Swiss Cottage, North London, where some of the Hakkasan takeaways are cooked, we found an anonymous building in a grey car park close to the trafficchoked Finchley Road.

Speaking to us outside, a chef for one of the other brands (which we have agreed not to name) described tough working conditions in which two dozen cooks turn out meals for eight different companies.

‘There aren’t any windows,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why – you’d have to ask Deliveroo that. We have air conditioning, but it’s not really the same.’

It’s a similar picture at Deliveroo’s dark kitchen in Battersea, South London, a small red-brick unit that looks like a row of garages. Deliveroo does little to advertise its presence here and the only obvious clue is a group of 30 motorbikes parked outside as the riders wait to collect brown paper bags of hot food passed through a single doorway.

When we were invited inside, we found eight little windowless kitchens, the different cuisines all prepared side by side with shared shelves and equipment. The powerful aroma of Indian spices mingled with something sweet and the smell of raw meat.

‘We make everything here from sushi to Mexican food to curry to Lebanese cuisine,’ explained one of the cooks. ‘There are about 20 to 30 chefs cooped up inside. It’s like an open-plan office, but for food prep.

‘It’s quite a depressing place to work, but if you’re busy you don’t think about it so much.’

Another said: ‘I’m not sure if the customers realise where their food is really coming from. But I don’t think they care as long as their food is quick and hot. I don’t think they think about it at all.’

A third agreed: ‘All they care about is prompt delivery. It’s the smaller restaurants this really affects.

‘The big brands can afford to use these dark kitchens, not the independents. It’s a shame. Of course I prefer working in a proper kitchen in a real restaurant with the buzz of it all and the customers there. But what can I say? A job is a job.’

At least he’s not working in a cluster of prefabricated boxes across town in Poplar, East London. Huddled together beneath a flyover and looking more like the