New and Old #265

Why ghost kitchens failed, cities as liturgies, a trip to Morocco, and the revival of tube TVs (?)

What Ghost Kitchens Got Wrong, Changing Lanes, Andrew Miller, March 24, 2026

Five years ago, I was quite bullish on ghost kitchens as the future, before I set the matter aside to think about other things. Looking into it, I was surprised to learn that my analysis back then was dead wrong.

The evidence shows that ghost kitchens have indeed failed. But the emerging narrative about why—pandemic buzz around food delivery, venture capital poured in, post-pandemic consumers returned to restaurants, concept collapsed—is a poor explanation.

Here’s a better account.

First, the business case for ghost kitchens:

Ghost kitchens were delivering on two claims at once.

The real estate thesis said: urban land near residential density has value that traditional restaurants aren’t capturing….that there was enough commercial land unsuitable for a traditional restaurant, but near enough to dense clusters of people, to support this new business model… and that the market hadn’t yet priced this value in, meaning there would be arbitrage opportunities by moving quickly.

The mobility thesis said: restaurants built around sit-down service are poorly designed to also offer delivery service….For the delivery market, a purpose-built production kitchen, designed from the start around delivery—optimized for throughput, packaging, and dispatch rather than ambience and table turns—would in theory outperform a retrofitted dine-in operation on every dimension that mattered.

The issue?

Ghost kitchens had every opportunity to generate business. Unfortunately, what they didn’t have was an opportunity to make a profit on that business. The shared assumption—that controlling the production infrastructure meant capturing the value it generated—failed, and it failed on both theses separately.

More:

The answer appears to be that consumers are being practical. They want accountability, someone to hold responsible when things go wrong. And as far as customers are concerned, a dine-in restaurant that one can visit has (or seems to have) feedback loops that will make the operators care about hygiene and food safety in ways that an anonymous industrial kitchen will not.

Whether or not this is rational, this is how customers seem to think, and the customer is always right.

The second reason was lack of customer loyalty. A restaurant with a physical presence earns returning customers passively: a good experience encourages repeat business. A virtual brand is not so fortunate, because it doesn’t sell experiences, just food as a commodity. Every customer therefore is a new prize to be won, from the beginning, every time, through a platform that charges for the privilege and has no stake in whether any particular brand survives.

I don’t think that that is irrational at all. It’s the same as not being able to speak to a real person on the phone, not be able to check in with a real person at a hotel or an airport, etc. Often the smallest little things that would be a 10-second exchange can end up being a problem if there isn’t a real human being to ask or work it out with.

Refusing to patronize non-existent “restaurants” selling food as a pure commodity out of inaccessible locations is a kind of insurance against getting screwed, and more than that, a rejection of the stripping away of the human element from everything. It’s very heartening that this business model has not materialized, in my view.

There’s a lot more here. Read the whole thing.

The Liturgy of the City, Jesus Urbanist, Robin L Owen, April 26, 2026

On Owen encountering what might be called the “traditional” over the “contemporary” Christian worship style:

We called our worship style liturgical because it was the public, communal worship of the church rather than a private act. Liturgical worship implies active participation by all the faithful in prayer, song, and sacrament, rather than passive viewing. We weren’t watching other people worship on a stage; we spoke the prayers together, sang the hymns together. In seminary, when discussing with other students about how this kind of worship should be planned, we talked about how the very word liturgy means “work of the people.”

What’s that have to do with cities?

I loved this idea—that our worship was the “work of the people.” But I later learned that the word leitourgia in Greek is more accurately translated as “public works.” As in, the Public Works Department of a Hellenistic city. Not shared prayer, but a shared material responsibility. Less a vision of holding all things in common - more sewers and roads.

It was disappointing to him at first that “work of the people” was more like “public works.” But:

It feels exactly right that the word we use to describe Christian worship is the same one that Greeks used to describe something as boring as roads and sewers. After all, the Christian story has always been about confusing the divine and mundane, the heavenly and the earthly, until we see the entire world as imbued with the presence of God.

This is on some level what I’m thinking when I write pieces like this.¹ Owen goes on:

Too often, our prayers are for cities that are dangerous and isolating. We fail to connect sidewalks, we leave speed limits too high, we fail to show up after a neighbor dies to traffic violence. The early Christians didn’t just borrow the language of public works; they saw that the way we build our common life is inseparable from the way we worship God.

If we believe that God has taken on flesh, then the places where flesh is most vulnerable—our streets, our crossings, our neighborhoods—are not distractions from spiritual life. They are its testing ground.

There’s a funny thing you see with some Christians, where they act like any concern about the real world is a distraction from spirituality. That, to me, misses the whole point not just of the Gospel—as often as you did these things—but of the premise of Christianity itself, of God coming into the world.

This is also a very nice companion piece to one I featured in my roundup two weeks ago.

Give it read.

I’ve never been so happy to leave a place, Having Been There, Chris Mongeau, April 10, 2026

Some truths: the landscapes and surrounding Middle Atlas and Rif Mountains outside of Fes are gorgeous. Even from the medina, if you can manage to get a view beyond the rooftops (not hard with the amount of terraces here), you’ll see lush, rolling green hills dotted with sheep, olive trees, and bright, red poppies just beyond the old city walls. A short drive away is the ancient Roman ruins of Volubilis, which was unbelievably cool to see and walk around. Fes has one of the best handicrafts industry in Morocco and most of the country’s ceramics, metalwork, textiles, and leather goods come from here, which make it a really good place to shop. The food is cheaper than other parts of Morocco I’ve been to by at least 25%, and I’d say that half the people I’ve met here have been some of the kindest, most welcoming I’ve found.

But from the moment I even reached the outskirts of the city, everything seemed to go wrong.

I love negative travel writing. I did one of those myself after coming back from a trip to Sicily (I understood the old joke about the Italian boot kicking the Sicilian island away).

There’s an insight here, especially given that it really doesn’t take that many bad guys to make a place feel dangerous:

What I realized after five days is that the medina in Fes is specifically bad because of the tourism. Every person who visits and inevitably looks lost creates an opportunity for those who live here. If you stay inside the medina, you’re basically trapped and have to walk everywhere unless you’re right by one of the main gates, since this is a totally car-free zone. That aspect of being literally walled in, combined with the fact that the rest of Fes beyond the medina is mostly unremarkable from a tourist’s perspective, creates an obvious influx of foreigners on these narrow, labyrinthine streets that were never designed to hold so many lost and confused people.

This strikes me as even more insightful:

I don’t think it’s as simple as saying I didn’t like Fes. There is no shortage of beauty here as evidenced by the photographs. Maybe, as a foreigner, I’m just not meant to be here, or maybe I should have only spent a night and barely caught a glimpse like most people do. Maybe to some extent, Fes will remain a place that’s unapproachable to outsiders, impossible to ever fully understand. Probably, I should have taken Bowles’ message on Fes more seriously: being present does not actually mean you belong somewhere.

If it’s true that places have a kind of character or personality, maybe a place that’s centuries old and has barely changed really is, something like, non-metaphysically haunted.

The comments are a trip, too. There are comments calling him a racist next to comments knocking him for apologizing for not liking a third-world culture, because that’s how the West will die. There’s a comment from a feminist arguing that being a woman in Washington, D.C. is no different from being a tourist in Fes, so she’s glad Mongeau got an education in gender inequality. Etc. etc.

It’s a very fair and well-done piece of honest travel writing.

The Impending CRT Display Revival Will Be Televised, Hackaday, Maya Posch, September 23, 2025

Every six months or so, I google “will anyone make CRT televisions again.” Since I set up my basement retro-game room, I find myself interested again in these old TVs, as pieces of technology that really had, in a way, personality. In the last couple of years used tube TVs have started to become more desirable, as more people get into retro gaming and the supply of fully functional TVs dwindles.

Unfortunately, despite the headline, this is not a hit. It’s more of a roundup of the current state of CRT nostalgia and price increases, along with a little history and analysis of different display types, few of which quite beat a really good CRT. And given what those really good CRTs cost new—in 2004, my parents bought a 32 inch Sony WEGA Trinitron for $800—and what they cost now (for that one, maybe $200-$300 at the most), it seems unlikely any manufacturer would bring these back, or that very many enthusiasts would be willing to pay for them.

Nonetheless, it’s really cool to see which mostly-dead technologies hold on or resurge, and which ones don’t. Posch does note that there are some phosphor-based flat-panel technologies that would mimic the display aspect of a CRT without the actual tube, but none of those are really fully developed much less in consumer-grade production.

---

Related Reading:

New and Old #218

New and Old #219

---

1. “Food is culture. Food is hospitality. Food is almost sacred. To break bread with people is in some respect to become one with them. Take this, all of you, and eat of it.” Or, “When I see a jumbo jet descending through the air, peeking out from behind the mid-rise office buildings, looking down on a million people from all the ends of the earth—I feel at home.”