Maybe ghost kitchens aren’t scaring up as much business these days, as Uber founder Travis Kalanick just shut down a ghost kitchen that his new megabucks startup Cloudkitchens opened there five years ago.  

We first became aware of this concept called “ghost kitchens" just before the pandemic hit, as websites were promoting "restaurants" on DoorDash and Grubhub that were actually just ramshackle trailers with half-ass kitchens in them and maybe a porta-potty outside. But as the tech industry does, they not only presented these fly-by-night operations as real restaurants, the ghost kitchens also infamously impersonated a couple of local favorites like Kin Khao and Blowfish Sushi in hopes of a few quick, greasy dollars before anyone noticed.

After Uber founder Travis Kalanick left that company in disgrace, he decided that ghost kitchens were his way back into the tech game. So he founded a ghost kitchen startup called Cloudkitchens and started opening ghost kitchens across the Bay Area and beyond, many of whose interiors look more like a prison than a food service facility. The company has since amassed $1.3 billion in VC money, significant chunks of which came from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Microsoft.

One of those Cloudkitchens ghost kitchens has now given up the ghost. The SF Business Times reports that Cloudkitchens has closed its East Oakland ghost kitchen in the East Peralta neighborhood at 2353 East 12th Street. The 22,000-square-foot property was branded as "Oakland Food Hall” in order to seem like an authentic restaurant, and was apparently once home to (or built to equip) to 42 commercial kitchens.

A Cloudkitchens subsidiary bought the property in 2019 for $2.75 million, and when it first launched, Eater SF reported they’d attracted semi-respectable names like Frjtz, Little Skillet, and Montesacro. Though also once open, the facility started infuriating neighbors who lived there because there were so many delivery drivers milling about waiting for their orders, double-parked, blocking traffic, and sometimes even parked directly on the sidewalk.

The East Oakland Cloudkitchens property is still for sale, and the Business Times reports that “marketing materials show there is no offering price and owners are accepting the best offer.”

So is the ghost kitchen industry falling on hard times? Maybe, but there has been no larger pattern of Cloudkitchens trying to unload real estate assets. There are still other Cloudkitchens facilities in Berkeley (the neighbors hate that one too), Hayward, Redwood City, San Mateo, and Sunnyvale. There are also three in San Francisco, including the former Burger King at Civic Center, which itself has been rebranded as “Mid-Market Eats.”

Related: Imposter Impersonates Kin Khao On Seamless, Grubhub [SFist]

Image: Amber T via Yelp