DoorDash Opened a New Virtual Food Hall in New York and It Includes Actual Seating

Tai Saint-Louis
Tai Saint-Louis
Tai Saint-Louis is a Haitian-born, Atlanta-based journalist & content development consultant. Over the course of her 20 year career she has contributed to Mass Appeal, Ebony.com, WatchLoud.com, Bossip.com, Creative Loafing, Scratch, XXL, The Source, Upscale Magazine and AllHipHop.com, and worked with brands including the Combat Jack Show and the A3C Festival. She is also the co-author of The Art Behind The Tape, the first coffee table book about the history of mixtape culture.
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published May 4, 2022
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DoorDash Virtual Food Hall
Credit: NIMBUS

Two years after getting involved in the food prep business through the ghost kitchen model, DoorDash has opened its first brick-and-mortar location offering dine-in service for consumers. The new DoorDash Kitchens Brooklyn at Nimbus opened this week with two local vendors: DomoDomo — a sushi restaurant — and Pies N’ Thighs, a chicken biscuit restaurant located just three miles away. 

Moonbowls has also signed on as the first national chain sharing the DoorDash Kitchen space, with Little Caesar’s Pizza coming next. In addition to the three restaurants offering delivery, dine-in, and takeout service, dine-in customers can also order from Birch Coffee, Kado Patisri, and Milk Bar.

DoorDash Kitchens Brooklyn is open from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., with the last hour reserved for delivery orders only. Nimbus Kitchen, the building it calls home, is a shared-use commercial kitchen offering WeWork-style memberships for culinary entrepreneurs.

While this virtual food hall does offer limited seating — accommodating 20 diners at a time — the new concept doesn’t share much else with standard food halls. “DoorDash Kitchens Brooklyn is optimized for delivery, whereas many food halls are focused on their on-premises offerings,” says senior director Ruth Isenstadt.

Isenstadt adds that the restaurants serving out of DoorDash Kitchens Brooklyn feed into a unified dispatch area, meaning they essentially share a pool of drivers. To further optimize the delivery process, Dashers pick-up from their own window, located outside the building.
Just as the ghost kitchen concept allowed aspiring restaurateurs the opportunity to service a wide clientele without the overhead of a physical restaurant, DoorDash’s latest innovation offers vendors the opportunity to test expansion into a new market without many of the financial risks.