—Ghost Tortilla is Lucia Tahan’s contribution to Foodscapes, the Spanish national pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Ghost Tortilla

Research
Lucia Tahan, Campbell Orme

Ghost Tortilla is a research project about the urban impact of food delivery platforms.

Exhibitions
Foodscapes, Spanish pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale
Casa de la Arquitectura, Arquerias de Nuevos Ministerios, Madrid, Spain
Galeria Proyector, Ciudad de Mexico
MUSA, Guadalajara, Mexico
Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Publications
Building Metabolism: Recipes for Food and Resource Cycles, ACTAR
Foodscapes (book)
Foodscapes (catalogue)

Lectures
Student Lecture Series, Cooper Union, New York

Ghost Tortilla blends storytelling, urban analysis, and technological critique to explore the spatial, social, and economic impacts of food delivery platforms — especially the rise of ghost kitchens (also called dark or cloud kitchens). It’s a layered narrative that connects seemingly mundane acts (ordering a tortilla) to complex systems of software, labor, architecture, and global logistics.

As part of the research, the photographer Pedro Pegenaute documented key sites that are usually hidden from the public: various ghost kitchens and hubs in Madrid opened their doors for the project, offering a privileged view into the infrastructural underbelly of food delivery.

Foodscapes

Spanish National Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale

FOODSCAPES, curated by Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa and Manuel Ocaña, “is a journey through the architectures that feed the world; from the domestic laboratories of our kitchens to the vast operational landscapes that nourish our cities. At a time when energy debates are more pertinent than ever, food remains in the background, yet the way we produce, distribute and consume it shapes our world more radically than any other energy source.”

Lucia Tahan’ contribution is one of ten “recipes” presented in the pavilion that interrogate contemporary food supply chains and the landscapes that feed them.


Participant studios

Common Accounts
Guillermo Fernández-Abascal + Urtzi Grau
Iván L. Munuera + Vivian Rotie + Pablo Saiz, Urbanitree + Manual Bouzas
Lucía Jalón Oyarzun
Aldayjover
Institute for Postnatural Studies
Lucia Tahan
C+ Arquitectas
Federico Soriano

Casa de la Arquitectura
Arquerias de Nuevos Ministerios
Madrid, Spain

Photos: Jose Hevia

Universidad Torcuato di Tella
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Photos: Agustin Rojas

Ghost Tortilla
Full text

Ghost tortilla recipe in the style of Buckminster Fuller

It’s 10pm in Madrid and you’ve just had Spanish tortilla for dinner.

Now, we run the sequence in reverse: all the food comes out of your mouth onto the recyclable container box. The box closes itself and returns into a paper bag that has your name written on it, as well as a stapled receipt. The door opens and the delivery rider, clad in a wind jacket and bike helmet, takes the bag from your hand and walks back down the stairs as you get the notification that they will arrive soon. Then they ride on their bike back to where the app told them to collect your order.

Meanwhile, a server in Midwest United States pinges the message “picked-up by rider” and pushes it to the delivery platform state machine: your app, the vendor’s app and the rider’s app in turn show different user interfaces developed by a team of designers and engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area. From their office in California, these same engineers discuss the latest feature they are working on, and your rider queues outside the window of a dark kitchen, tucked away in a fresh produce market in Madrid.

The only cook in this kitchen, who makes tortillas exclusively, is efficiently operating his pans as they prepare multiple orders. The data associated with your order travels through a transatlantic cable (not quite at the speed of light), leaving the northern coast of Spain and arriving in the United States in Maryland. The data center where hundreds of images of tortillas are stored quietly hums in a dry landscape in central Spain, and the high resolution version of the tortilla tile image that you tapped is sent to your device, where it is displayed. As you click “Order now,” product managers in San Francisco discuss the results of their latest AB test to reveal whether “Order now” or “Place order” is the better call to action on the app’s checkout page, while your bank uses an encrypted protocol to transfer money to the company’s account. The rider then disappears into traffic on their bike.


Case study I

Doña Tortilla: Ordering a tortilla from a ghost kitchen at Mercado de Barceló

When searching for “tortilla” on one of the digital platforms that provide food delivery services in Spain, one is provided with various options for restaurants that specialize exclusively in tortillas, with minute variations of the classic recipe.

While delivery platforms digitize existing restaurant offerings, the power of their interfaces tells us that some restaurants have adapted to be optimized for online search. The search page — the most important destination on the app’s user flow — contains the so-called “vendor tiles,” where only one image is displayed per restaurant. Users are far more likely to select a vendor that matches the dish they want, overlooking the vendor itself.

Doña Tortilla is a vendor that offers only tortilla. There’s classic tortilla, tortilla with a side of bread, tortilla with a side of salad… excellent for SEO and customization. It is located in a fresh produce market called Mercado de Barceló, in central Madrid. The market dates back to 1954, when it opened to sell vegetables, meat and fish to professional resellers. Between 2009 and 2014, the mercado was rebuilt as a modern public infrastructure to provide services beyond the market of the local neighborhood.

In an effort to breathe new life into it, the designers of the market (Nieto y Sobejano) included a mixed program of traditional grocery shops with small restaurants next to one another. The market’s prime location, together with closures due to COVID-19, have transformed many of its booths into delivery restaurants. Some, like Doña Tortilla, occupy spaces designated for a small restaurant. Others occupy a space that was initially designed for retail and do not serve walk-in customers.

Ghost kitchens, also known as dark, host or cloud kitchens, are part of the infrastructural shift behind the turn to delivery. A ghost kitchen is simply a kitchen space for hire, used by many different groups like food stylists, caterers, supper clubs and start-up food ventures. Although platform delivery apps refer to every brand on their interface as “restaurants”, ghost kitchens do not serve customers who arrive physically at the door.

Doña Tortilla, therefore, is a prime example of informal spatial opportunism, a kind of opportunism that has marked the history of urban development. It is a virtual restaurant operating from a ghost kitchen in a market. Riders arrive often at Mercado de Barceló, leaving their bicycles and scooters at the entrance and then go up the escalator to the second floor, where the kitchens are located. Riders wait inside the market, or sit on the chairs intended for non-existent restaurant consumers.

While in other European countries traditional indoor fresh produce markets have all but disappeared, in Spain they continue a long and slow death. For over two decades, the Municipality of Madrid launched consecutive plans to breathe new life into markets, such as the 2003-2007 Plan for Innovation and Transformation of Madrid Markets. New models sprouted, more popular with younger consumers, such as outdoor farmer markets, or indoor-outdoor food markets, with bars and restaurants peppered with some specialty produce shops. Meanwhile, Doña Tortilla and the other kitchens in the market, along with their rider visitors, keep the space alive, together with the grocers who continue to buy, sell and display their produce, maintaining their relationships with those who visit the market. Every nook at Mercado de Barcelo has found a use.


Case study II

Las Margaritas branching out

While vendors like Doña Tortilla created a business for optimized delivery, some traditional restaurants have adapted to the delivery platforms’ economics and design.

Las Margaritas, an established restaurant in Madrid with a loyal clientele, al-fresco garden dining and broad traditional Spanish menu, ventured into delivery platforms. It evolved a whole set of strategies to make its digital and physical businesses coexist and thrive.

In the first years, expansion was easy, thanks in large part to the restaurant’s reputation. Things started to become more difficult as the market became more crowded. Niche food operations like Doña Tortilla appeared, with better search optimization, and many more competitive players.

When legislation was approved to regularize delivery wages for couriers, a tipping point was reached. As numerous voices denounced the conditions to which riders and other gig-economy workers were subjected, it was expected that the same obligations were bestowed on tech companies – and the same rights bestowed upon workers – that had existed in traditional employer-employee relationships, in terms of taxes, pension and social security coverage. Spain passed legislation that turned riders into employees of delivery platforms. Some competitors, such as Deliveroo, left the country. Delivery prices rose. A consequence for all food businesses was that riders became scarce. The riders could now pick the orders they were most interested in. The owners of Las Margaritas noticed that orders were canceled when riders didn’t accept them quickly, so they shifted their attention to providing a better experience to appeal to riders.

When a large number of riders congregated at the entrance of the restaurant, crowding out the customers looking to be assigned a table, the customer experience suffered. It was important to segregate customers’ spaces and the riders’ entrance. Riders now have a dedicated entrance from another side of the restaurant, providing them a sheltered waiting room, where they can rest while waiting. This makes riders more likely to choose Las Margaritas for delivery, increasing revenue and ratings for the restaurant, whose orders are less seldom canceled and generally delivered faster.

The riders’ entrance and restaurant dining hall are both connected to the same restaurant kitchen. Most importantly, a subterranean tunnel was built that connects the kitchen with the remote riders’ entrance, a sort of modern-day medieval secret passageway. Assistants take the orders from the kitchen to the waiting room through this tunnel. Food travels through this passageway like data through submarine internet cables: swiftly and invisibly, protecting the digital experience’s appearance of immateriality and convenience. The passageway and the rider shed are grafted onto the restaurant, transforming its typology and function. The design and spatial quality of this infrastructure responds directly to software updates.

“Food travels through this passageway like data through submarine internet cables: swiftly and invisibly.”

Today, Las Margaritas sells food on delivery platforms, not only under its established brand name, but using a variety of virtual restaurant brands that specialize in specific food types that consumers search for. It is therefore a physical space shaped by the virtual interface, as well as a multiplicity of virtual spaces originating in one physical space.


Dark, ghost and cloud kitchens: Trans-scalar dimensions

When we order food, the scale of the production chain involved doesn’t end in our city or even within the same country. On a neighborhood scale, there is the space and distance between the consumer’s location, the kitchen, and the rider. The rider enables the spatial decoupling of the kitchen and the consumer by moving food between the two.

On a different scale we have the production processes of the food substance: the tortilla is made with eggs laid by chickens, somewhere in Castile, measured and packaged in a large warehouse by Huevos Guillén in Almendralejo, Spain’s largest egg producer. But there is a much larger scale at play when software is introduced. The photo of a tortilla that represents the vendor is stored in a data center along with the images and data of many other vendors and users. Sometimes in the proximity of cities and sometimes further into remote areas, data centers sprawl shrouded in secrecy and clad in security measures.

Terabytes or even exabytes of pictures of food, stored in these centers, as well as the queries and data transmitted by a user’s actions on the apps, make their way across the Atlantic ocean through submarine cables that transmit internet data between continents. The MAREA cable connects the northern coast of Spain at Bilbao with Virginia Beach, VA, in the United States. In spite of its massive scale in terms of the amounts of data it carries, and its size (6600km), it lands invisibly underneath a small beach.

A similar transition to hidden infrastructure is taking place in kitchens. Not only are traditional restaurants like Las Margaritas adding infrastructural grafts, or small dark kitchens like Doña Tortilla springing up opportunistically in urban nooks, but a powerful process is being set in motion to turn dark kitchens into large-scale, organized investment operations.

In 2018, the co-founder and ex-CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, announced an investment of nearly $150 million in a real estate redevelopment company of which he is now CEO. The company operates a ghost kitchen business under the name CloudKitchens, which was valued at $15 billion as of 2021.

CloudKitchens builds dark kitchens in large warehouse buildings. Each one has dozens of small kitchens that are rented out to delivery platform vendors and other clients. The kitchen design is standard, a windowless cubicle with an extractor hood on one side, and a sink on the other. Set along a corridor and identified with numbers, the buildings suggest efficiency and being purpose-designed for delivery. In their own words on the CloudKitchens website: “Unlike traditional commercial kitchens, CloudKitchens locations are fully optimized for delivery, requiring minimal kitchen staff and capital.” Therefore, food preparation costs can be lowered, so that consumer demand will not suffer when delivery costs rise. CloudKitchens has over a dozen kitchen hubs in Madrid and Barcelona.

Still, a defining parameter that continues to influence kitchen development is location. Delivery times matter to consumers and kitchens need to be within a certain radius of a user’s delivery location to show up in their search results. This has led investors to seek out cheap urban spaces that can be transformed into ghost kitchens, often eliciting major protests by neighborhood associations. A local grassroots platform called Plataforma Vecinal de Afectados por las Cocinas Fantasma (Platform for Neighbors Affected by Ghost Kitchens) organized protests and legal action against kitchen hubs, such as one on José Calvo Street in Madrid. A common type of space used for this purpose is basements underneath industrial and residential buildings. Ghost kitchen hubs from CloudKitchens, and other providers, can house up to 20 kitchens in only 800 sqm and create issues. Neighbors are faced with dozens of riders blocking the street, tons of food waste generated by the kitchens in containers on the sidewalk, and food preparation smells. An infamous kitchen-development case was ignited in Prosperidad, Madrid in 2020 when CloudKitchens’ development group Cooklane, filled the entire surface of a city block’s inner patio with a 38 kitchen hub in a 1500 sqm pre-existing warehouse, adding a massive tower as well. New regulations in Barcelona have forbidden industrial kitchens in residential areas, while Madrid has restricted their size to 350 sqm or 8 kitchen units and required an indoor waiting area for riders. However, the software design that produces these kitchens has not been the target of regulation, only its spatial manifestation.

As neighbors’ protests and the latest regulatory developments push these kitchen hubs to suburban industrial areas, the result may be that their development enters a new phase, in which they become part of the invisible digital hinterland — the infrastructure behind digital products that includes data centers and Amazon warehouses, that the city doesn’t want to see. Software continues to neither see itself nor be seen by regulators as a powerful spatial planning agent.

Food delivery has deconstructed a restaurant into a kitchen, dining hall and food — and spatially decoupled the three of them. This is the formula for its success. Kitchens, an entity distinct from restaurants, are a new typology that seeks its place within the urban fabric.

“Kitchens, an entity distinct from restaurants, are a new typology that seeks its place within the urban fabric.”

The effects of software may be obvious when they generate an image of a precarious chimney towering over residential blocks, but the urban changes and cultural effects that software induces are more profound. Delivery platforms set the rules, while restaurants and small businesses do the hard work of trying and failing at finding the formulas to adapt; to transfigure the city in order to serve the rules imposed by the software.

The city is a resilient structure that can adapt to new demands. But what do we demand from it? The global cloud kitchen market size was estimated at $44.9 billion in 2023, and is estimated to reach $154.9 billion by 2035. Can cities develop ways to incorporate kitchens in a meaningful manner? Or should they be an infrastructure extirpated from the city and centralized in its hinterland? Transactional food deliveries across scales create spaces in the city and outside of it, while regulations and grassroots activism are targeting these spaces and negotiating their co-existence with people, the urban fabric and the environment. The future is unclear as to whether they will also be able to influence the software itself to produce more positive urban manifestations.