ChefReady Offers Brand-New "Ghost Kitchen" Spaces

Do you care if the food you just ordered for delivery isn't coming from a restaurant with a dining room? The growing number of ghost kitchens — food operations that offer menus for delivery primarily through third-party services such as Grubhub and Uber Eats — indicates that you don't, as long as the food is good. And more chefs don't care about looking out onto a room filled with diners, either, especially when that room comes with a hefty real estate bill.

Nili Malach Poynter and Robert Poynter, two San Francisco entrepreneurs with Denver roots, watched the Bay Area restaurant industry get hammered by high real estate prices and labor costs and observed the resulting growth of ghost kitchens there. So they decided to look around the country to see where the concept might make sense in another city. The result is ChefReady, which will open its first ghost-kitchen facility later this summer.

Nili Poynter was born and raised in Denver, and Robert grew up here, too. "We saw that there was a need in Denver, but the concept hasn't come here yet," she says of delivery-only kitchens. She and her husband teamed up with her brother, Steven Malach, to open ChefReady.

The company's first location will be a facility in Denver's Platt Park neighborhood with ten kitchens that average 200 to 250 square feet each. Each kitchen will come fully equipped with oven hoods, fire-suppression systems, sinks (both three-compartment and hand-washing) and other basic equipment, along with extra walk-in refrigerators and freezers, backup generators, cleaning services and pest control for the entire building. But ChefReady is more than just a commissary kitchen, according to its founders.

"We also offer technology to consolidate third-party apps, and we'll have food runners to expedite orders to waiting drivers," Poynter explains. The company also offers assistance with permitting and marketing to help chefs navigate city and state regulations and get their businesses started.