> Shared kitchen facilities meant that one staff member prepared food for multiple brands simultaneously. No ownership. No accountability. Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers.

It's funny because it's not like (normal) restaurants don't exist where they have crazy-big menus with a wide range of choices and cuisines. Certainly some of them are kinda mediocre, but many are actually pretty great, and you can get a solid dish regardless of what you pick. Some pride themselves on their ability to make basically anything, and make it well.

A ghost kitchen where the same staff works for several different "restaurants" simultaneously can work just fine, assuming actual training, and an effort to create quality recipes and use quality ingredients.

But I can easily see how a lack of a sense of ownership among the assembly-line-style staff could make this dicey. If you're making random dishes for a random set of "brands" (a brand among many that was plucked out of a hat, complete with AI-generated food images and descriptions), you're probably not going to take much pride in the quality of your work. And I do think the author has a point about connection; certainly a connection to customers is no guarantee of quality, but I think it's a much harder sell to inspire that quality without it.