2ndKitchen is looking to fix the age old problem of being hungry in a bar that doesn’t serve food. What do you do in that situation? You either starve or you leave, neither option being ideal for customer or bar. 2ndKitchen is trying to fix this by pairing up kitchenless venues with restaurants willing to outsource their own.
Chicago-based 2ndKitchen has announced that they have raised £1.05 million ($1.35m) in funding led by Hyde Park Ventures.
Adding a kitchen into a bar is no cheap venture. To help get around this, 2ndKitchen creates a kind of Just Eat for restaurants by letting customers in a bar, or other foodless venue, use a kiosk or mobile app to order from a restricted menu for a nearby restaurant. The order is then delivered directly to their table.
The reliance on accessible, nearby cafes and restaurants isn’t new. In my experience it’s always been late-opening kebab shops that bore the brunt of mildly intoxicated, and very hungry, bar patrons. The automation that 2ndKitchen offers would have helped in several ways. It would have spread that kebab shop’s work over the evening/night, so they weren’t inundated at the end of a long shift. Having food delivered to them at their bars of choice would have kept the customers from getting too ravenous hungry and those customers would likely have gotten a touch less… merry with easy access to food delivery.
At the moment, 2ndKitchen works with bars in the Midwestern US, but is working to expand so they can work with any business that doesn’t have a kitchen.
Thanks for reading!
Ben
