Your Delivery Order May Be Cooked in a Parking Garage

REEF Technology may change how we think of restaurants post-Covid

(Here, notably not in a parking garage.) Photo: REEF Technology

Order up! One fried chicken sandwich appears on the digital screen. Batter, dunk, fry, assemble. The spicy habanero fried chicken gets gussied up with a few pickle slices and a slap of butter on a Martin’s potato roll. Paired with macaroni salad and daikon slaw. Like an orchestrated quartet, three chefs seamlessly construct David Chang’s famous Fuku Korean fried chicken sandwiches in a 200-square-foot kitchen. The sandwich is popped into a to-go box and sealed with a Fuku sticker. A delivery worker on a bike retrieves the order and speeds away toward the finish line, an apartment in breezy, tropical Miami.

There’s no brick-and-mortar Fuku in Florida, but Florida diners can still get the same Fuku menu. And it’s legit — even if this particular chicken sandwich came from a parking lot in Miami, thanks to REEF Technology. That said, it’s not all roses. When REEF rolled out Fuku in Portland, Oregon, it was paused because people were less than thrilled it debuted in the middle of Covid.

REEF is one of a handful of companies that challenges the way we think about real estate — and how we dine.