Ana Ferreira had never heard the term ghost kitchen when she and business partner Marcia Ponte started looking for a place to continue their catering operation last year.
Recently laid off from another local restaurant, the pair wanted to start something of their own and thought they knew how to do it.
They just needed a commercial kitchen to work in without taking on the risk or going the traditional route for a startup.
Luckily, Cambridge entrepreneur Salar Mohebbi was in the process of expanding and changing the business model of his FireLoo ghost kitchens on Bishop Street from daily rentals to one-year leases.
Known as ghost kitchens, the spaces serve as places where chefs can serve up take-out meals to customers who order food directly from them, or through various apps like Skip the Dishes or Uber Eats.
And they can do it without the huge commitment and investment of leasing a larger restaurant space and paying front-of-house staff.
The concept took off during the pandemic when government restrictions shut down dine-in operations across North America, leaving take-out as the only option to generate revenue.
Closing down dining rooms doesn't eliminate the cost of rent, hydro and heat.
"Once the pandemic hit, we realized all these restaurants are having to shift gears," he said.
Mohebbi saw it as a way to eliminate all those barriers while giving chefs a low-risk opportunity to get into restaurant industry.
Mohebbi launched his FireLoo ghost kitchens in Cambridge in 2020 by converting a former restaurant space and adding two more kitchens to make it three separate units.
The name FireLoo came out of trying to come up with a name that brought together the fire and water needed for kitchens, and the name Waterloo region.
"We wanted something that paid homage to where we started," he said.
"We really just wanted to remove as many barriers as we could for people wanting to enter the industry during the pandemic."
Building out a kitchen typically takes a $200,000 investment before overhead costs are even a factor.
FireLoo's kitchen come equipped with everything a chef would need to start a take-out restaurant of their own.
The one-year leases offer a good testing ground to see if they can get their foot in the door of the industry.
But without the visibility of a full-service restaurant, each tenant relies heavily on word of mouth, traditional marketing and an "essential" social media presence; all things FireLoo helps them with as much as they can.
"We meet with them regularly to see what they're doing and what we think would help them," Mohebbi said. "We talk with them about menus and we provide a lot of feedback."
They also help them through the inspection process, which includes a pass from the fire department and health unit.
"We definitely encourage them to be on social media and to be on the apps for sure because no one's going to know about you unless you're on those apps."
The goal, of course, is that once their return customers know who they are, they'll call in their pick-up orders directly to avoid paying the added fees from Skip and Eats.
Aromas Cuisine was the first long-term tenant to sign a lease for one of the kitchens last August and has since grown out of the smaller kitchen into a larger unit.
"They had one of our smaller units and they told us it was going so well that they wanted more space so we knocked down a wall for them and made a bigger kitchen," Mohebbi said.
The Meditteranean and Middle Eastern flavours offered by Olive Haven followed a few months later.
"Having all these different kinds of food in one building is great," Ferreira says. "It helps everyone out."
The co-owner of Aromas says it's often the case that her customers will come in to pick up their food and see what some of the other FireLoo tenants are cooking up.
"People wonder what's going on," she says.
Sometimes it works the other way around.
Since Aromas is the only tenant with a display case, they'll often fill it with deserts to entice customers of the other kitchens to take something sweet home.
The city's large Portuguese community keeps them busy at Aromas where they serve up a mix that features traditional dishes like bife a casa and carne alentejana. That's steak and eggs and pork and clams to the uninitiated.
The ghost kitchens' newest tentant is hoping to capitalize on this area's well established taste for sushi.
Do Hyung Lim opened Tricity Japanese Salmon Bowl last month, offering different variations of sashimi and rice, tempura shrimp, fried chicken and other savoury mixes inspired by his decade in the industry in Japan and Canada.
Lim was born in the States to parents with South Korean and Japanese heritage but spent his formative years in Japan where he developed an interest in the art of sushi early on. His father, not a sushi chef himself, owned a sushi restauarant in Kyushu, the southerly most island in Japan and Lim remembers watching the chefs work.
In 2002, he moved to Canada to live with an uncle and learn English while attending high school. When he returned to Japan and began working in the industry there, he dreamed of returning to Canada to open his own business.
Eventually he did and was one of two chefs working at the Izna Japanese Donburi House on King Street in downtown Kitchener when the pandemic hit.
Lim's job didn't survive the devastating toll it had on the industry, but while struggling to make a living, he saw the shift as an opportunity.
He originally planned on moving to Montreal, knowing sushi restaurants there are in short supply because many Japanese chefs fear the language barrier.
Instead, the chef decided to stay put in Waterloo region knowing the ghost kitchen was the opportunity he needed to test the waters without the risk.
"I always wanted to start my own business," Lim said.
He's not alone. FireLoo has been fielding a "ton of interest" from wannabe chefs over the last few months.
So much so that thoughts of expansion are rapidly turning into plans to add more kitchens to the warehouse space in the back of their Bishop Street facility.
"There will be more kitchens available. It's just a matter of getting contractors and building them," Mohebbi says.
