Food delivery websites like Seamless may be "how New York eats," as their slogan goes, but they may also offer a way for restaurants to put one past site users.
A recent NBC News I-Team investigation looked into 100 of the top customer-rated Seamless and GrubHub restaurants in the city and found that around 10 percent of them have kitchens whose names or addresses do not match the city's database of restaurant inspection listings.
These non-listed restaurants are called "ghosts," and when you order from one on a site like Seamless or GrubHub, you will actually be getting food from another kitchen entirely, NBC News reported.
This is problematic for many reasons, restaurant consultant Michelle Jones told NBC News.
One reason is that food delivery sites "have no legal responsibility to verify names and addresses of restaurants," which means that if a customer gets sick from a meal delivered by a ghost restaurant, he or she may not be able trace where their food actually came from, Jones told the I-Team.
NBC News investigators caught one shell restaurant operation in the act. Its manager, Gary Chen, told them that he opened the fake restaurant to keep up with other kitchens — and to increase his restaurant's odds of being ordered from on popular delivery sites.
"When we have one line, it's hard to compete," Chen told NBC News.
Chen added that the practice of creating fake restaurants to increase the amount of "lines" a restaurant has on sites like Seamless is nothing new.
"We know how many lines some of the other restaurants have," Chen said. "It's an open secret."
The I-Team's findings correspond with what the city's Consumer Affairs Department has uncovered in its own investigations.
"Some people might be illegally operating from their apartment, from their home, and delivering to people in complete contravention to Department of Health regulation," Consumer Affairs Commissioner Julie Menin told NBC News.
Since NBC News and the Consumer Affairs Department released their discoveries, a spokesperson for Seamless and GrubHub — which merged in 2013 — has promised reform, NBC News reported.
"We take the accuracy of our restaurant listing seriously," spokesperson Abby Hunt said. "We are partnering with New York's Department of Consumer Affairs to address the issue and remove inaccuracies."
