Viral TikTok foods can be hit or miss, from the simple but well-loved Emily Mariko salmon rice bowl to head-scratchers like “pasta chips.” Regardless, they get a lot of attention — so it was probably only a matter of time before a ghost kitchen popped up to serve these internet-famous dishes to folks who don’t actually want to cook at home.
Creators’ Kitchen As Seen on TikTok is a new ghost kitchen from Virtual Dining Concepts, the company that originally launched MrBeast Burger, a pickup and takeout-only restaurant collaboration with the world’s most popular YouTuber. According to Restaurant Business, the ghost kitchen is now available for delivery and pickup on delivery apps in more than 100 locations across 32 states, including Bay Area locations in Palo Alto and Campbell.
The dishes available on Doordash at Creators’ Kitchen’s Palo Alto location are very Italian-focused: baked feta pasta, pasta chips and dip (cooked pasta tossed with cheese and spices and air fried), a chopped Italian sandwich, fried lasagna and creamy shrimp scampi pasta. The recipe for each item comes from a specific TikTok user who is then credited in the dish descriptions. According to Creators’ Kitchen’s website, they “support creators by licensing their dishes and paying others to post about them.”
Virtual Dining Concepts, run by multi-millionaire Robert Earl, is one of the leading ghost kitchen companies in America and frequently collaborates with famous names like Mariah Carey and Guy Fieri, though it has fallen out with MrBeast as of late. The two sides have sued and counter-sued each other over contractual issues, and MrBeast has publicly disavowed the burger restaurant that bears his name.
That hasn’t stopped the company from growing, particularly with this newest venture, though some users are already chiming in with mixed reviews of the food available. In a TikTok video with nearly 350,000 likes, popular beauty YouTuber and makeup artist James Charles ordered a number of the Creators’ Kitchen dishes, giving them mostly positive reviews despite saying some of them looked “vile.”Another TikTok user remarked on the baked feta pasta’s $16 price tag while noting that the simple dish could be made at home for far less money.
