Growing taste for food halls that offer dine-in service

Shira Yevin was on her way to grab lunch from the Studio City Trader Joe's when she caught sight of a new restaurant on the block called Local Kitchens.

- BY KARLA MARIE SANFORD

"I was like, 'That sounds good, sounds healthy,'" she said. "Let me see what it is." "

Excited at the prospect of not eating preprepared grocery store food, she was initially deflated when she saw that the restaurant served Vietnamese food, a cuisine she doesn't normally eat. Then she noticed that the restaurant also served some of her favorite Mediterranean dishes.

After she placed her order, she started reading the colorful signs on the walls, one of which mentioned an Oklahoma onion burger.

"I'm like, 'Oh, a burger? What is this place?'" Yevin wondered.

Local Kitchens is a fast-casual restaurant with five distinct menus from five different chefs. The catch is that there aren't five kitchens operating separately. Rather, the five partnering chefs a mix of restaurateurs, cookbook authors and chef-influencers worked with Local Kitchens' in-house culinary team to design the menus. The food is prepared from scratch by a single team of on-site cooks, ghostkitchen-style.

But unlike many ghost kitchens, customers can eat on site. Diners are greeted by screens where they can scroll the five menus, then mix and match items as they build their order. When ready, servers deliver the food to the table all at once - not in disposable containers but on white ceramic plates. It's a touch of restaurant-style service combined with the choice of a food hall and ience.

"It's a fast-casual convenvaluable proposition," said cookbook author and content creator Rick Martínez, who for his first restaurant venture has partnered with Local Kitchens to offer a Sonoranstyle Mexican menu. "A lot of my friends are either vegan or pescatarian, or have some kind of allergy. It's like no one can agree on any one place, right?"