How to Start a Ghost Restaurant (Using Toast)

Ghost restaurants are quickly gaining popularity. Mainly because you can offer the public new menu items and “launch a new restaurant” with very little investment. Ghost restaurants have far less risk than a traditional restaurant, and make your existing brick and mortar location more efficient. We started our new restaurant in less than a week and for under $500.

Toast Now

Ghost Restaurants rely on online ordering and delivery to be successful. When starting “Tacos Burritos and Bowls”, we knew we needed a cost effective method to quickly offer these features. We chose to go with Toast Now. For $50 a month we now have a workable solution. This allows our customers to order for in store pickup, curbside pickup, or delivery.

We have tablets at our restaurant that receive the orders – from there our front of house staff places the orders in Saddleback’s existing Toast terminal. It’s not a seamless system, but it’s effective and relatively inexpensive.

Website

For our website we followed the same ideology as the online ordering system – Something quick and inexpensive. We chose to use Wix to make our website. Wix makes it incredibly easy to make a simple, good looking website. Our philosophy was to essentially make an online brochure. We linked to our Toast Now menu for customers to make their order. All in all the website took less than 48 hours. It’s functional, and we think it looks pretty good.

Social Media

Using our existing social media channels we advertised the launch of our new website. This helped generate excitement for the new menu. We sent out an email blast to our entire email list as well as a text message. All the news we announced was met with incredible reception.

Photos

To ensure we had high quality photos of our new menu we brought in an amazing local photographer. We made every item from the new restaurant and had him take photos of all of them as well as all of the items together. We now have high quality photos of our whole menu: great for online ordering, the website, and social media.