The couple run five separate restaurants out of the one backroom, commercial kitchen, located inside an industrial area warehouse in Perth's southern suburbs.
There are no tables, chairs or wait staff — not even a branded sign to acknowledge their existence — just a row of tablet computers that incessantly ping when another hungry customer places an order.
Mimi and Line operate as a cloud kitchen — also known as a dark, ghost or virtual kitchen.
They are a low-cost, quick-turnover business model that is rapidly expanding in every major Australian city, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The delivery-only restaurants exclusively service on-demand food apps like Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Menulog.
"At the end of the day, it's takeaway. It's just [that] we have no face anymore," said Line, who is also a barista and pastry chef. "We're faceless. No one sees your face when you’re grumpy!" The pair specialise in Moroccan cuisine, but in an effort to tap into consumer demand, they also have four other separate menus serving burgers, chicken parmigianas, fries and artisan desserts.
"With a restaurant, it takes too much money," said Mimi, who has worked as a chef for more than a decade. "We don't have a fixed lease here. So we can walk in, walk out anytime we want. "We just want to try our food out first to see if it actually works. "If it works, we might open a small place somewhere in the future, and then we already know what people like."
'You've got to move with the times'
Continue to published article from ABC News (abc.net.au)
