Over the last year we’ve seen scores of brick-and-mortar eating establishments turn their restaurants into delivery-only concepts. C3, a hospitality company that runs a portfolio of virtual restaurant brands, has chosen to do things the other way around. This week, the company announced Citizens, a network of brick-and-mortar food halls for its virtual brands.
The first location will open this July in New York City, with a second location planned for Atlanta, Georgia and slated to open in 2022. Further Citizens locations are planned for Seattle, Miami, and California.
The 40,000-square-foot Manhattan West location will be part food marketplace, part sit-down restaurant, and will feature all of C3’s existing restaurant brands in addition to new ones. Customers will be able to order meals from kiosks or the C3 app (which the company launched in collaboration with Lunchbox), then choose to either take food to go or eat it onsite. The location will also feature pre-made grab-and-go options.
The forthcoming Atlanta location will offer a similar setup, and also include a delivery option to the surrounding neighborhood.
All food hall locations will be powered by C3’s in-house tech stack, which includes the Lunchbox-powered ordering software.
Plenty of virtual food hall concepts exist currently, from Deliveroo Editions to Zuul’s newly launched effort that’s an online marketplace of restaurants working out of the company’s kitchen facility. Few of these have added any physical spaces outside of the kitchens, though that may begin to change as the pandemic recedes and people return to the world of onsite dining.
Citizens is part of C3’s overall plan to expand its restaurant business, which has previously only been available in the form of delivery-only concepts. Earlier this year, the company announced a partnership with Graduate Hotels to run virtual restaurants out of the latter’s kitchen spaces. C3 has also partnered with multiple residential properties.
This week also saw C3 expand for the first time outside of the United States, to the United Arab Emirates. Via a partnership with ghost kitchen network Kitopi, C3’s virtual restaurants will be available through the UAE as of this coming summer.
