A kitchen designed to send plates ten metres to a table is poorly suited to sending them across a city. The adaptations have reached the layout, the equipment and the menu.
Packing is a new station that needs floor space
A delivery order has to be assembled into containers, sealed, labelled, bagged and checked, which is several minutes of work per order.
Doing that at the pass obstructs the dining room service, so kitchens have carved out separate benches with their own storage for packaging.
Since packaging is bulky and consumed constantly, the station also needs replenishment space, which competes directly with dry goods storage.
Couriers need a route that avoids the dining room
Drivers arrive irregularly, wait for varying periods and leave quickly, which disrupts a room designed around seated guests.
Restaurants have responded with side entrances, dedicated collection windows and holding shelves that keep couriers outside the service area entirely.
The shelves are increasingly heated or refrigerated by section, since an order may wait several minutes for a driver who has been delayed.
Equipment choices shifted towards holding and reheating
Delivery volumes arrive in bursts that do not match dining room rhythm, so kitchens need to produce ahead and hold rather than cook entirely to order.
Holding cabinets, combination ovens and equipment that maintains quality over time have become more valuable than equipment optimised purely for speed.
That shifts the capital spend of a new kitchen away from the traditional line and towards machines that manage food between cooking and dispatch.
The menu is engineered around the container
Dishes are now selected partly on whether they survive twenty minutes in a sealed box, where steam softens crisp surfaces and sauces migrate.
Kitchens separate components that should not travel together, which changes plating into packing and requires the dish to be designed for reassembly by the customer.
Some items are simply withheld from delivery menus, which is a design decision made before the kitchen layout is even drawn.
Some kitchens dropped the dining room entirely
Where delivery is the whole business, there is no reason to pay for a dining room, a frontage or floor staff, and the kitchen can sit anywhere with access.
Those kitchens are laid out as production lines around packing rather than around a pass, and often run several menus from one set of equipment.
Their existence puts pressure on conventional restaurants, since a delivery order from either arrives in a similar bag and the customer cannot see the difference.