We do not identify as a ghost kitchen, though many people mistakenly refer to us as one. Let us explain:

A ghost kitchen is an infrastructure operator that provides the production space for restaurants or virtual brands to run delivery operations, typically renting this infrastructure out on long-term (1+ year) contracts only. Ghost kitchens are usually in industrial or light-industrial areas, do not have front-of-house facilities, and are not seen by the end consumer.

While Nimbus does in fact provides infrastructure to delivery businesses to run their operations, our diversified rental model – where members can cook in our kitchens for a few hours or a few years – allows us to service food businesses across distribution models, business sizes, and maturities, including catering businesses, bakers, CPG brands, pop-up operators, delivery concepts, and more.

We’re incredibly focused on community, hospitality, and transparency: in addition to our back-of-house kitchen rentals with open floor plan hourly kitchens that facilitate collaboration between members, we have a front-of-house space where our members can interact with the end consumer via events programming. These event spaces serve as a bridge between our members and the neighborhood, making us much more of a co-cooking business than a ghost kitchen.

Nimbus currently has facilities in NYC and Chicago.

We have four operating locations and 40 rentable kitchen units in New York City: we have over 20,000 square feet of commercial kitchen and event space infrastructure in Manhattan across our Lower East Side, Midtown, and SoHo facilities, and 10,000 square feet of commercial kitchen infrastructure and event space in Brooklyn at our Downtown Brooklyn location. Nimbus also has one operating location and 16 rentable kitchen units in Chicago, with over 19,000 square feet of commercial kitchen and event space infrastructure in River North. You can see more information about all of our locations here.

We’re actively expanding our co-cooking infrastructure around the country, so drop us a line if you want to bring Nimbus to your neighborhood!

Our flexible rental model allows us to work with businesses across the food-service industry – from caterers to delivery concepts – and in a wide capacity, with members using our space for everything from private dinner parties to pop-ups, catering tastings to chef training, and more. Our membership base includes:

Delivery concepts: dozens of operators fulfil direct-to-consumer delivery orders from Nimbus instead of a brand-owned brick-and-mortar location. For example, Jersey Mike’s runs sandwich deliveries from both our Midtown and SoHo kitchen locations in New York City, and The Ssam launched it’s delivery-only Korean wrap business from Nimbus Downtown Brooklyn and recently expanded to Nimbus Midtown.

Catering operators: many catering businesses cannot support large catering orders from their own locations, or have opted to cook with Nimbus as a more flexible kitchen solution than renting a full-time space. For example, Perilla’s expanded from Boston to New York City by renting space at our Midtown location.

Baking businesses: we have a host of baking businesses producing in our facilities, particularly from our specialty baking suites in Downtown Brooklyn in NYC and River North in Chicago.

Packaged goods brands: Many packaged goods brands opt to launch at Nimbus before heading to a co-packer. For example, Sour Humanoid bottles their cooking vinegar, and (Parentheses) makes their sober apéritif , from our NYC Lower East Side kitchens.

And more: we have chefs using our space for initial product testing, recipe development, chef training, pop-ups, and more! For example, OTG Management did all of their recipe testing and chef training from our NYC Downtown Brooklyn location in preparation for the new LaGuardia Terminal C launch, and Noma hosted a two week NYC pop-up, flew twelve chefs from Copenhagen, and cooked at Nimbus Downtown Brooklyn for the duration of the event.