Courtesy of Eat Fajitas
Eat Fajitas
You name it, Lanny Lancarte has done it, at least in the restaurant business — from working at his family’s Fort Worth institution, Joe T. Garcia’s, to attending culinary school at the Culinary Institute of America to starting restaurants like the high-end Lanny’s Alta Cocina Mexicana, subsequently transformed into his health-focused restaurant, Righteous Foods.
Now, Lancarte is taking on a new venture — Fantasma Kitchens — due to open in September.
Fantasma Kitchens is a ghost kitchen (“fantasma” means “ghost” in Spanish), meaning it will not have table service found at a traditional restaurant. Instead, customers can pick up food through to-go and delivery services.
Lancarte says that his restaurant ventures always seem to mirror his personal journey. When he opened Righteous Foods, he was into endurance sports and healthy eating. In 2018, his family’s needs inspired him to consider a ghost kitchen concept.
“I started thinking about ghost kitchens when I had two small children. I found myself pretty busy and pressed for time, and we were ordering food at our house quite a bit,” Lancarte says. “I really noticed the lack of quality in food coming from the kitchen and to someone's home.”
Lancarte’s inspiration came at the perfect time. Eat Fajitas launched right at the beginning of the pandemic out of the Righteous Foods' kitchen. The simple, family-style meal of fajitas combined with the built-in setup for pickup and delivery seems to have been designed specifically for a world where restaurant dining was suddenly thrown into chaos.
“[The ghost kitchen] is a leaner labor model where we can still have a focus on high-quality food without the big infrastructure of investing in a dining room and all the lipstick and interior design, host, bartender, servers, back waiters, and food runners,” Lancarte says.
Lancarte didn’t stop at just one concept for his new business, however. He came up with three.
“I’ve always said, Tex-Mex is in my blood,” Lancarte says. Along with Eat Fajitas, Fantasma Kitchens will also be home to El Pollo Tocayo, featuring a menu focused on al Carbon-style chicken (smoked chicken with a Mexican-inspired glaze) and fried chicken, also with Mexican-inspired flavors. Pizza Zapasta, whose name is inspired by Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, will showcase Lancarte’s unique take on authentic Italian cooking styles with Mexican ingredients.
Lancarte’s creativity extends past the menus and into the entire business. More twists on the traditional ghost kitchen concept include specially designed cardboard packaging to keep food as fresh as possible during delivery (no leaking styrofoam boxes here), pre-mixed cocktails in branded bottles, and a commitment to keeping food service in-house. You won’t find Fantasma Kitchens on Uber Eats or DoorDash — the company will instead employ and train its own drivers and use its own apps to make sure the focus stays on the food.
Fantasma Kitchens will be housed in a former Methodist church on the North Side of Fort Worth — the finishing touches on the building will be completed soon, and the phase of hiring and training will begin just in time for the predicted September opening, Lancarte says.
Fantasma Kitchens will be found at 1300 Gould Ave. and can be reached at the concepts’ respective social media accounts: @eat.fajitas, @pizzazapasta, and @elpollotocayo.
