On a recent Wednesday night, a delivery driver carrying an empty DoorDash bag walked up to a long white trailer occupying four parking spots in the back of a Financial District lot.

It wasn’t what he expected.

“Is this Burger Bytes?” he said, seemingly to no one. Within seconds, a hand emerged from the trailer door with a plain brown paper bag of food.

This is the future of food — or at least one fast, cheap and dystopian future, that has drawn hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from venture capitalists. Their vision: doing away with restaurants and replacing them with “ghost kitchens,” serving customers who order exclusively via app. The restaurant-less restaurants might befuddle drivers used to picking up from regular locations, but customers won’t know when they get a bag of food where it came from.

Burger Bytes, an example of this phenomenon, is an evanescent presence, though it’s everywhere online, having staked out space in Postmates, Uber Eats and Grubhub. Its website is registered to a Florida company that’s a subsidiary of Miami’s Reef Technology, as is “Vessel CA,” the company name that appears on the trailers’ handwritten signs.

Reef does not deliver food from any local restaurants; instead, it has filled rented trailers with virtual restaurants of its own devising. In addition to Burger Bytes, they include concepts like American Eclectic Burger, Breakfast All Day Everyday, Burn Burger, Fork and Ladle, Rebel Wings and Wings & Things, each with its own stylized food photos, logos and menus. The food is prepped at Reef’s main kitchen under the Highway 101 and Interstate 280 overpasses at 1760 Cesar Chavez St. From there it heads to Reef Kitchens — its Vessel pickup spots, some of which are the white trailers in parking lots — where final preparation and delivery take place.

The concept of ghost kitchens is not original to Reef. Also known as cloud, virtual and dark kitchens, they are restaurants without dining rooms, designed to serve delivery orders. Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, has backed CloudKitchens, a Los Angeles startup, which is building commissary kitchens to serve such restaurants; at least one of his kitchens already operates on Morris Street, a South of Market alley.

Reef’s rapid push to serve the San Francisco delivery market is fueled by a large investment from Japan’s SoftBank, a technology and investment firm, which reportedly vaulted Reef into the ranks of unicorns, or privately held companies with a value of more than $1 billion.

How this story was reported Chronicle reporters visited several sites where Reef Technology had established ghost kitchens in trailers parked in lots. Public records including health inspection reports and corporate registrations established the link between Vessel CA, the operator listed on the trailers, and Reef. Chronicle reporters then contacted Reef to confirm its link to the trailers and learn more about its plans for expanding virtual restaurants in San Francisco. Key terms Delivery app: DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub and Postmates are the biggest ones by market share. Delivery-only restaurant: A restaurant with no dining room. Some offer their own app, while others sell through third-party apps, which charge a commission. Ghost kitchen: A food-preparation facility that only serves delivery orders. Also known as cloud, dark or virtual kitchens. One ghost kitchen might host multiple delivery-only restaurants.

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SoftBank has grown notorious for pumping up companies like Uber and WeWork with capital, only to see their value diminish as business realities set in. More recently, the company has pressured its portfolio of startups to show profits or at least stanch their losses.

Formerly known as ParkJockey Global, Reef boldly announced plans in June to transform its thousands of parking lots and garages into “thriving hubs for the on-demand economy.” Those hubs, it said, would have “state-of-the-art kitchens ... housed in proprietary containers, with each one able to accommodate from one to five restaurant brands or concepts.” The Vessel trailers appear to be the current realization of that vision.

What exposed Reef’s plans to dot San Francisco with virtual restaurants was the uproar that began when prominent San Francisco chef Pim Techamuanvivit discovered her Michelin-starred Thai restaurant Kin Khao was listed on a Grubhub site last month. Grubhub, a Chicago food-delivery company, had loosened its standards for listing restaurants last year, amid fierce competition from San Francisco’s DoorDash, which has also received funding from SoftBank.

Not only does Kin Khao not offer delivery, but the menu on Grubhub didn’t even belong to Kin Khao. Instead, it came from a Reef brand, Happy Khao Thai, and Grubhub mixed the two restaurants up. After Techamuanvivit complained, Grubhub pulled the listing down.

A spokeswoman for Reef said the company did not attempt to impersonate Kin Khao. It uses generic names like Burger Bytes for its delivery-only restaurants to make it easier for customers to find popular types of food — a strategy similar to e-commerce sites that have sought to rank highly on Google and other search engines.

Reef’s presence in San Francisco may grow less virtual soon. The company said it is seeking to work with established restaurants — even though its virtual outlets currently compete with them. It already works with at least one brick-and-mortar restaurant in Miami.

Ghost kitchens seem set to rise, as local restaurateurs also explore cutting their real estate costs and piggybacking on popular delivery apps. Frjtz closed its Valencia Street restaurant in April and now serves orders out of CloudKitchen’s 60 Morris St. address. Tacolicious runs a rotisserie-chicken operation, MF Chicken, out of its North Beach and Palo Alto locations. And Souvla has opened a delivery-only location in South of Market.

Will your next delivery order come from a real restaurant, a commissary kitchen, or a rented trailer? When you order online, you might not know. Though you could always ask the driver.

Shwanika Narayan and Janelle Bitker are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com, janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Shwanika, @JanelleBitker