On campus residents at Notre Dame looking for late night dining no longer have to leave campus or order takeout delivery. Campus Dining’s latest concept combines three of the hottest tech trends in dining – ghost kitchens, mobile ordering, and autonomous delivery robots.

Gipper’s Late Night Kitchen offers fast, affordable delivery of hot food across the South Bend, Indiana campus on Friday and Saturday nights from 8:00 pm to 2:00 am.

The food is prepared in an existing campus dining hall, but delivery is the only option. Students use the campus Grubhub app to place a mobile order and pay using their Irish1Card, debit, or credit card. The order is then delivered by one of the institution’s fleet of 30 autonomous robots.

A ghost kitchen is not necessarily something you promote. It’s student-driven and the word goes around in the community.

Gipper’s offers a limited menu and extremely reasonable pricing.

According to Luigi Alberganti, Executive Director of Notre Dame’s Campus Dining, the most popular option is the Detroit-style pizza paired with ice cream and cookies.

The concept is catching on.

“The demand has been high (because) the quality of the product is really good, very unique,” Alberganti says in an article in student-run newspaper, The Observer.

He believes it is a safer option for students, and it is filling a void in late-night dining options.

Word of the new offering has spread through word of mouth.

“The concept of a ghost kitchen is not necessarily something that you promote,” Alberganti says. “It’s student-driven and just for the students. The word goes around in the community.”

Proof of this, he notes, is that often when an order comes in from a dorm, another order follows from the same dorm. That suggests that students are talking to each other about is.

Gipper’s is a testing ground for Campus Dining. If the volume of orders is sufficient, they are likely to expand the operation, hours, and days.