The Big FAQ Deep Dive: Privacy, Phantom Payments, Real Maps, and Whether the Ghost Can Diet
The questions we get most, answered properly: where your account actually lives, whether anything is ever charged, why the map is real, where the food photos come from, and Boogi's waistline.
Where does my account actually live?
In your browser, and only in your browser. When you sign up with an email and password, everything — your account, orders, Dish-dex, Ghost Passport, savings total, and Boogi's entire personality — is stored in your browser's localStorage. Nothing is sent to a server, because there is no account server to send it to. The upside is privacy by construction: we couldn't leak your data if we tried, since we never have it. The honest downside: clear your browser data or switch devices, and your ghost's memories go with it. Guard that browser like it's the family photo album, because for Boogi, it is.
Is anything ever, in any circumstance, charged?
No. There is no payment processing anywhere on the site. Checkout is always $0, the pre-filled PHANTOM CARD is decorative, and we never ask for a real card number — if something that looks like PhantomBite ever does, it isn't us. The coupons that drop every few hours carry labels like ₩1,000 to ₩5,000 (our favorite: the rider apology coupon, because he's lost), and they apply themselves to your cart with great ceremony. They discount a total that was already zero. The total remains ₩0. The math checks out.
Why is the tracking map real if everything else is fake?
Because the tracking is the show. Watching a rider drift through real streets in one of 12 real cities — Seoul, Busan, Tokyo, Osaka, New York, LA, London, Paris, Bangkok, Taipei, Mexico City, or Singapore — for three minutes is what makes the finale land. A fake map with fake streets would be a loading spinner with extra steps. Real geography, phantom cargo. Each city you're 'delivered' in also stamps your Ghost Passport, which is the closest this site comes to travel.
Quick-fire round
- Where do the food photos come from? They're real photographs of real food, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licenses, each attributed on our credits page with photographer and license. The food existed; someone else simply ate it already — the most PhantomBite provenance possible
- Are the recipes real? Yes — all 59 base dishes have genuinely cookable ~20-minute recipes, unlocked by ordering
- Are the restaurants real? No. All 1,200 in the directory are ghosts, filterable ghosts
- Are the owner replies human? No, and no human could sustain that enthusiasm
- Do variants count for the Dish-dex? Yes — any Signature, Double, or Truffle version lights up its base dish
Can Boogi diet?
The question we receive with the most emotional urgency. No. Chubbiness comes from cumulative dodged calories, and cumulative numbers only go up. Boogi ate those calories so you didn't have to, and Boogi keeps them, moving through five chub tiers toward the final form respectfully titled Absolute unit. This is not a bug; it is a record of service. The wardrobe offers nine outfits, and we can confirm the top hat and crown flatter every tier. You cannot slim a ghost. You can only love it, and dress it accordingly. 👻
✍️ Written by the PhantomBite editorial team for the joy of it. Food history is often contested — where the record is murky, we say so rather than pretend to certainty. Recipes are tested to work in a home kitchen. The delivery, of course, is not.