Khalani Armstrong has been selling food since she was 14, back when she helped her mother cook plates for the neighborhood. Now 23, she runs Khalani's Kitchen, a ghost kitchen with no dining room, no storefront and a following of roughly 240,000 people on Instagram. Most of them found her through short videos of a young owner packing clamshells of comfort food, and plenty of them are local enough to order.
She opened in May 2024 while studying hospitality at Purdue, cooking out of The Cooking Station, a shared commercial kitchen on North Michigan Road. Her pitch was simple: why not start now? Two years later the model hasn't changed much. She cooks on weekends, sells by preorder and closes when the plates run out.
The signature is the jumbo wing dinner: eight wings, baked mac and cheese and candied yams, with sauces that rotate between Sticky Heat, Garlic Parmesan, Honey Jerk and Garlic Lemon Pepper. Specials come and go. Lamb chop Cajun Alfredo with garlic bread is a best seller, and she has also run spicy garlic beef noodles, iced cinnamon bread egg rolls and blue raspberry lemonade.
To get a plate, watch her Instagram, @khalaniskitchen, where each weekend's menu drops early in the week, then order at khalaniskitchen.com before it sells out. Pickup is at The Cooking Station, 8329 N Michigan Rd, during a set window that's posted with each menu. Arrive on time, because she means it. Some weekends she only opens one day, and some she closes entirely. If you want to start a food business of your own, she's also written an e-book about how she built hers.
