Pete Wells, the New York Times restaurant critic, has pulled the pin on reviewing after 12 years and, on his way out, dropped a rather gloomy assessment of the state of restaurants today.
The gist of Wells’s final essay, is about how technology – from online reservations and delivery apps to QR codes, ghost kitchens and Instagram – is stripping “the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants”. Restaurants have changed since he began reviewing more than a decade ago, Wells says, but not for the better.
It’s a given that the USA is literally and figuratively another country when it comes to eating and drinking (exhibit A: Starbucks’s reputation as a good place to get coffee; exhibit B: the unrivalled superiority of the American hamburger), but restaurants across the globe share core similarities. No one could legitimately disagree with Wells that technology is playing an increasingly dominant role in how restaurants operate. So, do his observations about the New York restaurant scene apply in Australia, too?
One of the reasons that restaurants are so fascinating to many people is that they’re like the canary in the coal mine. Restaurants are more prone to failure than success, operating on ridiculously slim profit margins that are vulnerable to the whims of everything from governments to nature and fashion. Not to mention pandemics and wages.
Because they must constantly check the erratic pulse of what is and isn’t working in order to survive, restaurants have a way of reflecting economic and cultural conditions in real time. For some of us, restaurant-watching is a form of entertainment in itself, as much as dining out is.
Cost of living going up? Suddenly it’s all about the old-school pub, the neighbourhood bistro, the local family-run restaurant, all with humbler ingredients and lower price points. Awareness spreads about health-conscious ingredients and food allergies? Menus become annotated with a clinic’s worth of dietary information.
So it’s hardly surprising that, with technology arguably the dominant source of cultural change, paranoia, hope and uncertainty across the world right now, restaurants are right there in the midst of it, demonstrating the benefits and pitfalls of tech in real time, while we watch in comfort from a seat at the bar.
As Wells points out, technology can mean reduced human interaction. It’s apparent in Australia, with fewer restaurants where you can make a reservation by talking to a person on the phone, while QR codes replace physical menus, meaning you can order without a waiter. Delivery apps have made staying home an easier and more attractive option. Social media has gaslit some restaurants into believing that prioritising how a dish looks over how it tastes is a viable business strategy.
But there have always been lamentations about the restaurant industry not being what it used to be. I’ve been observing and writing about restaurants for more than half my life (I worked in restaurants for a decade or so before being paid to pontificate about them) and have witnessed and sometimes participated in the cyclical conversations about the hospitality industry being doomed.
Restaurants and dining out have been declared to be in their death throes when linen began disappearing from tables, or share plates challenged the dominance of western/French-style service, or a pizza restaurant won a top gong, or a restaurant chose to serve only natural wine. I can remember when Stephanie Alexander closed her eponymous Melbourne restaurant in the 1990s being certain that we were headed for dining Armageddon. Then small bar culture struck and we were all riding victoriously into a new, more casual, dawn.
Except then new bar culture was supposedly going to turn us all into snack-obsessed alcoholics which would mean the city would suffer from a skill shortage in the kitchens and we’d all be doomed to cooking at home or eating fast food. Enter the wine bar boom and we all breathed a sigh of relief about the industry living to fight another day.
This reliable resilience has made me forever hopeful for and fascinated by the restaurant industry. Circumstances change, we lose brilliant places to eat and drink along the way, but the gap is always filled as the cycle moves on. Obviously it’s wise to view technology in any sphere with a degree of scepticism but, the fundamental nature of restaurants is human. People keep choosing to go out and eat in public in a room full of strangers even as the settings change around them.
Just look at the rise of micro-restaurants (seen in Melbourne at venues such as Chae, Greasy Zoe’s, and Matsu) with their intensely personal experiences. Or the neighbourhood pubs being transformed by new operators who are elevating the food and drink offering while fastidiously retaining the local social club vibe. Or all those kitchen bars and communal tables. They all suggest that technology isn’t eliminating human staff and the personal touch.
Things are changing, yes, and technology is accompanying and sometimes even driving some of those changes. But that’s just the restaurant industry playing canary in the coal mine again. And that makes me excited about what’s coming next.
