This is Pete Wells’s last column as restaurant critic for The New York Times. Read more about his 12 years of reviewing here.
Last week, the restaurant-loyalty app Blackbird introduced a new way to pay for dinner. Customers check in on the app on arrival, pick a payment source and tip percentage, and then eat. Ben Leventhal, one of the app’s founders, explained what he called the “best part” in an Instagram video shot at the Italian cafe Lodi.
“When you’re done, you just get up and go,” he said. Then he demonstrated how it’s done, high-fiving Lodi’s host on his way to the door without breaking stride.
I’m at the end of 12 years as a critic who ate in and reviewed restaurants constantly. Of those years, I probably spent two solid months just waiting for the check. I ought to be in favor of anything that speeds up the end of the meal, but Blackbird’s new checkless exit gives me the creeps. It is just the latest in a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants. Each of these changes was small, but together they’ve made going out to eat much less personal. Meals are different now, and our sense of who we are is different, too.
In my first few years on the job, I thought of restaurants as one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human. We might work silently in our cubicles, rearranging and transmitting zeros and ones. We might walk around with speakers in our ears that played digital music files chosen by an algorithm. We might buy our books and sweaters and toothpaste with a click and wait until they showed up at our door. We might flirt, fight and make up by text. But when we went out to eat, we were people again.
No machine could drink rosé for us, or chew lamb chops, or flirt, fight and make up. And at every critical point in the meal, there were people there to guide us. From the moment we walked in, we talked with hosts, bartenders, captains, runners and bussers. Being served in a restaurant wasn’t passive. We had to participate.
Many of the little routines of dining that we used to handle by talking to a person now happen on a screen. When we go to Shake Shack, we order and pay for our burger and frozen custard on a screen. In some places, we enter our names on the waiting list for tables on a screen. We scan QR codes so we can read the menu on a screen. Restaurants are turning into vending machines with chairs.
Before we walk in the door, we’ve usually made a reservation on a screen. You could still make reservations by phone in 2012. Many places were on OpenTable by then, but if you didn’t feel like using it or couldn’t find a time you wanted, you picked up the phone, and your call would usually be answered by a human. Pleasantries were exchanged. Polite phrases were used: Please. Thank you. I’m sorry. We look forward to seeing you.
Now restaurants hardly ever pay someone to pick up the phone, if they have one; few newer places bother getting a number because so few calls come in. Eulalie, in TriBeCa, is one of the few that still takes reservations over the phone, a quirk so rare that it seems like a willfully perverse exercise in historical re-enactment. (Even the taverns at Colonial Williamsburg are on OpenTable.)
Online reservations are easier on the ego, because they free us from the humiliation of being told no. Mainly, though, we like their convenience, which in the United States is virtually an inalienable right. It’s so much more convenient that we’ve hardly noticed that reservations, once a simple agreement between you and the restaurant, are now a commodity that other people can profit from. We’re used to getting beat out in the race for tables by bots, which can turn around and sell the spot to the highest bidder.
We know that we might not be offered the same reservation times as somebody with a higher tier of American Express membership. Before we even get that far, we have to click OK on privacy policies so long and impenetrable that a lot of people I know assume restaurants know all about them before they show up.
On nights when we don’t feel like going out, we can order delivery on a screen. In 2012, when I wanted food brought to my house I would pull out a paper menu that had been left on my stoop and call a place in my neighborhood that I had either visited in person or walked past a hundred times.
While most of those neighborhood joints are on the delivery apps today, there are also vendors I’ve never been to or even heard of, because they aren’t real restaurants. They’re ghost kitchens, and I have no idea who is cooking there or where my money will go. Are my dollars supporting a local business owner who lives on my block? Or am I enriching investors in a startup based in Silicon Valley?
Many of these technologies spread during the pandemic, when there was a compelling reason to limit human contact. But the use of tech for social distancing hasn’t gone away. One result is that we feel increasingly alienated from the people who cook and serve our food. It’s no wonder we are always hearing about diners acting like entitled jerks — they’ve been trained to expect that everybody who works in a restaurant should be as fast and compliant as a touch screen.
Restaurants that pride themselves on professionalism are becoming more faceless, too. This reaches depressing depths at the modern tasting counter, which during my time as critic came to dominate the fancy-dining sector. A few of these places are wonderfully personal and idiosyncratic, but many of them feel utterly interchangeable — they follow the same template, down to the signed menu you’re given as you leave, as if you were going to run right home and paste it in your scrapbook.
You sit there having the same experience everybody else is having. (People are so afraid of missing out that they’ll ask the server what’s the right way to eat each dish.) If it’s your birthday — and on a typical night in one of these places, half the customers seem to be celebrating one — you’ll get the same dessert everybody else is having, with a candle stuck in it.
Even the Cheesecake Factory gives you a free slice of cake on your birthday. But the Cheesecake Factory wants you to come back; a lot of tasting-menu restaurants assume, correctly, that almost nobody sitting at the counter is going to become a regular. These places are built for one-night flings, not long-term relationships. They’re hookup restaurants.
People who consume a steady diet of bucket lists and viral videos rush from one restaurant to another so they post about it, to prove they were there. They go to places solely so they can put a photo of the viral egg sandwich or rainbow bagel on Instagram. Whether the sandwich or bagel tastes good is irrelevant; the point is to prove they were there.
Most of these people will never return. Restaurants that are packed for the first few weeks are empty six months later. The wisest owners now avoid serving anything that might go viral, because they don’t want their business to burn itself out.
It’s not that we don’t want to have relationships with the owners and cooks and baristas in our lives. Tiny pop-up restaurants and micro-bakeries are still riding a wave of popularity that started during the pandemic. A large part of the appeal of these places is the chance to meet the person who baked the croissant or cooked your Vietnamese bun cha.
We may value the chance to meet these vendors even more because we’ve lost so many of the personal exchanges we used to have in restaurants.
Not every restaurant needs to provide an intense emotional experience. I love the quick service of Japanese ramen shops where you pay before you eat. But if we’re going to stay in a restaurant for more than a few minutes, we want to connect.
A server’s little smiles, rehearsed jokes, out-of-nowhere raves for the daily special and so on may be subtle or not-so-subtle efforts to bump up the check and the tip, but they also ground us. Without them, the meal may be faster and cheaper, but it leaves us feeling a little empty. And when it’s time to go, we’re not in the mood to high-five the host, if the host still has a job.
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