no. 53: restaurants on the radio

a first post for paid subscribers

In this issue, I bring together and build on a couple of recent pieces on the impact of the internet on restaurants in the US. In last week’s issue of Expedite, Kristen Hawley muses about how venture capital is killing the restaurant scene in the US by funding delivery services, ghost kitchens, and virtual brands. And this week, Byrne Hobart did a piece in The Diff on how technology has changed restaurants.¹

I’ll start by pointing out that venture-tech has been hurting the restaurant scene since the days of the dot-bomb. It’s done so in three main ways.

First, as I wrote a few months back, the internet has a way of separating content from its physical origins, and redirecting the financial flows the content generates.