winning at the internet
So here we are in week number lots of lockdown in New York City. The parks are crowded and restaurants in Georgia are open, and I should have cracked last week.
The best thing I (and many others) have read about restaurants in the age of the Coronavirus is Gabrielle Hamilton’s essay about shutting down Prune. Like the first leg of lamb I cooked, it’s overdone in places and raw in others, but it was heartfelt and real enough to give me PTSD (I’ve had to close restaurants too). Take a minute to read it, if you haven’t already. I’m going to talk about something else now, but I’m going to come back to Prune’s closing later.
An idea that comes up frequently in all the rest of the stuff I read about restaurants in the age of etc. is that restaurants should turn themselves into content creators to engage audiences and create new revenue streams, none of which actually have anything to do with the work of actually making food and feeding people.
What no one points out is that this isn’t adaptation – it’s taking the current playbook to its logical conclusion. In the coastal US metros it has been the case, for the last 3-5 years if not longer, that the success scenario for an independent restaurant involves becoming the centerpiece of a media property; restaurant not as restaurant, but as platform and payoff, the foundation for a marketing funnel. You cannot build an independent restaurant any more – you need to build the engine powering an apparatus of cultural creation. You need to do this because all but the most casual restaurants need an audience of hundreds of thousands to survive.
This turns restaurants from hospitality businesses into marketing businesses, competing not with other providers of food and conviviality, but with other marketers on the internet. The internet strips restaurants of everything that makes them centers of culture, loci channeling a spirit of place and time. You lose the ability to compete on the energy of the room, on a server’s wit and warmth, on the smell of herbs and butter when you walk into the room. You put all that aside and compete on food styling and celebrity mentions.
Prune was never meant to be the kind of restaurant that is competitive on the internet. The food is unpretty, the prices humble, the room entirely quotidian – a place for “a line cook’s paycheck but also a line cook’s palate.” Of course, fame was thrust upon it by a combination of excellent product and the right connections (Hamilton’s sister was the food editor at Saveur when magazines still mattered). But, for whatever reason, Hamilton never chose to spin fame into empire.
One commentator said in response to the essay that if Hamilton was tired of hosing down the line herself, she could probably have done something about it. But doing something about it would have involved doing something other than running Prune. A chef-owner working 80-hour weeks and doing 4 turns on a Tuesday night should be able to be financially comfortable in the city in which they operate. They shouldn’t have to start three other places, go on TV, or charge so much that they are only feeding the 1%. They should be able to make a living simply working their guts out, cooking.
Hamilton’s story is also a rebuttal of the idea that restaurants should play by the rules of internet marketing to survive. There are plenty of restaurant owners out there arguing that closing is for the weak – the strong start creating content and doing takeout (this particular version of the argument comes from Nick Kokonas, the owner of Alinea, a restaurant so famous it has its own reservation software).
But Hamilton and Prune have a substantial public presence, what my growth-hacker friends would call the ability to generate top-of-funnel. This is a chef who can get twelve thousand words in the New York Times whenever she wants, and has for 20 years been running one of the most beloved restaurants in New York. A marketing funnel only works if you can actually make money selling whatever’s at the bottom of the funnel, and what’s at the bottom of this funnel is takeout, perhaps with a bottle of wine from the restaurant’s cellar. Most restaurants don’t have enough control over their cost structure to transform their existing operations into profitable businesses, especially when demand for prepared meals is falling. You can cram as many impressions in the top of the funnel as you want, but that doesn’t help when it costs $20 to produce a meal you have to sell for $18.
Anyone outside the industry arguing that takeout is the answer is doing so because they don’t have anything better to suggest. Anyone making the argument from within the industry is doing so because they are sufficiently large that they believe they can survive a long period of slow bleeding (which is why you see Nick Kokonas and the Major Food Group talking up the idea).
The real answer is to figure out a way to produce food at a profit, and get it onto people’s plates. As Vaughn points out, for many restaurants that counted on full dining rooms in highly trafficked urban areas, this just isn’t going to be possible in the age of etc.. Our urban landscape, with foodservice spaces that assume seats are strength, is really not designed for this. It will be some time before the necessary physical and industry-wide adaptation starts to take place; if it ever does, since there is every temptation to proceed as though the age of etc. will pass quickly enough that it’s not worth a radical rethink of restaurant real estate.
In the meantime, I think – I hope – that we will get our food from places like these tiny operations that Steph told me about in San Francisco. I have no idea if the numbers crunch for them, but I have to believe that it’s easier for them to make it work than it is for someone carrying rent on a restaurant space. If you know of anyone doing something similar in New York, I’d love to hear.
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, formerly a weekly newsletter about food systems and food, which may become weekly once again. As always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Diana Kudayarova, Jen Thompson, and once again, Vaughn Tan.
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best,
tw
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