Dining Out: We’ll still want to break bread
Today much of what was once familiar is changing, impacted by technology: Brick-and-mortar retail stores are struggling in the shadows of eBay and Amazon, and businesses such as Blue Apron, which delivers prepared ingredients to your home, are affecting how we cook at home.
And restaurants? The conventions are changing rapidly there too, the result of technology, economics and simple fashion. Online rating websites such as Yelp have made everyone an instant critic; reservations apps such as OpenTable and Resy allow diners to shop around for a table tonight or next month. Labor costs are making fullservice restaurants a burden for owners, and more top chefs are going the more economical fast-casual route where diners order at the counter and the food is brought to the table — upending the idea that a good meal out entails a waiter and three courses.
It’s tempting to think that the restaurant of the future will become something different entirely.
But I would argue that, in fact, these changes do not touch what is fundamental about dining out — and that the future restaurant may be different in style but very much the same in purpose. Dining together creates an atmosphere that nudges us to let down our guard, and dining out in public at restaurants keeps us social in a way no app can. People may find each other on Tinder, or Slack each other at work. But ultimately, when they must come face-to-face, it’s often in a restaurant. I don’t think that will change.
Restaurants (or cafes or diners or any place where people sit across from each other with food) are where couples have first dates, orchestrate proposals and mark special occasions. They are also places where people find themselves on equal footing. There is something so basic about gathering people around a dining table with food and drink — and the atmosphere is often more productive than hiring a highly paid facilitator to bring parties together.
Buck’s in Woodside is purportedly where Elon Musk secured funding for PayPal, where Netscape was hatched and where Steve Jurvetston and Sabeer Bhatia developed the idea for Hotmail. Would any of these encounters have flourished in a more formal, rigid office setting?
Each generation certainly adds its stamp to the dining scene. Today we share our dining table with our smartphones — sometimes more than with friends. Evan Rich of Rich Table earlier this year opened RT Rotisserie, a fastcasual, counter-service restaurant only a block from his full-service restaurant. At first he tried to apply the same standards to both restaurants — checking in with people at tables and trying to engage them — only to find that at the Rotisserie customers more or less wanted to be left alone with their phones or friends.
“It’s taken a bit to get used to it,” says Rich. “At Rich Table our job is to give an experience, educate people, tell a story and make them feel at home. We initially did the same at Rotisserie. To be honest, most people have no interest in that part of the experience.”
But this realization doesn’t discourage him. The customers just aren’t looking for the same experience, with the attendant attention, that more conventional restaurants provide. In fact, Millennials now spend more money dining out than Baby Boomers. A Food Institute study last year showed that diners ages 19 to 36 spent 44 percent of their food dollar on eating out, more than a 10 percent increase from 2010. In 2014, those ages 52 to 71 spent 40 percent dining out.
I used to look at the profusion of quick-service restaurants as primarily about economics. With rising labor costs, this style of service saves money and allows owners to offer better pricing. Yet I now realize it’s also cultural: Our attention span is growing shorter, and dining at these restaurants is less of a time commitment.
At the same time, many of these new spots have a communal table. Communal tables have been around for a while; when Lulu opened in 1993 it was one of the first, if not the first, trendy restaurants to offer one. It was always empty, even when the rest of the warehouse-size restaurant was packed; today virtually every new restaurant offers some form of communal seating, and these are often full. Even the most ardent social media consumers want to put down the phones at some point, and a communal table gives physical shape to our social network. Maybe, almost 25 years after Lulu opened, we need that communal table more than ever.
Then there’s the recent phenomenon: the merging of the bar and restaurant. Main courses are decreasing on menus; long cocktail lists and the small plates to accompany them are increasing. This is all about sharing drinks, sharing plates: a very different and highly social kind of snacking together.
Food trucks are the ultimate example of a communal experience transformed by technology. At the insanely popular Off the Grid at Fort Mason, 30 trucks and tent vendors and two bars serve 6,000 to 8,000 people on Friday nights. Friends and family arrive together, perhaps prompted by tweets or Instagram posts from the mobile chefs, separate to line up at the truck of their choice for myriad cuisines including Korean, Indian, Greek and Japanese, and then come back together to sit at communal tables or to find chairs to pull into a circle.
Gathering around food, formally or informally, remains a primary force in nurturing our humanity. Maybe, in fact, we’re finding that sharing food in public — that is, at a restaurant — is becoming even more important as the rest of our lives see change.
Finally, restaurants can offer us something so necessary in an increasingly strained world: a neutral place where the enjoyment of food can bridge any divide.
In 1987, Willie Brown and Bill Lockyer gathered representatives from warring parties — insurance companies, doctors, manufacturers and trial lawyers — in a private room at Frank Fat’s in Sacramento. As they were sharing potstickers, brandy fried chicken and New York steak in onion and oyster sauce, they agreed to a plan that created major changes to California's civil liability laws.
No matter what technological innovations or economic pressures the future brings, the central role of the restaurant will remain: to bring us together.