“I Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed, and Not for the Better.” by Pete Wells, NYT
by UraniumSpoon
“I Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed, and Not for the Better.” by Pete Wells, NYT
by UraniumSpoon
30 Comments
You have to pay for the article/opinion piece
I Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed, and Not for the
In his last essay as a restaurant critic, Pete Wells reflects on a dining world of touch screens and reservation apps, where it’s getting hard to find the human touch.
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.
The entire thing is eyeroll inducing boomer drivel
Unfortunate paywall
Fuck all critics
Truly only something a tired food critic who lives in New York could write. And I really don’t blame him as a writer to write this, it’s his last piece if he wants it to be some out of touch rant dressed up to pass to the public, then that’s understandable.
The only thing I agree with is his point about people going to restaurants who don’t care about the food but just showing that they went, and well that was a thing 12 years ago before you started reviewing restaurants and a tired ass point to make.
Protip: I forced chrome to open the page on desktop mode and then stopped the page from finishing loading, so I could see and copy the text (this was on android)
On a computer, chrome’s reading mode will show the text by itself.
I also have an app that aggregates news and think pieces, Pocket, that downloads saved articles/pages (you can input your own urls, if the article isn’t available on the app) for offline viewing that essentially does the same thing
Paywalls are basically digital childlocks. I’m just your average internet user who grew up as a pirate. They are not hard to bypass, at all.
Small joints is where it’s at and while there’s some super nice upscale small joints. I prefer the ones where health regulations are questionable. I know the food gonna be fire. Just hopefully it’s not all rednecks, then it’s more likely not.
Ben Leventhal came to speak at ICE about a year ago and I asked him a similar question about the over-commodification and stratification of dining if Blackbird were to catch on. He gave a very corporate answer about the opportunities for restaurants outweighing the downsides. His general attitude towards the industry rubbed me the wrong way but I will admit that, in an industry in which passion sometimes takes precedence over good business sense, it was fascinating to hear from someone who is viewing the restaurant industry through a deeply capitalistic lens. Nonetheless, I think the lack of preconceived notion when you walk into a sit-down restaurant is the essence of dining. The diner and the restaurant place an incredible amount of trust in each other. Call me a romantic, but if the money is already on the table, it just feels like a less intimate and more transactional experience.
Gift article
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/dining/pete-wells-how-restaurants-have-changed.html?unlocked_article_code=1.B04.bo4L.XLL4GBRUuuHu&smid=url-share
“The human touch” I really hope is in the kitchen making and some handling of my food. I don’t really need a server, especially when a food runner is usually the one who drops off the meals.
To me, this is a thought provoking piece. I’ve been out of the industry for a long time, but as a consumer, I definitely agree with some of his laments about missing out on the human element of dining. I don’t mind the screens and easy payments at a chain place, but there is something that feels good about having a great server and BOH staff at an upscale establishment.
I have recently had the pleasure of eating at a couple of places (Girl & the Goat in LA, and Herb & Wood in San Diego) where the staff and food were really fantastic. The service at both of these places was honestly top notch, and it really does make the meal better. Having staff who are knowledgeable and know how to interact with guests is something that seems to be falling by the wayside.
Pete Wells can absolutely go fuck himself. Should be easy how much he likes jerking himself off.
It’s more of a comment on society at large, really. Once upon a time people like me, who would definitely prefer to simply be left alone, had no choice but to go into the wider world and deal with shit. I hated it then and I hate it now. But I hate it more now. I feel like humans themselves are shying away from interaction, and I can’t imagine that being remotely healthy.
I don’t know if I agree with his takes on technology, but there’s a beautiful love letter to the thing I do embedded in this piece.
>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. […] 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.
I know most of this sub are cooks and chefs. I spent a good five years of my career as a line cook before becoming a server for the money, now managing FOH. I live for these little moments of interactions, and guests do too. This is what adds 400% to a bottle of wine which in turn allows chef-driven restaurants to continue producing food at costs that wouldn’t make sense economically otherwise.
Having worked in restaurants as a line cook for most of my life, I feel a lot of what he’s saying. I left shortly after the pandemic because I was just getting too old for a highly physical job. But things have changed. I started in the 90s when the vibe was very, very different.
But it isn’t changing back anytime soon. This is the restaurant experience the new generation is growing up with, what they’re coming to expect, and what they want.
Which means those of us from the old days really are just old men yelling at clouds. The old days are done and gone.
the chinese restaurant i like forces patrons to order on tablets so they can hire waitstaff who can’t speak english
The implications of losing the human touch scares me, but my social anxiety rejoices. Being able to go to a sit down restaurant without having to interact with a single person sounds like a dream.
Why can’t y’all just shut the fuck up and eat the food man.
IIRC Wells did the review of Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar. He pretty much shredded anyone and anything remotely involved in the operation, poured gasoline on the remains, lit it on fire, scooped up the ashes, launched them into space then blew up spacecraft into a million shiny particles destine to be sucked up by the sun or a black hole.
It was glorious.
If you ever need a master class about the art of evisceration, it’s well worth the time to seek out that review.
Wells is a gifted writer and and perhaps more so, a incredible sharp observer of the human condition. He’ll be missed.
I understand that America is hard on people but i was in the industry for 8 years. The biggest problem is no one really cares anymore about customer service and if anything an open hostility is present. I don’t want someone to kiss my ass or be my friend but coming back for refills and an inquiry about how things are tasting is a minimal expectation. Diners are the best at this and everything in between that and fine dining sucks.
As a punter, I can’t believe how prevalent iPad menus and wine lists have become.
Ffs it’s so damn try hard . I miss menus with the specials written in pencil
And they say nurses have it tough
With the prices of every part of restaurant services going up, including labor, my personal feelings are that ALL SERVERS, INDUSTRY WIDE (not you, bartenders) CAN BE REPLACED WITH A SINGLE IPAD. I do not think that there should be a person taking your order or bringing you a check. I love the people I’ve worked with in FoH, I just do not think that part of the meal is worth +20% of total restaurant revenue. Eliminate those positions, distribute tips to the people making the food. Servers, develop a skill and quit living off the sweat on your chef/cooks brow. Y’all are a bunch of spoiled brats with a massive ego/entitlement problem.
Everyone’s on a smartphone, they don’t want to be talked to.
We’re already around people without connecting or communicating with them.
I prefer it that way. Pay and tip before you’re served? Be done and leave? I would like that. I already do it in some restaurants.
The service industry won’t wait on us relics.
Scanning QR codes to read an online menu is a terrible pandemic hangover which needs to die asap. It’s terrible for the vibes and interaction around food choices.
It’s weird. I never have eaten at a place like this in my life. Never used an app or a screen to order food if you don’t count a drive thru, and that’s for people involved.
In their defense the clientelle is worse than ever
Capitalism is a war against ~~labor~~ humanity and the planet.
Capitalism doesn’t produce food to feed people. Capitalism produces what it calls “food” to make a profit. So if robocop instead of “food cooked and served by humans” is what is needed to turn a profit; Then that is exactly what capitalism will produce.
What’ll really cook your noodle later on is when you realize that capitalism *is not* the only way to do business… (it just says it is because it hates competition)
I’m the one guy who isn’t upset. I eat at a restaurant for the food. I know that it’s supposed to be equal parts service, atmosphere and food, but for me it’s always food. I’ve scrubbed pots, waited tables, tossed pizzas, flipped burgers and over easy eggs. For me, if the service and atmosphere are excellent but the food is meh, I won’t go back. If the food is excellent and the the atmosphere and service are meh, I’ll go back. Besides, back in 2020 most of us knew that the rising flood of overworked and underpaid kitchen dogs had peaked and big changes were going to happen.