Today a Guest Blog is from my friends at BAUM+WHITEMAN’S focusing on 2019 trends. Regular
readers of this blog will note how many grocerant niche attributes are listed
as trends for 2019. The team at Foodservice
Solutions® believes that this is another sign that the Grocerant niche is going
main stream. Enjoy the guest blog and than you Mike.
Big challenges in 2019. More people eating home as restaurant prices
outstrip supermarkets’, while paychecks lag behind. Sit-down restaurants converting to
fast-casual, serving upscale food. Did
Amazon just benchmark the country’s new minimum wages, and how will restaurants
cope? Breakthroughs in automation aimed replacing
labor. Smile … cannabis is showing up almost everywhere. Get ready for more Chinese specialties; food
from the Stans; more sour flavors. New
perspective on winning the meal kit wars.
What is “motherless meat”?
--
1. THE PERILS OF RAISING MENU PRICES
Biggest change
for the year ahead: As this is written
Amazon is raising its minimum wage to $15/hour … and bumping up wages of those
already at the minimum.
This will damage lowpaying restaurants across the country. And it will accelerate menu price inflation
that already is taking its toll on restaurant customers … especially Americans
whose hourly paychecks don’t reflect a ten-year stock market bonanza. Widening gaps between menu prices and costs
of meals eaten at home is moving more of us to the family dinner table.
Another threat to restaurants: If Trump’s tariffs raise prices for washing
machines, cars, refrigerators, clothing, and electronics, consumers may
retrench further.
For the 12 months ended August 2018, food prices
away from home rose 2.6% while food purchased at grocery stores rose only 0.5%
… and actually may have declined at cutthroat competitors like Walmart, Costco,
Kroger and the like. A longer look (see
Bureau of Labor Statistics chart) tells us that in December ‘o8, the inflation
rate for restaurant meals and in-home meals were pretty much the same. As of last December, the spread was growing.
As restaurants raise prices to
offset staff-heavy wages per dollar of sales and increasing rents … which is
where food retailers have an enormous advantage … revenue grows but customer counts
stay fairly flat or down, especially among chains.
Binge-meal kit explosion, better supermarket
prepared food, tight finances … all contribute to restaurants’ squeeze. Restaurant traffic would likely show drastic
declines if not for growth in delivery options.
We may spend nearly half of our food dollars eating
out, but 82% of our meals are prepared at home … says NPD Group … and restaurant-going
per capita peaked way back in 2000; we’ve returned to 1990 numbers,
they say. Better Homes & Gardens claims that 93% of
millennials … a 75 million market segment … eat dinner at home four nights a
week. They’re not scared of actually
cooking … like sautéing or poaching … or of supplementing their handiwork with
arrays of prepared supermarket goods.
The situation’s especially acute in states and
cities mandating higher minimum wages … and abolishing tip credits … while
workers clamor for benefits like health insurance. At the same time, labor pools have dried up,
adding to wage pressures and increasingly bad service. Amazon, all by itself, has made $15/hr. the minimum
entry level wage these days. … no matter what the law says … so restaurants
will have to compete for labor. So restaurants are reducing service staffs,
introducing new technologies, converting to fast-casual formats, expanding
reliance on delivery, getting serious about automation (see below).
-- 2. NEXT-GENERATION
FAST CASUAL:
Crossing
the price barrier with breakthrough food
Wall Street frets that fast-casual restaurant chains are oversaturating the market …
but they’re missing the real excitement:
Independent operators who are filling in the price and quality gaps
between standard fast-casual and more upscale dining.
Chains like Chipotle, fast-casual pizza outfits and
… yea, even Shake Shack … strain to keep average spends to $10-$14, positioning
themselves as better choices than fast food.
But fastcasual newcomers are ignoring fast food pricing. Instead they’re taking aim at mid-scale
sitdown restaurants in high-rent locations that are crippled by high labor
costs and lots of overhead. These new entrepreneurs offer similar meals at a
bit more than half the price.
Take Barzotto in San Francisco. Walk up to a counter and order your food as
in most fast-casual joints. Maybe pasta
aglio e olio with chili, bottarga and broccoli rabe for $14; or porchetta with
salsa verde and cherry mostarda for $18.
Add a side and a glass of credible wine and bang! …. you’re up to
$33. Dinner for two with a bottle of
wine: $85.
Take Kish-Kash, a fast-cas couscouseria in New York’s
West Village. You approach a counter
topped with colorful casseroles holding first-rate toppings … to be ladled over
a mound of hand-made couscous. Short rib couscous with chard and white
beans: $18. Chicken tagine with olives and three-lemon
sauce: $15. Split an order of
cauliflower with pickled raisins, pine nuts and tahini: $12. Add a glass of vinho verde and an Israeli red
… and dinner for two is $65.
What’s missing from these places:
No tablecloths, no flowers, no waiters, no bussers, no drawnout dinners, no
reservations, no tipping, and not much elbow room.
What you get:
A chef actually cooking top-notch products; often a bar with signature
cocktails; knowledgeable servers at the counter; probably actual china; a
strong personality that doesn’t reek of design-a-restaurant kit … and adventurous ingredients that have
trickled down from fine-dining establishments. These all are consumer-friendly touchpoints.
AlaMar Kitchen & Bar in Oakland, a service restaurant known
for family-size Cajun seafood boils … switched to fascas … and now tells
customers via a buzzer to pick up their orders.
At Chiko, a hot-hot Chinese-Korean fascas in
Washington, main courses range from $8 for a pork-kimchi potsticker to $14 for
fried rice with Sichuan hot-smoked catfish; $17 for cumin-lamb stir-fry, to $18
for chopped brisket with soft brined egg and furikake butter. (Note the
ingredient trickle-down from fine dining menus.) Fifty bucks gets you a tasting dinner at four
counter seats … which are perpetually booked.
(Re tipping: With high average
checks, many fascas converts now facilitate tipping
by having customers pre-pay at the counter using a tablet that suggests tips…
which makes hiring easier; allows tip distribution to everyone since there’s no
distinction between front- and back-of-house staff; and gives operators
advantages of tip credits where they are legal.)
Expect generally to be jostled by
delivery boys and carryout customers hurrying for the door … because 50% (or
more) of these places’ food is consumed off the premises. Just look at the real estate economics: If 50% of its meals could be converted to
takeway and delivery, then an
80-seat restaurant would need only
40 seats. At 13 square feet per seat, you’re looking at about 1,000 more square
feet not to pay rent on. At, say, $75
per square foot, the restaurant’s offloading $75,000 in rent onto customers who
eat somewhere else … plus saving on air conditioning, cleaning and related
operating expenses. Adding beer and wine
or a full bar means more than raising average checks … it negates the “no” vote
among upscale customers who otherwise might shun places where they can’t get a
drink.
--
3. POOF!
YOU’RE OBSOLETE. MAKE ROOM FOR
THE BOTS
(AND
WHAT IS STARBUCKS THINKING?)
A month ago, a NYTimes article detailed why hotel
employees around the world, panicked by a new generation of electronic gizmos,
now prefer job security to better wages.
Face-recognizing front desk automatons; robots delivering meals and
laundry to hotel rooms; AI-powered ordering systems replacing waiters and food
store cashiers; fully automated restaurants, hotel front desk staffs reduced to
a single troubleshooter … the bots are
here. Even sitdown restaurants have “self-driving” bots delivering and
removing dishes from tables, taking orders, and escorting customers to specific
tables.
A three-armed robotic pizzaiolo in France claims to
bake 120 made-toorder pizzas an hour with various selections made from a touch
screen. Also, see Zume automated
pizza in California (right). In China, they’re working on fully automated
restaurants as this video shows
… raising real concern about mass unemployment among low wage earners.
Café X is a robotic sidewalk coffee monger in San
Francisco’s financial district. You
order a variety of beverages using smartphones or tablets and a robot does the
rest.. Its mechanical arm clears the
counter … even waves goodbye. A human
refills the beans. Imagine the impact of
Café X in the lobby of a hotel … or on a corner or mall near you? Starbucks must be wondering … what’s next?
Here’s a humdinger:
A 14-foot-long transparent hamburger bot called Creator … also in San Fran. It grinds the meat; slices the brioche buns
and the tomatoes; shreds the cheese; applies snazzy condiments; and delivers a
4,5 oz. brisket burger … for $6.50. The
contraption uses 350 sensors and 20 computers; its two machines cook and
assemble up to 350 burger an hour. And these
are not your basic burgers. Available
sauces … in quantities you specify … read like this:
“Thousand
Island with umeboshi and mole; Oyster Aioli, Charred Onion Jam,
Sunflower Tahini, Pancetta
Aioli, Garlic Sauce, Smoky Ketchup, Garlic Aioli, Hickory Smoked Jalapeño Sauce, Truffle Parm Fonduta, Blue Cheese
Fonduta.” Have it your way, indeed.
Spyce, a Boston startup with star
chefs
Daniel Boulud, Gavin Kaysen and Thomas Keller …
along with some deep pockets. The mostly
automated restaurant turns out meal-size $7.50 bowls with strong ethnic
inflections … filled in front of customers by seven induction wok-like drums (right).
Garnitures … which can run up the
bill
… are added by hand, cleverly decorating the
otherwise jumbled ingredients beneath (see
video here).
Prep is done (by humans) at an offsite commissary. In September they raised $12 million
… which is a lot of brown rice and
kale.
As
one-offs, none of these contraptions appears economically logical until scaled
up, and maybe not even then. But you can
see where things are heading … and rather rapidly. Even faster in China.
-- 4.
FOOD FROM THE STANS
Hidden in plain sight, immigrants from places like
Kazakhstan, Tajikstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan … breakaway republics from the
former Soviet Union … are now spreading their ethnically specific flavors among
us. Formerly lumped together as
“Turkish” food … which itself was lumped into kabab cuisine … they’re showing
us new ways with noodles, beans and eggplant; newold tricks with liver; how to
marry meat and fruit; and what miracles happen when you chop tarragon, spinach,
cilantro, dill, garlic chive and parsley together and toss them into a stew or
a frittata or stuff them into a dumpling.
Great
kebabs, too. (See also Iranian food in “Getting Sweet on
Sour”, below.) Some enterprising
restaurateur will figure out how to turn out individual orders of plov in a pastry crust and reinvent Big
Night (above) in the style of Stan.
--
5. COKE IN YOUR COKE? THE INEVITABLE
MAINSTREAMING OF MARIJUANA
Big Beer and Big Soda are giving thumbs-up to
pleasurably ingesting marijuana and hemp … and restaurants are joining in the
fun.
Constellation
Brands … owner of Model and Corona … placed a $4+ billion dollar bet that weed is
its future, investing in a Canadian marijuana company. Heineken-owned Lagunitas is selling Hi-Fi
Hops, a beer-flavored, boozeless sparkling water with a modest dose of THC …
the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana … or CBD (which mellows you without
the high). You get them in California
dispensaries for about eight bucks.
Molson Coors has ventured with another Canadian weed company for a
similar product. Cannabiniers, in San
Diego, aims to sell its own THC-infused beer in
grass-friendly states, along with its goosed-up coffees and teas. And CocaCola … whose name originally
referenced cocaine as an ingredient … is flirting with the notion.
As more jurisdictions in North
America legalize pot in one form or another, Big Beverage’s “legacy” products,
from generic beer to sugar-filled soda, face a shaky future … anticipating a massive consumer shift to hemp
and marijuana drinkables.
Restaurants are tinkering with this stuff, too. Some explanation first: THC, a compound in
marijuana leaves, gets you high. Cannabidiol or CBD, comes from hemp, gets you
mellow and maybe relieves pain … but won’t get you high. Right now, CBD is where it’s at.
Early adapters:
Millennials, of course. Vegans
and vegetarians. Wall Streeters. And the
wellness crowd that revels in mindfulness and meditation. The rest of us will follow.
Hotshot mixologists are busy concocting CBD
cocktails with or without booze … and chefs are assembling CBD tasting dinners
and even THC-laced dishes.
Spring, a restaurant in LA, has a
power lunch with three CBDsprinkled
courses. Organic eatery Green Goddess Cafe in Stowe, Vt has a chill-latte infused
with CBD oil … and CBD-enhanced tonic juices.
Plant-based Panacea in Henderson NV serves CBD-infused syrup for
pancakes. In Portland, vegan café Harlow augments its smoothies with 33 mg of CBD for $3. Juice Crafters
in LA sells CBD teas, a CBD elixir with turmeric and
herb ashwagandha. In New York, vegan chain By Chloe’s ice cream cake called
Mary Jane has a CBD frosting (see photo,
right) and green sprinkles.
LAX is becoming an “airpot” …
allowing passengers to carry weed through the building and onto airplanes. It’s all mainstreaming … which is better than
mainlining … although we haven’t heard from Olive Garden and Applebee’s just
yet.
--
6. WHO WILL WIN THE MEAL KIT WARS?
There’s no dispute that home
cooking is growing. Meanwhile, meal kit
companies can’t hang onto their customers … only 15% of Blue Apron’s
subscribers stick around for a year.
About 150 meal kit companies are
scratching to make a living while customers fret about long commitments,
getting a week’s worth of food in a box, mountains of packaging, and the expense. Now, we believe that customers go to
supermarkets more often than they order meal kits … and go to restaurants even
more often … so maybe the future belongs to food stores and restaurants.
That’s why Home Chef was sold to Kroger, Plated sold
to Albertsons, Gobble is partnering with Walmart … and why you’ll find troubled
Blue Apron’s meals in some Costco stores.
And why supermarkets are developing their own kits. The idea: Put kits where customers are … where
they can buy something today for today.
Here’s where impulse triumphs over commitment.
That logic applies to restaurants …
but the industry has barely dipped its toes
into the meal kit pool. Chic-Fil-A may be the leader … testing whole ready-to-cook
meals in several markets … crispy Dijon chicken,
chicken parmesan, chicken enchiladas, chicken flatbread and pan roasted chicken
with greens. Each kit feeds two people
and costs under $16 … while typical website meal kits cost closer to $20.
Of
course, it’s only a test, but everyone’s watching … especially casual dining
chains that are plagued by falling customer counts. If a fast food chain can assemble its own
meal kits, certainly casual restaurants could hawk their own at lunch for
people to have for that day’s dinner … or at dinner for customers to take home
for lunch tomorrow. With a la carte
pricing and packaging, restaurants could produce highly flexible meal kits of
the “always on-demand” generation.
Meanwhile Blue Apron’s muddying the waters by acting
like a restaurant … testing on-demand delivery of meals by GrubHub in an hour …
without a subscription.
--
7. GETTING SWEET ON SOUR
Last decade we developed a craving
for bitter … coffee, dark chocolate, broccolini, brussels sprouts … and now
we’re exploring mouth-puckering, saliva-inducing sour. You can thank the popularity
of Korean food, the rising influence of Filipino cooking and … just now
emerging … Persian’s love of sour.
Think of how kimchee has migrated from Korean
restaurants to “new” American menus … into tacos and quesadillas, pots roasts,
flavored mayonnaise, mac-and-cheese … and of course the kimchee ice cream
created for the Trump(ski)-Kim(chee) peace summit in Singapore this year.
Exploring trendy Filipino dishes, we note various
vinegars in braised dishes, in marinades and dipping sauce … even in their
version of ceviche; vinegar-based chicken adobo (not to be confused with
Mexican adobo) is a national signature.
Also tart calamansi gets trendy.
Iranians who fled the 1979 religious revolution
injected their Persian cooking into London, where it now is easy to find … and we’re seeing more Persian
restaurants opening in the US, with the greatest concentration in LA. Iranians are particularly partial to
sour: rhubarb, sour oranges, fresh and dried limes, tamarind and pomegranate fit
the flavor profile (example: At Sofreh, a hot new restaurant in Brooklyn, you get
griddled chicken with tart bayberries and dried sour plums).
Let us not forget kombucha … on tap
in supermarkets. And restaurants
fermenting corn, cabbage, tomatoes, garlic, strawberries, peaches and
blueberries … along with slow-rise sourdough pizza crusts.
--
8: “CELL-BASED SLAUGHTER-FREE CULTURED
CLEAN
LAB-GROWN
MOTHERLESS” MEAT
Last year we proclaimed that ‘plant-based’
foods were among the top trends of 2018.
That’s still true. But this year we’re shifting our view: Lab-grown
meats and related proteins look like profound long-range game changers. Regardless of what you call them … some names
are in our headline above … if it can please your favorite carnivore, meat
grown from animal cells will transform the way we think about “food.”
The idea, oversimplified, is that instead of killing
an animal for a steak, you pluck a cell or two, then manipulate and breed it on
an enormous scale. Success means we’d
eliminate ranches and slaughterhouses, slash greenhouses gasses since cows are
prolific poopers, turn back land to other uses or to Mother Nature, clean up
lakes and rivers and reduce energy consumption. (We’ll need lab-grown leather, too, for shoes
and for the seats in your Bentley.)
This could be a technological blind alley … but
Just, the outfit behind plant-based eggs and mayo, says it will have a ground
chicken product is an overseas KFC by year’s end. It’ll come from chicken cells grown in a
plant-based medium … and is only a test; but economically viable production
could be only a few years away. Mind
you, making whole chicken breasts, sirloin steaks and pork chops could take
five years, ten years, or beyond your lifetime.
Quandaries: If early users blend this stuff into fast
food hamburgers, what, if anything, will they call it? Will it be kosher? Will vegetarians eat it if it doesn’t come
for dead animals? Will consumers accept it … or will it become another
“frankenfood”? What will the government
say?
None of these
quandaries deters venture capitalists who are showering money on motherless
meat startups. Tyson Food and Cargill,
among the largest meat people, are heavily invested. There’s also Memphis Meats (with Tyson, Bill
Gates, Richard Branson as investors), Future
Meat Technologies
(from Israel, saying it’ll bring a product to market this year), Mosa Meat in Holland
(with Merck as investor), Clara Food (growing egg whites), Finless Food
(working on fish), Perfect Day (milk).
Ranchers
are running scared. After watching dairy
sales attacked by the runaway success of faux milk, they’re on a campaign to
prevent this lab-grown stuff from being called “meat” at all.
--
9. CHINESE AGAIN? THIS TIME ITS DIFFERENT
increasingly popping up in US small and large
towns. A bubbling cauldron of broth,
ferociously red with chilis and spices, sits on your table and you swish into
it a cornucopia of raw vegetables and proteins that you and your friends have
selected … cooking them to a desired doneness.
It’s communal, and pepperheads make dinner a competitively incendiary
sport.
Chinese chains are establishing beachheads in the US
but most are individual operators.
Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot has about two dozen in the US.
HaiDiLao … with a billion-dollar
IPO in Hong Kong … runs hot pot restaurants in Japan, South
Korea and Singapore with outlets near LA and a 12,000 square footer coming in
New York. At Niu Jiao Jian Hot Pot, in
Houston, chili oil is molded into a cutesy animal sculpture that dissolves when
hot broth is poured over it. Chubby
Cattle, with locations in Denver, Las Vegas and Dallas wants to expand its
“Hellishly Spicy Hot Pot” chain further east.
We hosted a hot pot soiree in Taiwan and each person
had a raw egg in a bowl … so if the pain got too severe you could dip your
morsels into the egg for an emergency coating.
•DRY POT COOKING: Here’s the next generation of hotpot cooking
but this time around the items you select of cooked “dry” by the chef, instead
of by you and your buddies, using lots of spices instead of broth. Flavors are more intense, especially with the
pool of fragrant chili oil in the bottom of the dish. Depending on the restaurant, you can experiment
with tripe, catfish, lamb, pig’s foot, frog, duck tongues, various gizzards,
even Spam … along with more familiar cuts of beef, chicken, lamb and shellfish. Spicy is the way to go. Find dry pots at Mala
Project, New
York, Sizzling Gourmet in Cupertino, Chef Pin in Richmond, Sichuan House in San
Antonio, Happy Dining in Irvine, and New York’s fascas Peppercorn Kitchen. Big Wang’s Cuisine (yes, that’s its name), in Dearwood, Md.
specializes in dry hot pots that will napalm your taste buds.
•BINGS MAY RING YOUR BELLS: Bings are getting loads of attention from
fast-casual diners, most of them urban Millennials.
What
are bings and why should you care?
They’re popular Chinese street food and come in two forms (that we know
of). Chun bings are northern
Chinese flatbreads made of wheat. Jian
bings are flakey, eggy crepe-like affairs usually with a cracker inserted for
crunch. They’re both sold in fast-cas
formats with traditional and inventive fillings … in many cases with flavors
that signal Chinese “authenticity.”
Players in this quietly emerging market:
Junzi
Kitchen (perpetual lines in New
Haven; three in New York before year’s end) is probably the most visible …
attracting offshore and local money.
Junzi, it appears, is the only startup using house-made chun bing … a
burrito-style wrapper aimed at lunch, dinner and snacking crowds. (Others, see below, use a large eggy jian
bing crepe that’s folded into a puffy square and often merchandised for
breakfast). Junzi was launched by a bunch of super-smart Yale graduate students
… who figured that highly fragmented Chinese mom-and-pop restaurant businesses
in the US were ripe for chain domination via upgrading, contemporary styling,
better service systems and superior customer relations management.
Junzi kitchen has, in essence, just two main
courses: a variety of chun bings; and
bowls built around two types of noodles, the latter outselling bings … a
surprise since the bings are cheaper and more portable. Their bings are rolled around highly fillings
like fragrant beef shin with cucumbers
and bean sprouts, or chicken thigh, kale, sweet shallots and roasted sesame
dressing. Then, Chipotle-style, you
customize with authentic add-ons like pickled daikon, bean threads, chive ash
and shrimp salt. The flavors have not
been dumbed down.
Companies
selling jian bing (which, by the way, tend to be caloric and a bit greasy)
include:
Mr. Bing (see video) also
in New York, with a couple of popups and a busy food hall stand. Its flavor-bomb jian bings are
large crepes of mung bean and flour
coated with egg, sesame seeds, scallions, hoisin sauce, crispy chili paste,
cilantro, and crunchy wontons … made in front of customers.
Their bings are folded around such
fillings as duck, barbecued pork or drunken
chicken.
Portland, Ore, has
a two-cart outfit called Bing Mi with low-priced egg-filled
crepes … while Brothers
Wing & Bings fills theirs with
teriyaki chicken and Mongolian beef.
There’s a Bing Bing shop
in St. Louis. Pleasant Lady Jianbing Trading Stall, in London’s Soho, offers cumin
lamb, miso chicken and Iberico char siu pork as fillings … and a second is in
the works. A
golden arches in China is selling bogus bings made of pancake batter … called
Mc-Jianbing … with fillings like bacon, ham and hash browns. Of course, they would. No sign (yet) of a Badda Bing
company.
• TAIWAN IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Excitingly
reinterpreted Taiwanese food is lighting up New York and LA … even parts of
Texas … and therefore pretty soon everywhere else. You’re probably familiar with bubble tea,
steamed buns with barbecued pork, and molten soup dumplings. Now make way for high-texture oyster omelets
slicked with tangy tomato sauce … stinky tofu (think durian-scented gorgonzola)
… three-cup drunken chicken … beef
noodles with anise … flies’ head (pork shoulder, garlic chives, birdseye chili
dotted with fermented black beans).
-- 10. GET YOUR KATSU ON
Global hysteria
gripped Instagrammers earlier this year … swooning over a $180 Tokyo-inspired sandwich
of breaded and fried wagyu beef … served with gushing publicity in London,
Houston, Sydney and New York.
They missed the real
trend: The spreading fame of a pork cutlet, crunchy-panko breaded, deep
fried and served between soft crustless bread, usually with cabbage slaw and a
zingy sauce. It is called the Katsu sando.
Katsu is Japanese shorthand for cutlet,
and sando is a
cutesy-poo term for sandwich. A simple snack
sold at zillions of convenience stores in Tokyo … now touching upscale
sensibilities in the US. The sando is a
symphony in texture … soft and gummy bread, crunchy-juicy meat, saucily lubricated.
Find a traditional
one at Adana in Seattle; slightly more toney is the Duroc pork rendition at
Stonehill Matcha in San Francisco. Sando Bar in Sydney tenderizes his pork in koji (another cheffy trendlet)
then fries it twice. A really elaborate
variation comes from Abri in Paris … where the chef adds a cheese slice, kewpie
mayo, mustard and a thin omelet to the standard ingredients … but only on
Saturdays from noon to three p.m. Hi
Collar in New York sells only ten a day starting at noon.
Katsu sando may
remind you of a schnitzel sandwich, or a Mexican Milanese, or even a fried
chicken sandwich. That’s correct. By today’s loosey-goosy standards, the
filling can be anything fried. At
Momokoni in Atlanta, that means fried shrimp or chicken or steak … or wagyu for
$58. Pagu’s chicken katsu in Cambridge
is flavored with alioli and a blitz of shallots, ginger and soy.
Katana Kitte, New
York, makes theirs with a slab of mortadella.
Someone soon will use Spam.
--
11. GETTING GIDDY AND GAUDY WITH DESIGN
Tired of white box dining rooms, or woody
restaurants with overpowering gloom or overdone bare brick and phony Edison
bulbs? There was a happy look this
summer in trendy clothing shops’ windows … with clashing patterns on patterns
on patterns … and it is (admittedly slowly) creeping into restaurant design
around the world. The idea is to be
frankly decorative and joyful since there’s more than enough seriousness in the
world.
One designer we know is fixing a deafening restaurant
with sound absorbing panels … covered in wild fabric, signaling to guests that
the owner has been listening, throughout the clamor, to their complaints.
Of course, this being fashion, the entire notion
could disappear with the next issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
-- 12:
INVASION! Non-food business
siphoning off restaurant customers
How does a restaurant compete with
a savings bank that serves coffee with lounge seating and high-speed wifi … for free! Restaurants can’t retaliate by starting
banks, so the most basic answer is … they can’t compete. But that’s happening in 33 (and growing)
Capital One bank locations … where
they’re installing cafes to reverse declining traffic in too-large bank
spaces. Here’s another: Hoping … like banks … to offset declining
ticket sales, next-wave theaters like iPic, Alamo Drafthouse and Cinepolis are
selling real food (as opposed to snacky stuff) delivered to luxury seats and
tables by real waiters … and sometimes adding upscale sitdown restaurants. Booze, too.
At iPic’s Tuck restaurant in Houston you dine on brioche-crusted crab
cakes and frisee-citrus salad with yuzu vinaigrette, or a turkey burger with
barrel-aged goat cheese, harissa and green goddess dressing. Note Alamo’s last name: “drafthouse” … these
are restaurants with theaters attached.
Would restaurants slither into the movie business? Improbable.
Your friendly phone company, AT&T, is piloting a
3,000 sq. ft. space in Seattle housing a café, a cellphone store and comfy
lounge seating. Put this into
perspective: 3,000 sq. ft. is more than a typical TGIFriday’s … so ATT’s
actually creating a nofee walk-in co-working venture. Do restaurants … and Starbucks “third place”
… compete by starting their own phone companies?
There’s more: A 90,000 sq.ft. Restoration Hardware with
a barista on the second floor and a full-service restaurant/wine bar on the
roof … replaced the muchadored restaurant Pastis in New York. Much to the displeasure of nearby
restaurants, RH says that restaurants in four other stores average $4-$6
million annually. For good measure, they’re
opening an RH boutique hotel just down the street. Crate & Barrel is planning its own
version of store-plus restaurant with a 100-seater outside Chicago.
There’s a Nordic face in H&M’s
new upscale European chain called Arket.
And a new H&M instore café in Stockholm, called It’s Pleat, serves
an “All Good Caesar” with black kale, cauliflower, chickpeas, kamut,
wheatberries and duqqa spices.
A new 28,000 sq.ft.
internationally trendy Como Corso lifetime store has a café with tuna carpaccio
and artichokes, and ribeye with fava bean purée and
spigarello
… just around the corner in New York from Restoration Hardware.
On the other hand, it
appears that Barnes & Noble is throwing in its dish towel on full-service restaurants
... there were five … after chairman Len Riggio said “the bottom line is awful.
