The year 2019 may well be remembered in dining circles as one during which a major change took place on both sides of the table. Actually, the table virtually disappeared. Restaurant meals increasingly are being brought to the diner – the end user – via a delivery system that is neither owned nor controlled by the entity that prepared the food. Call it “Uber to table.” Companies led by Uber Eats, DoorDash Inc. and GrubHub Inc. have been contracted by restaurants from fine dining to burger places to coffee shops. Third-party delivery took hold in 2019.
Restaurateurs and chefs are trying to come to grips with it. Some are retooling menus to maximize the items that travel well. Others are anticipating more seismic changes. There are already cooking centers taking the place of restaurants where orders are placed by mobile apps and food is prepared at least in part by robotics. Orders are packaged for third-party delivery drivers queued up at a kind of reverse drive-thru. One such operation already existed in Boston. It was known as Spyce and was described as “the brainchild of four hungry MIT grads, who teamed up with a Michelin-starred chef. The food is all prepared in a robotic kitchen.” Now if this sounds like a dystopian movie, it is one we have all seen and we know how it turns out. The human spirit always prevails.
There already appears to be a backlash to this bleak, tasteless future. We need to be with people. Near the end of the year, well-known chef and restaurateur Matt Jennings, writing in a Food and Wine magazine blog, sounded the alarm. Jennings, now a Vermont-based consultant, writes, “All the [online] platforms in the world will not solve our ability to truly relate or communicate with one another.” He reminds us that when we choose to go to a neighborhood restaurant, we are giving those on the other side of the table the opportunity to, as he puts it, “craft an experience that not only resonates with us but that brings us back again and again because we feel taken care of, heard and even loved.”
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RAISING GLASSES: Restaurateur Bob Burke leads a toast during a celebration at his Pot au Feu restaurant in Providence. / COURTESY JULIE TREMAINE[/caption]
Someone who first comes to mind when conviviality is mentioned is Bob Burke at Pot au Feu. His response to “Uber to table”?
“Laying on our deathbeds, trying to recall the sweetest moments of our lives, we will not recall the ring of the bell and the delivery guy. Instead we will recall the dinner dates, the holiday feasts, the family cookouts, the wedding meals, the birthday cakes, the midnight snacks, the toasts, the roasts, the random conversations at a bar or a counter in a diner, the clink of glasses and looking across the table to find that life is best when eating is communal … . Uber is the sound of one glass clinking, DoorDash the sound of one voice talking and GrubHub is not a name, just a description. Alienation is the enemy of the human spirit. Self-alienation is the enemy of self.
“The average American will eat 87,600 meals in their life. Why waste even one?
“That is not to say that delivery can’t be communal, but chances are you are ordering in and staring at a screen trying to connect to the kind of real social experience that social media only imitates. Solitary confinement even with good food is still solitary.”
By the way, Spyce in Boston closed in November with plans to reopen “in the coming months,” according to its Instagram account.
Bruce Newbury’s “Dining Out” radio talk show is heard Saturdays at 11 a.m. on 1540 AM WADK, on radio throughout New England, through various mobile applications and his podcast. Email Bruce at Bruce@brucenewbury.com.
