And yet, as surprising and delightful as dining can be, it’s not exactly a tactic baked into most restaurant programming. I get it, a restaurant is a busy place. This was all on my mind a few Saturdays ago when I took my mother to one of our favorite restaurants for her 82nd birthday.

Some backstory…the restaurant occupies the ground floor of a country inn located in one of Vermont’s most quintessentially Vermont-y towns. Mom and I hadn’t been back to the place since my father died three years ago. Perhaps we’d been avoiding the restaurant — how could it compare without Dad there, the guy who gabbed with every waiter and waitress and bartender, all of whom knew him by name? Or maybe Mom and I had been avoiding it because in our absence the restaurant had changed ownership. Whatever the case, my fears were unwarranted. Familiar sights assuaged us as soon as we arrived, from the clubby yet low-key atmosphere in the wood-paneled tavern to Mom’s favorite turkey croquettes still gracing the menu.

What I wasn’t expecting—as we followed the hostess toward a two-top by the left of the fireplace—was for another member of the relatively new staff to stop us and hand me an envelope.

“I hear it’s someone’s birthday,” the woman said, smiling as she pressed the envelope into my hand. Fear, oddly enough, struck me again, or at the very least a feeling of deflation. I’d driven up to Vermont from Manhattan that morning, a five-hour slog in bad weather, dropped my wife and two sons off at my in-laws along the way, all so that  I—Mom’s only child—could treat her to a birthday dinner. Meaning the last thing I wanted was for some benevolent family friend to steal my thunder by picking up the check.

This, it turned out, was yet another unwarranted fear. While Mom’s friend had supplied us with a generous gift certificate, the amount would cover a nice bottle of wine rather than the whole meal. I could still slap down my credit card with great magnanimity at the end of the night and thus be the recipient of all those endorphins gift-giving can trigger.

I think it was the element of surprise—of being handed that envelope out of the blue—that shifted the course of our evening, which until that point we’d tacitly agreed would follow the same trajectory it always did when we dined there.

But here’s another thing I wasn’t expecting: the freebie caused me to spend more money than I’d anticipated. Mom and I ordered several appetizers so that we could sample this and that, plate-sharing being a rarity for us, as well as a round of cocktails before we selected a wine, and when dessert was suggested we uncharacteristically opted for that, too. Perhaps subconsciously I’d tallied how much the gift certificate had saved me, and so decided to splurge on other menu items…but it didn’t feel like that was the case. Rather, I think it was the element of surprise—of being handed that envelope out of the blue—that shifted the course of our evening, which until that point we’d tacitly agreed would follow the same trajectory it always did when we dined there (in, I suppose, a bid to relive the past; one in which my father was still around).

In short, I’d been surprised and delighted, and this had a ripple effect through our entire meal.

The Science of Surprise

In her book, "Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected,” co-author Tania Luna argues that surprise brings vitality to our lives — quite literally, with studies showing that the unexpected can intensify our emotions by as much as 400 percent. Not only can a good surprise trigger dopamine, but it can also recalibrate whatever situation we find ourselves in, causing us to shift perspective and engage deeper with the slightly new experience at hand. Why else would we all love the perfectly timed plot twist? Luna breaks her theory down into four phases:

1. Freeze—a surprise can literally cause humans to freeze for 1/25th of a second.

2. Find—in the aftermath of being so caught off guard, our curiosity is stoked as we need to make sense of what just happened.

3. Shift—based on these findings, our perspective will often shift about a person, place, or event.

4. Share—this new perspective, or deepening of our understanding of something, will often cause us to share these findings with others.

“It’s kind of like a cognitive statistics game,” Luna told WNYC. “The more you expect it, the less you’re surprised. The less you expect something, the more you’re surprised.”

In the case of my mother’s birthday meal, we were surprised by the stranger handing us the envelope, which made us suddenly curious as to what else might be on the menu, thus shifting our conversation from the nostalgia and melancholia of missing my father to this seemingly new culinary experience we’d both decided to opt in for, and share…well, what am I doing right now? (BTW, the mushroom cheddar tart banged — do order it).

A Princeton Neuroscience Institute study found similar evidence to that of Luna. Inspired by the unhinged celebrations of soccer fans—whose sport is marked by its sparse, and thus unpredictable, scoring—researchers scanned the brain activity of participants while they watched the final five minutes of nine (in the study’s case) NCAA basketball games.

“When surprises were positive for each subject’s preferred team, areas associated with rewards processing such as ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens were activated. This shows that surprise activated regions associated with a positive affective feeling, which also show activation for numerous other pleasurable stimuli like music and food. Altogether, these findings indicate that the reward and arousal brain systems work in concert when a large change in the expectations about the environment happens.”

Or, as other studies have found: unpredictability increases anticipation, and anticipation triggers dopamine.

Really, is there anything that more accurately telegraphs our future than a menu?

Surprising Hospitality

Restaurants can be notorious for how they engineer diners to spend more money—from elaborate menu descriptions to the absence of dollar signs next to these descriptions to the frivolous extras in the form of breath mints and other needless items one encounters at, say, a Starbucks cash register. But one thing restaurants don’t often do is surprise us with the unexpected. Sure, they delight us, and the best ones can surprise us with their creative dishes or their takes on staple items, but unless we’re talking omakase, we more or less know what we’re getting once we’ve sat down, and certainly once we’ve ordered. Really, is there anything that more accurately telegraphs our future than a menu? It’s like a theater program, a choose your own adventure program perhaps, but once you’ve made your selections you’re essentially locked in, meaning the best a restaurant can do is meet your expectations.

Where’s the room for spontaneity? For switching up the routine with the unexpected? For presenting something a diner doesn’t have the time or foreknowledge to anticipate? The human brain—or most people’s —craves surprises, and this should be no different when it comes to dining. In the case of my recent meal with my mother, it was her friend who surprised us, triggering a new way in which we engaged with an old standby. But the same tactic can be employed by restaurants themselves, especially when it comes to their most loyal customers. Mix up the menu and recalibrate a party’s night out by giving them something extra and unexpected, and you’ll see how much deeper those diners engage.

James Jung
VP, Content
Blackbird Labs, Inc.

TikTok has another name for Ms. Paltrow and the eating habits she espouses: “Almond Mom.” In case the platform’s scary good algorithm hasn’t served any such videos in your feed, an Almond Mom is the type of mother who still adheres to the restrictive dieting culture of the 1990s. You know, back when many women let their food consumption—or lack thereof—be determined by the self-denying principle of “nothing tasted as good as skinny felt.” If that sounds dated it’s because it is. And yet Ms. Paltrow is not alone in reviving such trends. In terms of celebrity Almond Moms, she replaces self-proclaimed #worstmomever, Yolanda Hadid, who earned the title while telling daughter Gigi to solve weakness and fatigue by having a couple of almonds and “[chewing] them really well.”

Almond Moms are not limited to Oscar winners and Real Housewives alums. They’re…everywhere. And not only are they denying themselves everything from cake to the more benign complimentary chips or bread to “save” for the entree, they’re also preaching the gospel to their children. Or, more specifically, to their daughters, all in a bid to convert these kids to their joyless food religion.

This being the era of stitched videos and story time and all other manners of memes, Almond Daughters have of course taken a stand, imitating their mothers on TikTok. In so doing, they have digitally joined forces to exhume these food and dining rules from their childhood. Still, they show some empathy, too. They know that their Almond Moms aren’t foisting these standards upon them out of malice but rather out of habit. Almond Moms came of age during an era that encouraged women to be hungry and resist, to go to restaurants in search of salad, low-fat options, something without protein, carbs, or whatever culture decided women should or should not eat that year.

What these parodying TikToks haven’t done, however, is connect the Almond Mom with the fraught history women have long faced regarding their access to restaurants — a history in which restriction was more literal and physical. It’s an interesting and at times shocking story about female independence within the food world, and this broader context deepens the meaning—and irony—of the Almond Mom.

And there’s something beautiful lurking in this Almond Daughter revolution. Because just as Almond Mom tried to convert Almond Daughter into alienation from her own hunger, there could be a near future where Almond Daughter converts Almond Mom into nourishment and satisfaction and joy.

Ice Cream Saloons and Bar Fights

Early restaurants barred entry to a single woman and only allowed groups of women to dine during non-prime lunch hours. Journalist Kimberly Wilmot Voss explains that “men only had a limited time to eat lunch and women would [supposedly] monopolize tables as they gossiped and ate slowly.”  ‘Women's restaurants’ appeared as places for women to lunch after shopping — “Ice Cream Saloons,” “Tea Rooms,” establishments offering food “for women.” Men ate and drank for sustenance and fun—steaks and alcohol—while women ate light fare and decadent desserts — oysters and ice cream, small sandwiches and candies. Historian Paul Freedman points out the long-standing notion “that women combine abstemiousness with indulgence,” that women don’t eat to fulfill hunger, but oscillate between restriction and delicacy. American media still drips this oscillation, from hyper-disciplined “What I eat in a Day” videos, to sporadic, junk food, manic-pixie-dream-woman diets like the (still thin) Gilmore Girls.

Prohibition and WWI shook up restaurant gender segregation, but it wasn’t fully challenged until the 1960s and ‘70s, when going to a restaurant as a woman was a form of protest in and of itself. By escaping their homes—places where women were the chefs yet never bore such a title—women made restaurants almost feminist adjacent spaces. Restaurants provided a break, a haven outside of domesticity leading up to and throughout the mass discontent captured by The Feminine Mystique.

The last of the gendered restaurants yielded in 1970, responding to demonstrations at and lawsuits against men-only restaurants organized by the National Organization of Women (NOW) and others. Following a lawsuit, a Kentucky law that “[forbade] women from drinking… at the bar” was repealed, while a New York ale house admitted “women for the first time in… 116-year[s].” The latter was no easy feet, with the VP of NOW physically fighting the bartender for her right to drink at said ale house and having a beer poured over her head by an angry man — baby steps, right? The oft-used analogy of “taking a seat at the table,” has literal meaning within restaurant history. Women fought for admission, a table during lunch hours, a stool at the bar. But what’s interesting is that Paltrow and other Almond Moms fought in their own way too. They fought to fit into a restrictive definition of beauty in pursuit of society’s favor, and while the past few years marks a cultural shift away from pervasive diet culture, it is difficult for the Almond Mom to join, because control through restriction may be all she’s ever known.

Take Your Mama Out Tonight

Almond Moms (from celebrity to suburban) grasp for control — control over what one eats, control over how one looks, control over how one is treated based on how one looks, all of which is part and parcel of this subversive power struggle where women deny themselves satiation in pursuit of their own humanization. Herein lies the essential paradox: Almond Mom would rather eat at home for maximum control over ingredients, though Almond Mom would have more fun and feel more alive (!) meeting friends for tapas at Ernesto’s. The luxury of a restaurant experience is letting go of control instead of reaching into one's own pantry and/or cooking in one's own kitchen. The luxury of letting someone else determine the plate, trusting that they pour love, care, and themselves into it, just as the chefs who were only ever called mother or wife did for their families perpetually. And at this crux, we find the true experiential joy of women dining in restaurants within the broader historical context. Women were always caretakers, controlling the basic human needs of family models. By going to a restaurant, they can let go while someone else controls nourishment for them.

So yes, Almond Moms deserve empathy. Many Almond Daughters have declared that “they did the best with the tools they had.” But Almond Moms also deserve the joy in letting go, in not counting almonds, or not doing paleo, in looking at a menu and instinctually questioning what they want. Dining out as a woman who once couldn’t is revolutionarily luxurious (and this luxury compounds the more we consider intersectionality and other complex, historical restaurant rules — though perhaps that’s the topic of another post). As women, we’re no longer relegated to Ice Cream Saloons after a day of shopping. We can dine during prime hours. We can drink at the bar (even in Kentucky!). We can linger as long as we want, gossip to our heart's content. Order oysters, and ice cream, and salad, *and *steaks, lamb chops, pasta with thick, creamy sauce…

And so, if you consider the context, if you consider all that’s at stake, then there’s something beautiful lurking in this Almond Daughter revolution. Something more than just satirical TikToks and the shock over Ms. Paltrow’s archaic and austere eating regimen. Because just as Almond Mom tried to convert Almond Daughter into alienation from her own hunger, there could be a near future where Almond Daughter converts Almond Mom into nourishment and satisfaction and joy. Sounds pretty liberating, right? So if you’re an Almond Daughter, take your Mother out to dinner. And if you’re an Almond Mother, accept your daughter’s invitation, and order the first thing on the menu you really, truly feel like you want.

Hailey Colborn
Community ManagerBlackbird Labs, Inc.

Prince Michael Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolensky-Romanoff was about 50 years old when he opened a groundbreaking new restaurant in Beverly Hills in December 1939.

Most of Hollywood suspected that “Prince Mike” Romanoff (aka Harry Gerguson) was not the exiled Russian nobleman he’d long claimed to be, but in a town in which make-believe was the reigning mode, that pesky fact hardly mattered. Romanoff’s well-honed shtick, from his plummy Oxford accent to his weirdly plausible tales of various royal “cousins,” just made him all the more fun to be around. Sure, the dozens of restaurateurs, hotel owners, tailors, and art dealers he’d scammed with bad checks over the years might not agree. But to the movie stars who knew and liked him—many of whom had also reinvented themselves from humble roots—Romanoff was the life of the party, not to mention a surprisingly loyal friend.

A lot of people did not expect Romanoff’s to last long. In fact, it won over the crowds much as its irrepressible owner always had, and sat atop LA’s fickle restaurant scene for two decades. Let’s look at the six factors that made it tick.

A Charismatic (and on-site) Owner

The primary factor was, well, Mike Romanoff, who once declared that a restaurant owner’s personality was its most important element. Obviously, the influence of that personality wanes if that owner is, say, off hosting TV shows and opening branches in Dubai and Las Vegas. Romanoff, by contrast, spent every day in his own dining rooms, running them in imperious and eccentric fashion. He took meals at one of his own tables with his two bulldogs, Socrates and Confucius, eating off plates on either side of him. Unlike other Hollywood restaurateurs, he never kissed up to anyone simply because they were rich or famous; he once turned away the mighty Howard Hughes for showing up without a necktie. Any celebrity who was friends with Romanoff could readily get a table, but otherwise there were no guarantees. Romanoff was discriminating—you might even say he was a snob. But the clique-y, intimate vibe he maintained was also at least somewhat inspired by the former Brooklynite’s deep familiarity with prohibition-era New York City speakeasies.

Serious Star Power 

The food at Romanoff’s was nothing special during its first few months in business; when it opened, there were just two menu items. What caused the place to really take off was its insane concentration of star wattage. His friends Cary Grant, Charlie Chaplin, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and mega-producer Daryl Zanuck were among the original investors—and thus had additional reason to go spend money there. Romanoff's "royal" notoriety had earned him small movie roles; that and the stage presence he exuded in real life helps explain his abundance of famous friends. On the rare occasions when Romanoff relaxed his rule against taking photographs, the results were staggering. A 1945 spread in Life magazine shows a crazy number of A-listers having lunch there, and several of the most iconic candid images of Old Hollywood emerged from private events at Romanoff’s. Among them are this one of Sophia Loren giving rival sex bomb Jayne Mansfield the side-eye and Slim Aarons’ famous “Four Kings of Hollywood” photo of Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, and Van Heflin at a white-tie New Year’s Eve party. The publicity value of this A-list crowd was priceless.

A Brutally Hierarchical Seating System

Between its two dining rooms and sun-dappled patio, the original Romanoff’s on North Rodeo Drive seated 150 people. For Hollywood bigwigs, though, the only seats that mattered were the five booths in the front room, which were in plain view of everyone. Movie stars would linger for hours at the bar in hopes of securing one, while the pleasant back room was considered Siberia. Whether this cruel imbalance was a feature or a bug of Romanoff’s success is hard to say. Romanoff himself found the drama it caused annoying, and when he reopened at a new location in 1951 he scrapped the setup. The main room of the second Romanoff’s, though larger, actually fit fewer people, because it consisted entirely of banquettes, all of which had good sight lines. “There is no use having tables people don’t want to sit at,” Romanoff explained. He made it impossible for diners to avoid the spotlight, and he seated the most famous ones in a different area each time they came in, so that no one part of the room became more desirable than any other.

A Top-Flight Menu 

The food at Romanoff’s quickly hit its stride, thanks to French chef François Pallares, whose enduring contribution to gastronomic history is chicken Romanoff (cold boiled chicken breast, diced and simmered in sherry, with cream sauce and sprinkled with dark cherries). Another popular Pallares invention was the Omelette Sylvia, made with chicken hash and smothered in cream. Though Romanoff himself disdained fresh greens and told dieting movie stars to go elsewhere, his kitchen turned out an excellent Green Goddess salad. Hollywood enjoyed dessert much more in those days; Gregory Peck had a weakness for Romanoff’s banana shortcake, and the restaurant’s individual-sized chocolate soufflés (a novelty at the time) were a huge crowd-pleaser. Romanoff’s also maintained its “royal” image by staying extravagantly well supplied with premium caviar and ice-cold Dom Perignon. There was no better place to court a potential client or celebrate a two-picture deal.

Airtight Books

Even if the ex-charlatan Mike Romanoff had “disintegrated into an honest businessman,” as one magazine quipped, tracking incoming and outgoing cash had never been his strong suit. The unsung hero of his lucrative restaurant business was one Gloria Lister, who came on as bookkeeper in 1945. When she resigned in 1947 to take a secretarial job in Palm Beach, Romanoff flew to Florida to win her back, and not just for business reasons. One year later, Gloria became his wife. When the new Romanoff’s opened on South Rodeo Drive—this time in a building that it owned, eliminating previous landlord problems—she began capably managing the day-to-day operations of the larger enterprise, which included a ballroom and several private dining rooms. Romanoff’s developed its share of problems by the late fifties, but the back-of-house was not one of them.

Only in L.A.

The Romanoff’s magic worked especially well in Los Angeles, and maybe only there. Outposts in San Francisco and Palm Springs were short-lived. Whenever Romanoff temporarily lost sight of which town he was in, he paid the price. At the request of two powerful producer friends, he agreed to put Republican literature on his dining tables—during a time when Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was harassing some of Hollywood’s brightest talents for alleged Communist sympathies. It was a foolish decision, and one that lost him the goodwill of many regulars.

Romanoff had certainly earned the right to take time off by the late fifties, as he approached age 70, and he did just that, traveling the world as part of his pal Frank Sinatra’s entourage. But his long absences from the restaurant—along with changing fashions and the fadeout of Old Hollywood—hastened its decline. He closed for good in 1962. The story of his life has been optioned more than once over the years, but has never been told on screen.

Darrell Hartman is the author of Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and The Making of Modern Media (Viking, 2023). His writing on history and other subjects has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, The Daily Beast, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Follow Darrell on Twitter and Instagram.

Why do we yearn for the toughest tables in town? Well, exclusivity has always had its allure — just ask Charlie Chaplin — and in today’s post pandemic world, chic and vibe-y restaurants are akin to the new velvet roped clubs, or even the new catwalks. There’s also the perceived accessibility factor. Not only is going out for dinner a form of entertainment that one can do seven days a week should one so choose, but restaurant reservations are ostensibly democratic (there’s no snobby doorman superficially sizing you up before mercilessly shunning you); all one must do is buckle down and snag that resy before someone else with a smartphone does. And, speaking of smartphones, TikTok and Instagram now allow us to brag about our restaurant access to people far beyond our friend group, and in real time no less.

Diners at Dhamaka, for example, are not simply excited to eat the fiery Bengali food and be in the vibrant dining room but to be “part of this new conversation that we’re having in the city,” he says. When you dine at an Unapologetic Foods restaurant, you’re entering the uncharted territory of Indian cuisine. You’re along for the ride.

All this ratchets up demand like never before, thus rendering said hot spots and others of their zeitgeist-y ilk, well, hotter and hotter. But how does a new restaurant court such demand? Is it all just left up to fate or are there a set of rules in place beyond the hype-building trinity of good press, social media trending, and excellent word of mouth?

A bit of both, it turns out. Artists argue that the muse comes to the “prepared mind” — that is, the artist who works patiently everyday, thus putting the optimum conditions in place should inspiration — that fickle thing — choose to strike. The same could be said for restaurants and the restaurateurs behind them. There is no exact formula to guarantee an operator catch lightening in a bottle, but by checking as many of the five boxes below as possible, a spot might well set itself up for success, and maybe even attain that elusive hotness we all want a piece of.

1. Have a strong take

Successful restauranteurs don’t waffle over what they want their place to feel like. They possess strong takes and always sweat the details. Balthazar is a French bistro par excellence, right in the middle of Soho — which is why it’s been in the spotlight for some 25 years. Carbone’s decade plus run? Sure, the celebs help (more on that later), but it’s the place’s definitive take on the elevated red sauce joint — from the rigatoni to the ambiance — that’s made it a destination for over a decade.

Still, takes can go deeper than cuisine and decor. As Roni Mazumdar, the CEO of Unapologetic Foods — whose New York restaurants Dhamaka, Semma, and Masalawala & Sons are hyper-popular — puts it: eating at his restaurants has “become sort of a social currency, where being there means something.” Diners at Dhamaka, for example, are not simply excited to eat the fiery Bengali food and be in the vibrant dining room but to be “part of this new conversation that we’re having in the city,” he says. When you dine at an Unapologetic Foods restaurant, you’re entering the uncharted territory of Indian cuisine; you’re along for the ride.

2. Belong to an already hot restaurant group

Sure, this is a chicken-egg thing, but we can’t ignore how helpful it is for a new restaurant to be part of an existing restaurant group — see Torrisi or virtually anything Keith McNally touches. When the new restaurant is the sister restaurant of an already successful spot, the hype builds itself. Take Saffy’s, the Middle Eastern restaurant that Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis opened this past summer in Los Angeles. Menashe and Gergis already had two enduring hot spots under their belt with Bestia and Bavel. Their names carry enough weight in the city that they didn’t have to hit diners over the head with pre-opening buzz. Instead, they launched Saffy’s to peoples’ surprise, and it swiftly became one of the toughest reservations in town. Mazumdar and his team take the same approach. When they open a new restaurant, they don’t even host friends & family (the commonly practiced preview dinner, wherein friends of the restaurant come to eat for free in the days leading up to the opening). “We just open one fine day, so there’s a certain curiosity,” he says.

“Not every restaurant has that luxury,” says Tessa Naso, a communications and marketing consultant who works with Bavel, Bestia, and Saffy’s, in addition to other bona fide hot spots like Horses. Another one of her clients is De La Nonna, a popular pizzeria in the Arts District, run by chef Patrick Costa and Jose Cordon. Before they opened their brick-and-mortar, the duo ran De La Nonna as a pop-up to build interest among Angelenos over time. “For people who are new in the city and trying to make a name for themselves, it’s really important to have a longer-term strategy,” she says.

3. Serve the celebs (even the bad ones)!

As stated, press is a surefire way to court hype, and celebs guarantee ink. And while Page Six might not be as relevant as it once was, there’s still no denying the fact that we want to eat where the stars eat — the world’s a stage and all that. Even, for that matter, where the bad celebs eat. As reality TV casting directors say, always cast the most irritating person for your show. Consider how much press McNally garnered by banning James Corbin from Balthazar last fall.

Positives help, too, especially from credible sources. Like when we see Malala advocating for the malai rigatoni at Pijja Palace, we know that the hype is real. Or at least, we’re even hungrier to try it for ourselves. These days, it’s important to pay attention to the gamut of tastemakers beyond household names. From TikTokers with massive followings to someone like, say, Alison Roman, influence does a lot to keep diners lusting after your reservation book. Followers gonna follow.

4. Don’t forget the vibe

Vibes are like porn: you know them when you see them. Or, in the case of restaurants, feel them. A genuine hot spot has a certain vitality to it. It’s packed, yes, but it also feels good to be there. Naso remembers the first time she sat down with Liz Johnson and Will Aghajanian, the chef-owners of Horses, in the Sunset Boulevard restaurant that would soon become the hottest of LA hot spots. “They were talking about the history of the space and the art they were going to put on the walls and the types of people that they wanted to dine at the restaurant,” she says. “I was like, ‘this is going to be a hit.’ There’s a spark, there’s an energy in the space, and there’s a point of view and a vision that you can’t replicate.”

Mazumdar agrees. “It starts with a core belief about what you are putting out there and your conviction towards that,” he says. “A dish can attract you, but it doesn’t always resonate on a deeper, more primal level.”

5. Be consistent but also evolve

Here’s where restaurants — and hospitality institutions in general — have it the hardest. Whereas a novel, a film, or a painting might strike gold, they’re all finished products. A restaurant, in contrast, is akin to a living thing, one that must deliver night after night, year after year, and — if it’s lucky — decade upon decade. The ultimate goal of any restaurant operator is to have staying power. For a hot spot, the stakes of achieving it are even higher: it’s worse to fall from grace than remain somewhere in the middle of the road. So what’s the recipe for maintaining desirability? It’s consistency, above all, but also being able to mature alongside culture. An elite restaurant treats its regulars well, doesn’t shy away from evolving with the times, and, most crucially, stays great.

Mazumdar doesn’t even think of his restaurants as hot spots. “I just think they’re brands that people believe in,” he says. “The most important factor of having a philosophy is not wavering from it.”

The baseline for a dynamite restaurant is that it serves food that tastes good. But for us diners to experience an emotional connection with a restaurant, we have to understand what that restaurant stands for. Whether that’s using food as a vehicle for much richer conversations, as Unapologetic Foods aims to do, or creating a place that’s sexy, delicious, and feels intrinsic to the city’s history and culture, such as Horses, is up to the restaurateur. “There are so few places where you walk in, and you’re like, ‘Wow, this is hitting on all cylinders,’’ Naso says. “It’s almost unexplainable, but you know when you’re experiencing it.”

Thanks for reading! And remember to get in touch with us on Twitter.

https://www.thesupersonic.blackbird.xyz/p/5-factors-that-determine-a-spot?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share

Emily Wilson is a Los Angeles-based writer with bylines in Bon Appétit, Eater, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Resy, and more. Find her on Instagram and Twitter at @emilyjwils.

There’s a trope in rom-coms where the two leads bond over people watching. Maybe they’re at a bar, scanning the room and making comments on how long various couples have been together. Maybe they’re sitting on a park bench, making up stories about the people who pass. This game is adorable and twee when it happens on screen—oh how sweet, the elderly couple holding hands! Oh how nice, the divorcee on her first good date in years! In real life though, eavesdropping is rarely so pleasant. Keep your eyes on your own charming companion, lest you witness a truly sour scene, a dinner like so many of mine.

Here’s what we looked like to the outside: on one side of the table, you see an older man with dyed black hair, his expressionless face pointed vaguely upward, looking at something in the far distance while his hands, thin and clean, folded and refolded the paper case from his chopsticks. Across from him, there’s a teenage girl with weak, skinny limbs, and long, thin hair. She’s been crying, or maybe she’s about to cry. Maybe she looks angry, or maybe she seems scared. It’s unhappy though, you can tell. Of course you can tell.

There are many such dinners like this, post-divorce meals where a parent sits across from their child. Before my parents separated, back when I was a kid, we sometimes went out to dinner as a family of six. Four kids, two parents, mainly happy but sometimes harried. After my parents separated, I didn’t really see my siblings with my father. I’m the second-born, and perhaps the most trouble. And so my father chose to see me alone. Once a month, for around 90 minutes, we “visited.” This was almost always at a restaurant—rarely did I darken the doorway of his newer, larger, fancier home—and usually, we got sushi.

Sushi was my choice but I chose it for him, too. At the time, I was the only one of his six children—a number that then included my step siblings from the second of his four marriages—who enjoyed sushi. My father had served in the Navy, aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War, always to classified places, and while traveling abroad he cultivated a taste for seafood. He liked salty sea urchins and rubbery octopus, foods that my mother (who has still never left the country) didn’t appreciate. Desperate to prove myself braver, bolder, and more urbane than the staid residents of suburban Massachusetts, I decided to like sushi, too. I was neither his smartest kid nor the nicest. I wasn’t the most useful or the most compliable. I decided to be the most adventurous—in eating, in travel, in love. Even in questions.

There are so many things he couldn’t tell me, or wouldn’t. But I asked anyway: Did you ever think you were going to die? (Yes. During the drills.) What was your favorite place? (Scotland, no real reason why.) Do you think there will be nuclear war in our lifetime? (It doesn’t matter, but probably not.) Do you think I’d survive? (No, no one would.) What was the worst part of living underwater? (Blanket parties.) Did you participate? (No comment.) How’s your sushi? (Good, try the Redsox Maki, see, this is called tobiko, the red fish is tuna…)

Sometimes, we’d trade roles. He would ask me short, quick questions, to which I gave long, meandering answers, chattering to fill the silence. I told him about my good grades, my excitement about college, my interest in traveling someday, not on a submarine, but I pretended briefly that maybe I would work a job like his, someday, despite not being at all cut out for military life. This didn’t make him like me any better, judging by how often we talk now. But for a time, we did see each other semi-regularly for dinner. Although the meals were wildly stressful—I couldn’t forgive him for cheating on my mom, especially with such a younger, smaller, and more educated woman – a “work colleague, and he couldn’t forgive me for being just *so much *my mother’s child—I still think of the restaurants fondly. They were the kind of medium-good restaurant that opens in wealthy suburbs of major cities (in our case Boston) around the country. My favorite was The Sushi House, located just down the road from the Concord Prison on a small, busy stretch of Route 2. It was easy to get to, not terribly popular, and perhaps a bit overpriced.

The Sushi House had everything you’d expect from an early 2000s Japanese-American joint. There were heavily used tatami mats covered with clear plastic runners (to protect them from Massachusetts slush), blond wood tables thickly varnished and slightly tacky to the touch, black mass-produced ceramics with unconvincing “brushstrokes” of red to create a faux-handmade finish, and several cat figurines, each waving a paw from a different window ledge or countertop. The sushi, however, was great. Or I remember it being great, though who knows what I would think now. At first, I remember ordering Philadelphia rolls and caterpillar rolls exclusively, two choices that contained no raw fish. I had been told that was dangerous, likely to lead to food poisoning. But my dad told me that was bullshit, that sushi was safer than lunchmeat, which meant soon I was trying all the dishes he ate—the spicy tuna, the baby octopus, the sea urchin, the fat balls of roe. It made me feel sophisticated and worldly, to eat these things, like I was on the edge of some new food trend, though inevitably by the time something made it to the quiet Boston suburbs, it was old news.

I still have no idea if I’ve ever eaten “authentic” sushi. I have yet to visit Japan, and I have my doubts about the very idea of “authentic” cuisine anyway. I loved the Sushi House for what it was—relatively private, quiet, and calm. I liked that I could eat something I enjoyed, and I thought I was showing my father I appreciated his likes and dislikes, too. Unlike my mother, I would eat raw fish. Unlike my siblings, I wanted to hear about his time serving in the Navy. I thought I was differentiating myself and that maybe he’d come to see me as separate from the rest of our family, my own person. One he could admire, because I admired him. My father had a PhD; he’d traveled around the globe; he worked a job that required government clearance.

And yet, even as I tried to ape him, I resented him. And that undoubtedly showed during our dinners. Only once were we mistaken for a couple, though that’s something that happens in movies all the time. Mostly, our waiters seemed to know exactly what we were. Two unhappy people trying to maintain peace, to use the tools of the restaurant business as props in our family drama. We were acting the part of two people who were interested in talking to each other, of moving forwards towards something better. I don’t know why that never happened. In all honesty, it was probably already too late. Maybe the resentment was already in my body. Maybe it had become a part of me on some deeper level, maybe it drifted out of my oily teenage pores, maybe it wafted off me, poisoning his meal. Maybe that’s why the platters of fish didn’t solve our problems. Maybe that’s why even an anodyne, neutral ground felt unbearably tense and maybe that’s why he could never seem to look me in the face. I don’t think he even noticed how I ordered what he did, how I followed his lead.

None of it mattered in the end. When I was 18, we stopped going out for sushi. “I think you purposefully choose the most expensive restaurants,” he said to me once. “Just like your mother.”

Katy Kelleher is a Maine-based writer whose work appears in Eater, Jezebel, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. Her essay collection The Ugly History of Beautiful Things is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. Follow Katy on Twitter.

As per Wikipedia: “in video games, a power-up is an object that adds temporary benefits or extra abilities to the player character as a game mechanic.” In other words, a power-up allows your hero to more easily vanquish enemies, become invincible, garner extra lives, and so on.

Pac-Man pioneered the power-up. By consuming a “Power Pellet,” Pac-Man was periodically able to eat ghosts instead of running from them. But, as any kid who came of age in the 1980s or ‘90s will attest, it was Super Mario Bros. that firmly put the power-up in pop culture. Enter the Super Mushroom. Once deployed from a hovering mystery box and consumed (i.e. run into) by our hero, the mushroom doubled Mario in size, thus rendering him super and conferring upon him all the powers commensurate with said stature. He could jump higher, break bricks, and if you accidentally ran him into a Goomba or similar foe he shrunk back to his un-super size rather than straight up die. This feature, and others like it (the Fire Flower, the Invincibility Star, the extra life), made the game more fun by incentivizing users to explore the Mushroom Kingdom beyond the linear, face-value framework of getting from point A to point B in each level. Power-ups lent Super Mario Bros. some more-than-meets-the-eye mystery, giving players the ability to cheat or circumvent the rules of the game.

Of course, power-ups are primarily satisfying for two reasons: they are hidden, thus requiring extra effort to find, and once found they grant you extra abilities beneficial to gameplay. But, as the Super Mario Bros. game designers found out, there was something gratifying to players in simply seeing Mario double in size upon consuming a mushroom. As Shigeru Miyamoto put it, his team backed into this aesthetic choice: "When we made the prototype of the big Mario, we did not feel he was big enough. So, we came up with the idea of showing the smaller Mario first, who could be made bigger later in the game; then players could see and feel that he was bigger."

This sentiment — that a power-up is gratifying in and of itself — is echoed in a 2019 gaming academic study. By comparing “the experiences of players depending on their exposure to power-ups in a recreational video game,” authors Alena Denisova and Eliott Cook found that “players who collected power-ups felt significantly more immersed in the game [and] experienced more autonomy.” According to the Self-Determination Theory, autonomy is one of three tenants that humans require in order to thoroughly enjoy activities.

IRL Power-Ups

via Unreality Mag

There are plenty of other examples of power-ups and the incentivizing ways in which we’re encouraged to hunt for them, from specific skins in Call of Duty to all the classic examples ranked right here to even food power-ups. But what about power-ups IRL? Humans, after all, love the idea of changing their status. For evidence consider the weight-loss challenge, or the movie montage, which allows us to watch some of the hero’s journey in hyper-lapse. If Super Mario Bros. was an app today rather than a video game franchise dating back to the 8-bit ‘80s, we would attribute some of its stickiness to features like Super Mushrooms, Fire Flowers, and Invincibility Stars — these ephemeral advantages that players can earn and just as easily lose.

So what real world examples spring to mind? Airline status, certainly, which allows people to skirt some of the humdrum realities of modern flight. Being listed at a club, sure. Or garnering a blue check on Twitter before Elon mucked that up. This latter point leads to the rub: for power-ups to matter, to grant us that sense of satisfaction, they must be earned rather than bought. By earning a perk, that perk confirms our identity — a skilled gamer, a thought-leader, a world-traveler. And products that reinforce and deepen one’s sense of identity are found to maximize customer value in the longterm.

And so, as we always asks ourselves here at Blackbird, but what of dining? According to The New York Times, game designers think of the world (along with all its rules) within a game as being inside a magic circle, one that can be drawn in chalk on the sidewalk.

“The chalk line casts a spell on that space of sidewalk and turns it into a space for playing…Humans have always been drawn to this trick, finding novel ways to play within their environments.”

A Strava leaderboard; via DC Rainmaker

App-designers in other industries seem to understand this. Consider Duolingo, which rewards users learning a foreign language for consecutive days — or “streaks” — spent studying. Or fitness app Strava, which ranks cyclists and runners on leaderboards for GPS segments (the fastest is given the KOM or QOM crown). Strava will also notify you when you set a new PR or obtain “local legend” status for having completed a certain segment more than anyone else.

Dining platforms seem ripe for all this, and yet there is no gamification layer currently augmenting the experience. Odd considering how much of a gambit dining is these days, from snagging a reservation to being seated at the best table to getting that iconic burger at Raoul’s before they run out for the night. If you think about it, dining is — at its essence — a form of a power-up to begin with. By stepping into a restaurant, we’ve entered the magic circle of a game, one with its own atmosphere and set of rules, while at the same time we’re also bypassing the rules of the real world — we’re not cooking for ourselves, we’re certainly not saving money, and chances are we’ll be indulging in food and drink that our physician might frown upon. In other words, we’ve eaten the magic mushroom, now it’s time for a platform to reward us for doing so.

Thanks for reading, and more soon…

James Jung
VP, Content 
Blackbird Labs, Inc.

Thanks for reading! And remember to get in touch with us on Twitter.

https://www.thesupersonic.blackbird.xyz/p/power-ups-and-the-gamification-of?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share

Dynamic pricing is behind both of these stories, and thanks to the practice having been adopted long ago in industries like airlines, hotels, and live entertainment, we’re all familiar with how it works. We’re also familiar with the standard consumer response, such as this one, Elijah Wood’s reaction to the AMC announcement:

In fact, Wood’s tweet is a perfect template for all future outrage over dynamic pricing: The [INSERT PLACE] is and always has been a sacred democratic space for all and this new initiative by [INSERT BUSINESS NAME] would essentially penalize people for lower income and reward for higher income.

It is strange that one could reasonably be in distress over the practice coming to movie theaters, where outside snacks and drinks are prohibited so that venues can charge monopoly-caliber prices for junk food. And, yet, the outrage abounds. Because dynamic pricing isn’t fundamentally different than gentrification, a formidable force, both politically charged and socioeconomically complicated, we just don’t like it. This bit is precisely why the hospitality industry — where close, personal customer relationships are at the heart of the business model — has the most trouble adopting the practice, despite its clear and reasonable economic advantages.

But, even in restaurants, we do seem to be getting closer. First of all, there are emerging swaths of the global restaurant industry where dynamic pricing — that is, prices that adjust based on demand factors — is commonplace. Uber and DoorDash both now offer the option of paying up for priority delivery. Two upstarts, Juicer and Sauce, both offer software for flexing delivery menu prices based on a range of variables, like day of the week and realtime demand. There’s more. Tablz offers 3D images of restaurants’ dining rooms, thus allowing operators to charge diners a premium to reserve certain tables — say, $24 for the ideal table to flex on a date night. Dorsia is the most aggressive and explicit of the bunch. It offers access to tough ticket tables to its “members,” who commit to certain minimum spends, say $500/person at Carbone.

https://twitter.com/blackbird_xyz

Despite all of this, the restaurant industry struggles to convince consumers the practice is reasonable. Tablz founder Frazer Nagy recently gave Kristen Hawley of Expedite the same pitch that us disruptors have been using — to no avail, mind you — for years. “Think about the airline industry,” he said. “You can upgrade to first class, comfort plus for extra legroom, and they dynamically price their flights. Restaurants just give away our best real estate for free.”

The current system is transactional and, at times, hostile. It may not ultimately matter for pizza delivery, but it does matter anywhere the average check is more substantial. We learned this firsthand in the early days of building Resy. From the guest’s perspective, it’s a system that still feels like every reservation and every visit is a new negotiation.

Except, that isn’t really true. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. When was last time you just walked into a crowded restaurant at primetime and happened to land a great table? Maybe you got lucky that one time six years ago at Blue Hill when you just showed up and happened to catch a no-show — a moment of happenstance that led to a magical night you’ve been talking about ever since. But, that’s just not how the sausage is made, friends. Not counting the aforementioned occasional lottery winner, there are only two kinds of guests who get prime time reservations at popular restaurants: known, and therefore more valuable, customers; and people who have, in fact, paid for access, either because a credit card company got them the table or it was booked through a concierge style service. The point is, actually dynamic pricing is alive and well in the restaurant industry. Like all good hospitality, though, the guest only sees what they’re supposed to see. It’s much safer for restaurants if most people continue to think of them as the last bastion of democracy.

There is a problem with the current system, however. Charging $24 for a guaranteed booth or locking in a $500 minimum spend is the restaurant industry bringing a knife to a gun fight. Short-term gains mask the problem that this approach does not get restaurants any closer to understanding who their guests are and how to think about maximizing the lifetime value of them. The current system is transactional and, at times, hostile. It may not ultimately matter for pizza delivery, but it does matter anywhere the average check is more substantial. We learned this firsthand in the early days of building Resy. From the guest’s perspective, it’s a system that still feels like every reservation and every visit is a new negotiation. It feels like the opposite of becoming a regular, which is the only type of guest that can actually put a restaurant on a path towards longterm economic sustainability.

It is time to learn to stop worrying and love the … you get it. Because it’s not the dynamic pricing bomb that is the problem. At issue is how current implementations erode the UX that good hospitality creates. If instead we focus on solving for scalable connectivity, meaning something that feels satisfying and productive to both restaurants and guests, the rest will be a cakewalk.

Ben Leventhal
Founder & CEOBlackbird Labs, Inc.

Thanks for reading! And remember to get in touch with us on Twitter.

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The timeworn term was coined in a 1980 review by the late restaurant critic Gael Greene, and subsequently gained popularity over the next couple of decades to characterize food-interested folk who did not fit into the previous era’s archetype of the snobbish, gluttonous gourmand. Foodie was more democratic than the formerly employed French words such as “gourmet” and “gastronome,” and its rise spoke to how both eating in restaurants and cooking at home were becoming more accessible and obsessable in mainstream American culture. This is only more true today, which is exactly why the word has crash landed into cringe territory.

In 2023, foodie is cheugy — a vague and cloying catchall that has finally run its course. The term also represents the type of eater who is a late follower of food trends. They Instagram once popular appetizing towers. They wait in long lines for viral pastries. They take desperate measures to secure tables at spots past their prime. None of these things are particularly egregious in their own right, and yet – just as the term foodie itself implies – they’re suggestive of a diner who cares less about the food and the experience than they do about chasing the latest fads and then flexing about them on TikTok. Of course this might not be the case, but self-identifying as a foodie can muddy one’s dining motives, thus rendering one guilty until proven innocent.

Thankfully, there are plenty of other words and phrases that are currently in vogue. What follows is our rundown of what’s being said at restaurants, on social media, and in group chats among the culinarily clued-in. We call it: The New Food Glossary. Read it, memorize it, use it, and we promise you’ll never feel out of your depths at dinner again.

1. Mid
   Anything can be mid (read: mediocre), from the latest Adidas collab to the weather, but it’s a particularly useful adjective for dishes and decor.

2. Gas, Fire, Slaps
   How do we praise a particular dish these days, extolling its virtues in the most no cap manner possible? Enter the new holy trinity of suppertime superlatives: Gas, Fire, and Slaps. As in…
   
   — “What are you talking about? The fries at Fanelli’s are not mid. They’re gas.”

   — “Damn, that khao soi is fire.” 

   — “I always get the shrimp cocktail here. It slaps.”

3. “Phone Eats First”
   It might be annoying, but it’s also fact: the phone eats first, so don’t you dare take a bite of that tuna tostada before the shots are snapped.

4. Notify 
   What was once a nifty Resy feature is now an essential tool for snagging hot tables. I.e., “How’d you get a reservation at Corner Bar?” “I got it off Notify.” Act fast!

5. Third Culture Restaurant
   Fusion is a dirty word. So how do we describe deeply personal styles of cooking that incorporate various influences, like dosa-battered onion rings and pizza topped with housemade Goan sausage served in a Silver Lake sports bar? Third culture, which refers to people raised in cultures other than that of their country of nationality, is a useful term here. Some of the most exciting restaurants right now, like Pijja Palace in LA and Bonnie’s in Brooklyn, are Third Culture Restaurants.

6. Takeover 
   “Pop-up” is a vastly overused term to apply to a wide swath of food projects without brick-and-mortar roots. Takeovers, however, are clear-cut and fun: when a chef or a team takes over a restaurant that is not their own. 

7. Glizzy
   Hot dogs are back, and they’re now called glizzys. The moniker was originally slang for a handgun within the hip hop community, and in 2020 became adopted to refer to hot dogs, given their similarities in shape. Viral TikTok trends involving hot dogs (e.g., Glizzy Gobblers) followed suit.

8. Revamp
   Classic restaurants never go out of style, and after the pandemic, we held on dearly to our old-school institutions. The trendification of this notion can be seen in the proliferation of revamps: when a restaurateur revives a time-honored dining room into something new. See: Gage & Tollner, Dear John’s, S&P, the soon-to-open La Dolce Vita. The list goes on…

9. Preorder 
   Preorder Sally Rooney’s next novel to find it on your doorstep the day of its release. Also preorder a cake for your best friend’s birthday, the most alluring of which are made by local bakers who conduct business over Instagram. 

10. ‘Tinis
    Gin, Tito’s, extra dry, with a twist, dirty. Whatever which way, we all drink ‘tinis now. (Relatedly: Hat tip to E. Alex Jung for coining “the winning combination of martinis and French fries” as the New York Happy Meal.)

11. Snacky Spot
    When every other new restaurant is a wine bar, there are no wine bars. How, then, can we refer to the elegant little places where you can share delicious little plates, drink off thoughtfully-curated beverage menus, and still leave hungry (more often than not)? Those are Snacky Spots. 

12. Short-Staffed 
    AKA the reason many restaurants are open four or five days a week (and only for dinner) instead of all seven, and why you may have to order at the counter at a sit-down restaurant. 

13. Vibey
    These days, vibe > food is a common requisite for those seeking restaurant recs. The people want vibey restaurants with high aesthetic value, packed dining rooms, and cool clientele. Think Balthazar in SoHo and Jones in West Hollywood. It’s not that their food’s not good, it’s just that the overall atmosphere (both of which these two joints have perfected) can count more than the cuisine. 

14. Upcycled, Byproduct, Fermented
    Upcycled ingredients are created from food scraps that would’ve otherwise gone to waste, including byproduct — the secondary product made from the production of something else (like fruit pulp and peels from making juice, or spent grain from brewing beer). Oftentimes, byproducts can be incorporated into ferments — any fermented product, such as vinegar or jam — which aim to extend the shelf life of seasonal produce, make use of imperfect ingredients, and add flavor to dishes. Expect to see more of these words on menus as restaurants seek to educate diners on more sustainable ways of eating. 

15. Bathroom Selfie 
    To prove you dined in a hot restaurant, post a selfie from its coolly designed bathroom rather than a picture of its most-talked-about dish.

16. House Orange
    Orange wine, also called skin-contact wine, is made from white grapes with the skin on, adding color and body and flavor, and is widely produced by natural winemakers. House wine refers to the wine a restaurant is offering cheaply and in abundance — an especially common practice in European countries like Italy and Greece. House wine + orange wine = house orange. Voila! “I’ll have a glass of your house orange,” says the diner at the table next to yours at Kiki’s in Dimes Square, and it’s clear that natural wine is no longer a trend — it’s the new norm.

17. TikTok Restaurant
    There are three main reasons why it’s hard to get into a restaurant in these trying contemporary times. 1.) The kitchen is helmed by a star chef. 2.) The establishment in question has received a glowing review in the paper of record. 3.) It’s a TikTok Restaurant. As in, one TikToker and then many TikTokers have obsessed over a specific dish, causing a flood of customers to flock to the restaurant (and also TikTok it). You could join the party by doing so at places like Saint Theo's and Nusr-Et, but, remember, following such a well-trodden trend might make you a…foodie.

18. Caviar Bump
    When you dig a Mother of Pearl spoon into a pool of caviar, plop a dollop of tiny black eggs on your fist, and slurp it up, that’s a caviar bump. The poster child of contemporary high-low food culture.

Thanks for reading! And remember to get in touch with us on Twitter.

https://www.thesupersonic.blackbird.xyz/p/glizzy-17-other-terms-for-your-post?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share

Emily Wilson is a Los Angeles-based writer with bylines in Bon Appétit, Eater, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Resy, and more. Find her on Instagram and Twitter at @emilyjwils.

Last year, Tom Cruise made headlines by motorcycling off a cliff in Norway and BASE jumping to safety. The set piece will appear in this summer’s “Mission Impossible — Dead Reckoning.” I can already picture the headlines: “A stunt never before seen in cinema!”

Such accolades, however, will be wrong. James Bond pulled off a similar stunt nearly 30 years ago in “Goldeneye.” This is not the first time the Bond franchise has been plagiarized. The midair plane fishing scene that opens “The Dark Knight Rises?” We first saw it in 1989’s “License to Kill.” The iconic skydiving scene sans parachute in “Point Break?” Bond did it in 1979’s “Moonraker.” The list goes on. So why do these copycats get the credit instead of 007? Simple: because James Bond movies are not action movies.

“But, I streamed one the other night on HBO Max,” you say. “I found it under ACTION.” In the inimitable, condescending purr of Sean Connery, but of course you did. Why, then, was said film incorrectly categorized as an action film? Because the genre in which Bond films exist, the genre the 25-film series created, isn’t an official genre by Hollywood standards.

In other words (cue Monty Norman’s swelling strings and twanging guitar) BOND FILMS ARE HOSPITALITY FILMS.

Sure, there are other elements that set Bond films apart: the girls, the gadgets, the globe-trotting adventure, the over-the-top villains hellbent on convoluted schemes of world domination. Blah, blah, blah. But at their core, Bond movies are about hospitality. Think about it: we live vicariously through 007, and in so doing we get to experience the rarified world in which every door is opened, every luxury afforded. Bond always gets the best table, the best hotel suite, the best bottle of Bollinger. Not only that, but he’s welcomed with open arms no matter what opulent setting he steps into. Whether he’s in Sardinia or Switzerland, Istanbul or India, the hotel manager knows Bond’s name, the maître d' knows when he last dined with them and where he likes to sit. For a secret agent, 007’s discerning tastes precede him. He knows a great restaurant in Karachi. Loves a good conch chowder, especially whilst poolside in the Bahamas. Understands that Dom Pérignon ’53 should never be consumed above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Bond is a total restaurant junkie. Here’s a government employee, on a government salary, and yet he knows every fine dining move.

That’s the fun of these films — watching Bond deftly operate in the world’s best restaurants, hotels, and resorts. We, the audience, respond to his flawless bon vivant moves, and so does everyone in the movie. Even the villains are hospitable. They serve 007 mint juleps while divulging their evil plans. Invite him aboard their yachts. Put him up in their villas in Acapulco. And, to make things even smoother, Bond never agonizes over any of this. Imagine 007 scouring the web for the latest reservations? Puh-lease. Instead he simply rolls up to a place, as he did at Hong Kong’s fictional Royal Rubyeon Hotel in “Die Another Day” — long-haired, bare-chested, and bearded thanks to a North Korean prison stay, 007 saunters through the lobby and asks for his “usual suite.” He is, of course, accommodated.

The first 45 minutes of these formulaic films always play out like this. The bars. The restaurants. The hotels. All of it unfurling like a first-class dream, and we’re only too happy to go along for the ride, pretending it’s us indulging in such luxuries. Watching a Bond film is almost like going on vacation ourselves, and yet never once feeling like a tourist. No matter how campy the adventure, the world outside these rarified halls is a cruel one, and so when Bond is inside them he’s treated to the warm blanket that is great hospitality.

Just like well-honed hospitality, James Bond is a form of wish fulfillment. This is, after all, why author Ian Fleming created the character. On the brink of marriage and fatherhood, Fleming wanted to escape the responsibilities of real life, and so he did so through the Bond persona. The British Empire was waning, the public had just lived through the food rations of WWII, and here was a character through which readers could live a little. So sumptuous are Fleming’s descriptions of Bond’s indulgent diet that there’s even been an artfully rendered cookbook devoted to the literary 007’s meals.

"'The trouble always is,' [Bond] explained to Vesper, 'not how to get enough caviar, but how to get enough toast with it.'" — Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, 1953

Like everything, Bond eventually has to come back down to Earth, and he does so each time the action truly sets in — always toward the latter third of the film. The minute a Bond movie does become an action movie is when things get rote and boring. The villain must be bested, the world must be saved. It’s exhausting, confusing, and — worse still — not worthy of other action franchises. John McClane, Jason Bourne, and Batman all — despite what Carly Simon once said — do it better than Bond. We’d all love to have 007 status at the world’s best restaurants and hotels. But trading barbs with some megalomaniacal lunatic and his pure-bred cat while getting roughed up by a cartoonish henchman as a roomful of goons countdown a nuclear missile launch you’re paid to prevent? Not so much…

One thing we talk about here at Blackbird is what it would be like to offer a product in which every user is treated like James Bond, no matter where they go. No, not “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War” as M once called him, but the type of diner who gets the reservation, the off-menu item, the free round of drinks, the best table, and so on. Someone, in other words, who is recognized for their loyalty, appreciated for their taste, and without fail greeted by name. Now that’s a Bond film I’m sure we’d all like to star in.

James Jung VP, ContentBlackbird Labs, Inc.

There are a handful of these unicorns, cycling apparel label Rapha springs to mind (please sound off in the comments below if you can think of others). But perhaps the most fun example concerns the little-known story of Global Underground, a UK-based dance music label whose late 90s/early aughts mix CDs gave rise to the culture of superstar DJs and the community of clubbers who celebrated them. Founded by photographer Andy Horsfield, GU’s premise was simple: take a mysterious DJ out of the shadowy club, book them to play an exotic locale, and put their name and face on the sun-kissed box cover of the mix encapsulating the gig. Voila! A rockstar for the new millennium.

The concept was sound, the hypnotic mixes often sublime, yet GU’s appeal went far beyond such a one-dimensional value prop. In addition to the music, it was the packaging itself that inspired such fandom. There was the double disc format, sometimes in a long, rectangular limited edition case (with CDs side-by-side rather than stacked). There were the photos: of the DJ, of the club, the surrounding cityscapes and geography, and of course the revelers on hand. And then you had the evocative linear notes, robust as a magazine feature and always written by the late Dom Phillips, at the time editor of dance music bible Mixmag. Each of Dom’s exuberantly crafted sentences spilled forth to create a gonzo-style travelogue transporting you to a place and time — Sasha in Ibiza, Danny Tenaglia in Athens, John Digweed in Hong Kong. By buying the latest GU release, you could somehow own the ephemeral experience, even if you had never been present for it in the first place.

"Global Underground didn’t just sell mix CDs," says Colin James Nagy, an LA-based media strategist and co-pilot of the excellent Substack Why Is This Interesting. "They sold a glamorous life on the road floating from BA first class cabin, to festival, to after party, record box in tow. GU came after electronic music was cross pollinating across borders but also, importantly, before the easyjet techno tourism scene. It turned the presenting DJs into global icons but also heroed the local scenes and sounds of a place. It was polished and sexy."

The heyday of the mix CD is long gone, given way to Spotify and Soundcloud and sets on the Boiler Room. But the digital nature of these platforms means we lose the physical form factor, and with it the ability to encapsulate an entire scene, culture, and community. Join us below as we take a trip back through Global Underground’s greatest consumer packaging hits.

"It's a tantalizing phuture-phunk, weaving sunny dreams with an exclusive sci-fi symphony. You don't need to hear the jets in here, Sasha is playing his own... " — Dom Phillips

“The ‘wanderlust’ lifestyle of DJ culture found a smooth landing with the GU series, which made you feel like you were somewhere and properly experiencing the music even if not at all. It was a great way to frame these DJs and give them context. I wish the roster was more diverse and have aged more gracefully but the best of them are really strong. It's a time capsule of a certain kind of techno optimism that is fun to revisit and get lost in. “

Sam Valenti IV, founder of Ghostly International

Darren Emerson’s Uruguay mix was a mood and so were the linear notes; via Global Underground

“Narrow-eyed acid nastiness scowling over rib-shaking levels of Jamaican bass. Icy space riffs echoing over steel toe-cap beats. Warren’s muscle-clad grooves slam into their targets with the kind of surgical accuracy NATO can only dream of.”— Dom Phillips

"It's a wild and bumpy road of mucky house, robot funk and the Devil's trance, and Digweed's tight, confident control never lets up as he pulls off dangerous track combinations with a rally driver's cool." — Dom Phillips

✌️ James Jung VP, Content Blackbird Labs, Inc.

I started going to Joe Jr.'s when I was 10 years old. That’s when my family moved to 10th Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Neither I, nor my parents, remember which of us discovered it. It was just one of those neighborhood spots that new residents learned about quickly, and old ones were already regulars at. We’d always go for lunch on Saturdays after little league basketball games at P.S. 41. My sister and I would be clad in our jerseys and shorts, our faces still blush from sport. There were other kids and their families from the league too, including competitors we had just won or lost to. By the time we all got to Joe Jr.'s, what happened on the court was behind us. Sportsmanship was the name of the post-game.

“The thin patty’s innermost layer was pink, its edges crisped-up by the superbly seasoned griddle, then covered with a glistening slice of melted cheese (in my case, cheddar). The bun was soft, the condiments self-serve. It made for the perfect weekend indulgence.”

My dad liked the split pea soup flecked with bits of bacon and my mom would order a salad with a scoop of tuna fish on top. For us kids, Joe Jr.'s was a place for burgers, medium rare, and classic milkshakes. The diner was on 12th Street and 6th Avenue, and they made a mean cheeseburger. The thin patty’s innermost layer was pink, its edges crisped-up by the superbly seasoned griddle, then covered with a glistening slice of melted cheese (in my case, cheddar). The bun was soft, the condiments self-serve. It made for the perfect weekend indulgence. So that was my order, every time: a cheeseburger with fries. And sometimes a milkshake.

On certain Sundays, we’d catch an afternoon movie at Regal Union Square followed by an early dinner at Joe Jr.'s. There was Catch Me If You Can, Tuck Everlasting, and our family favorite: The Lord of the Rings 1, 2, and 3. Dinner at Joe Jr.'s was quieter, but the menu was the same. We’d still order cheeseburgers, fries, and milkshakes.

Equal to the food was the sensory overload of Joe Jr.s, all of it still palpable to me. The air was thick with grease. Every table and bar seat was fixed to the ground. And its clientele, Villagers of all age brackets, was entirely local. The owners were Greek, and the to-go coffee cups were emblazoned with the iconic Greek lettering: “We Are Happy To Serve You.” I don’t remember seeing any celebrities among us at Joe Jr.'s, but it was a legendary* *Greenwich Village spot with an impressive 45-year run. So it makes sense that David Byrne, Cameron Diaz, and Ethan Hawke were known to dine there, too, according to a Times story on the closing – Joe Jr.’s being the casualty of a lease dispute.

The term neighborhood spot gets thrown around a lot, but nothing fits that bill better than a diner. While some diners make certain items better than others, they’re all kind of the same, which is why any given diner is particularly special to the residents of the neighborhood it serves. What better place, then, for a kid to become a regular than at their neighborhood diner? Joe Jr.'s was an extension of my home. It’s where I would take friends for dinner when they were sleeping over unless they wanted pizza or Chinese delivery.

When I had my first boyfriend in 7th grade, the most romantic place I could think of taking him was Joe Jr.'s. Bringing him there was akin to baring the depths of my middle school soul. I would charm him, I thought, by bestowing in him the magic atmosphere of Joe Jr.'s. It worked. We went together often, and every time, we’d order two cheeseburgers with fries and split a milkshake.

Then in 2009, Joe Jr.'s closed, leaving a gaping hole in my heart. It was a monumental loss for Greenwich Village and, frankly, the city as a whole, which today has been wiped of so many of its time-worn canteens with their quick, friendly service and massive menus of simple fare. As former New York Magazine food critic Adam Platt wrote in 2017, “Like most mass-extinction events, the Massive Diner, Coffee Shop, and Greasy Spoon Die-Off has been unfolding slowly around us for decades, in plain sight.” He, too, was a regular at Joe Jr.'s. His order? A BLT with extra mayo.

(An aside, but an important one to note: this Joe Jr.'s is unrelated to the Gramercy diner of the same name, on 3rd Avenue. Lore has it that the two diners shared an owner at some point several decades ago, but by the time I was frequenting the Greenwich Village greasy spoon, their connection was long severed.)

I live in LA now. But I was back in New York last week and feeling nostalgic. I wanted to visit tried-and-true spots in lieu of new places. For the same reason, I was sure to hit S&P Lunch, the storied Flatiron sandwich counter formerly known as Eisenberg’s and recently revamped by the contemporary sandwich masterminds behind Court Street Grocers. I went on a Thursday at noon with a high school friend, and we ate sandwiches on squishy rye bread (the “Fifty-50” with egg salad and tuna salad for me, pastrami with mustard for her). We caught each other up on our lives over a shared order of cottage fries. Around us, the room was abuzz. Short-order cooks griddled up hot dogs and sloshed them with chili and cheese. Servers doled out steaming bowls of peppery matzo ball soup. Heaping salads of iceberg lettuce appeared next to the case of raspberry-raisin rugelach on the counter, only to be swiftly whisked away to a back-room table.

“S&P works so well because the bones were already there. It doesn’t feel new because it’s not; it’s been around for decades. In 2023, there’s no such thing as creating a diner from scratch. It simply doesn’t make sense without the sepia-toned walls, the faded leather bar stools, the nonchalance of the longstanding staff.”

I was reminded of Joe Jr.'s. In fact, my dining mate was another Joe Jr.'s regular back in her day. The two of us had never eaten there together—we met the year it closed—but we had grown up only a few blocks apart. “It was my main zone, they knew me very personally. Was a place I was allowed to go by myself,” she texted me later on as we reminisced.

S&P delivered on its premise so well that I went back a few days later for my last meal before heading to the airport. I had a tuna melt this time, the order Eisenberg’s had long been famous for. S&P nailed it. The menu at S&P is appropriately lengthy, and still, all of the food is executed on a high level. The service is affable and efficient. But mostly, S&P works so well because the bones were already there. It doesn’t feel new because it’s not; it’s been around for decades. In 2023, there’s no such thing as creating a diner from scratch. It simply doesn’t make sense without the sepia-toned walls, the faded leather bar stools, the nonchalance of the longstanding staff.

As Platt painstakingly puts it, diners are a dying breed in New York on account of “skyrocketing rents and land values; ever-rising food prices; the spread of a more expedient, highbrow and lowbrow coffee culture; the gentle, inexorable aging of a whole generation of neighborhood ‘regulars’; the difficulty of keeping an ancient, sprawling, ten-page menu in tune with the changing tastes of the times; and the challenges of passing on a family business to a new generation of proprietors, many of whom have the benefit of a college education, and might prefer frittering their days away in barista bars to breaking eggs over a hot stove.”

We have to hang on to—or rather, regularly visit—all of the diners we still have for as long as we can. RIP Joe Jr.'s. Long live S&P Lunch.

Emily Wilson is a Los Angeles-based writer with bylines in Bon Appétit, Eater, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Resy, and more. Find her on Instagram and Twitter at @emilyjwils.

What’s perhaps most interesting about the 747’s legacy, however, is how we, the public, responded to it. Here was an aircraft whose sheer size and lower fares finally brought flight to the masses, and we were duly smitten. The Jumbo Jet captured our imagination, it demanded our respect. For children of the 1980s, it was not uncommon to hear your parents gush on the eve of a transatlantic trip: “We’re flying on a 747 tonight.” A hushed reverence would fall over the family. That one would need to comport oneself with a certain sense of decorum while aboard such a marvel of engineering was a given. This was an airliner, after all, with a second floor, a flying duplex for Christ’s sake(!), whose upper region — accessible only via spiral staircase — housed an elegant cocktail lounge, one which American Airlines had the audacity to put a piano in. Taking a 747, especially in its heyday, wasn’t a means to an end but rather the main event, and many passengers dressed accordingly. Coat and maybe even tie for men, something chic for the ladies, and the kiddos had better comb their hair. Back then the world still had a little pizzaz to it, and we hadn’t yet regarded air travel as a necessary nuisance, snubbing our noses at the miracle of flight as if we all possessed PhDs in jet propulsion.

Reminiscing over the 747’s legacy got us thinking about what other experiences demand that their participants meet them halfway in order for the vibe — so to speak — to be complete. Reading is the best example. Getting lost in a novel is no passive endeavor. Black lines on a white page conjure images in our mind, and the better our imagination and the deeper our commitment to the story the more wholly the author’s world is rendered. The same can be said of entertainment and hospitality. Going to The Metropolitan Opera, for example, isn’t simply an impressive experience due to the production on stage, but also due to the audience’s attire, with gowns and black tie in abundance. In other words, clothes you don’t see every day, meaning their very appearance heightens the experience itself. Movie premieres can still inspire such a sartorial response, award shows, too, and there exist a handful of five-star hotels in the world that demand their guests don proper threads — blazers after 5 p.m. in the lobby, good sir.

“The same can be said of entertainment and hospitality. Going to The Metropolitan Opera, for example, isn’t simply an impressive experience due to the production on stage, but also due to the audience’s attire, with gowns and black tie in abundance. In other words, clothes you don’t see every day, meaning their very appearance heightens the experience itself.”

But what of restaurants? For decades, going out to dinner presented perhaps the easiest excuse to get dressed up. And yet, as style and social mores have changed and evolved over the years, so too has the concept of getting gussied up for dinner out. This is true even of fine dining, which feels like an antiquated concept these days, at least from a visual standpoint. The best restaurants no longer adhere to some narrow or stuffy idea of decor and vibe, and so they don’t demand you do, either. For evidence look no further than Le Bernardin, which abandoned its jacket requirement during the pandemic. It can be argued that this is a good thing. Society is becoming less and less binary, and dress codes — which can be exclusive rather than inclusive, implicit with racial and gender biases — might feel like a thing of the past; a Hobbesian social contract that’s no longer needed, especially in an era that celebrates individuality, an era when fashion can be pulled off with the same eclectic, high-low mix of ingredients as the inventive food on one’s plate.

And yet there are some restaurateurs who disagree. Last spring, The New York Times ran this piece on the proliferation of restaurants across the country requiring that their clientele arrive in a certain style. From Manhattan’s Les Trois Chevaux to Catbird in Dallas to LA’s Olivetta, dress codes ranged from the specific to the vague, yet all were enforced. Rather than a means of gatekeeping, these policies — on paper, and according to those behind them — had more to do with upholding a legacy of style, and the restaurateurs asked that their guests join them in helping complete an atmosphere where the food might be Michelin starred and the wallpaper from Gucci.

“We revere the style and finesse that can only be attributed to having New York swagger,” [a text message from Les Trois Chevaux] said. “We expect our guests to arrive in proper dinner attire, and for you to celebrate the style that downtown New York City can bring.”

We’ll leave such prescriptive manifestos up to the restaurants themselves. The last thing we want to do is enforce style, especially when contemporary style can be such a subjective thing and the world becomes increasingly casual. (The New York Times has forecasted a future in which neckties will be cringe.) Still, there’s something to be said about looking your best when you go out to dinner — whether that means wearing a vintage designer dress, the latest Aimé Leon Dore fit, or Japanese denim, hypebeast sneakers, and all other manners of fire drip. As with nearly everything in life, our attitude often determines the experience. There was no dress code aboard the 747. Blazer or no blazer, it still took six+ hours to cross the Atlantic, and a red-eye was still a red-eye. But by getting dressed up, passengers conveyed to everyone their own happiness to be there, they signified their good fortune, they became part of the experience itself, and thus the experience became all the more memorable. Sometimes it’s ok to bring that same attitude to the dinner table. If the 747 taught us anything, it’s that a little pageantry here and there is a good thing, especially when great restaurants and great company are involved.

James Jung VP, Content Blackbird Labs, Inc.

Diners are uniquely ubiquitous, and immortal. When diners do close, they do not go quietly into the night, like the weird elevated tapas joint with the rotating menu and house-made smoked salt that the chef likes you to sprinkle on the baked eel. When a diner closing is announced, vigils and fundraisers are held and petitions are circulated; the ultimate closures are mourned and taken as the darkest kind of referendum of a neighborhood. Indeed, they anchor cities and towns across the U.S. and the world. If one were to try to rank all of the consumer product creations in history, one would have a very hard time ranking 10 products above the American Diner in terms of global market penetration (try it). Around a table, everyone has a go-to diner order and a specific diner that can be remembered by name for every period of life, from childhood to college to first job to right now.

What is also incredible about the diner is that many restaurants — most, arguably — can only aspire to have the kind of steady, loyal business that the average diner enjoys. One does wonder why, with the diner source code so categorically open, more restaurants don't use the blueprint. The diner’s product-market fit is invincibly strong, so why do so many good operators look down on the format?

Or do they? If we were to attempt to codify the American Diner operator’s rules of hospitality engagement, they might be:

1. Be local, welcoming, and restorative.

2. You need booths and a bar: those are the best seats.

3. Be in the business of saying yes — to walk-ins, to substitutions, to special requests.

4. Keep the table top simple, and don't be afraid to make some of the condiments self-serve.

5. If you display your desserts, you'll sell more of them.

6. Paying at the register is a good way to reduce turn time and alleviate waitstaff workload — and nobody hates it!

7. Familiarity over innovation.

8. If you make it an up-charge, there's less sticker shock.

9. Don't sleep on interactive placemats.

10. Always make sure there's a healthy option, a comfort option, an I-don't-know-what-I'm-in-the-mood-for option, a no-nonsense option and, yes, a burger.

11. Related, if you’re printing the menu everyday you’re doing it wrong.

12. The lobster is going to be overrated.

13. The service is going to be underrated.

14. When in doubt, put pickles on the plate.

So, maybe, if you look closely at the most successful restaurants of the world, in fact by and large they are just doing as the diner does. Pick a favorite non-diner restaurant, one that you've been to many times: how many of these rules are they using? Of course, there is another type of incredible restaurant, and it's not a diner at all. And one does wonder, how did the diner get it so right? We'll get to those topics in due course, but for today, consider this: the reason you love that restaurant you love so much is because it’s just a diner in disguise.

Ben Leventhal Founder & CEO Blackbird Labs, Inc.

Thanks for reading! Blackbird will launch in select restaurants later this year. In the meantime, if you dug this, please give it a like! We’re also on Twitter and would love to hear from you there.

Last Sunday, I met my in-laws for dinner at a red sauce joint in the east sixties of Manhattan. My wife and two young boys — ages five and two, respectively — were already there, while I, as usual, was running late. I won’t name the restaurant because it’s one of those dated and gaudy places that can easily be maligned for its questionable decor and basic takes on Italian-American food. There’s a touch too much sugar in the tomato sauce, and the kitchen staff’s liberal use of the deep fryer is excessive. On the bright side, the baked ziti bangs. The zucchini fritti pop into your mouth as addictively and crisply as Pringles. A bottle and a half of chianti and the two-acre square of tiramisu? Mama Mia! As a friend who grew up in the neighborhood told me with a commiserating smile and a shrug when citing the place’s ample portions — a friend, I’ll add, in possession of a palate far more discerning than my own — “at least you won’t go home hungry.”

Still, as I trudged southeastward to meet my family, I didn’t anticipate our meal with much enthusiasm. In-law jokes aside, it was the destination that depressed me. As parents, nights out are rare for my wife and me these days, and to use one on such an unremarkable restaurant felt like a waste. My oldest son was to blame for the choice. Five days a week we pass the restaurant on our walk to his grade school, and it’s precisely the place’s loudmouth facade — the scripted sign, as big and subtle as a billboard; the multiple brick archways, each one in my mind evoking a pizza oven; the bright red awnings, wagging in the brisk winter wind like wolfish tongues — that to my son screams class and sophistication; an elegant eatery worthy of his patronage, as if tailor made for a big night out on the town. And so, of course, my wife, her parents, and I all acquiesced.

My wife and I can be food snobs, vibe snobs, downtown dilettantes who’ve surrendered to uptown ease, but we’re not monsters. If our kids are demanding a night on the town — with us! — then bring on the bolognese.

Growing up, dining at a restaurant on Sunday nights was tradition in our family of three, especially in winter. We lived in a backwater ski resort in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Our town stood at the terminus of a ten mile road that wound through the wilderness and was encircled by a jagged rim of four thousand foot peaks. To my Austrian father, who’d relocated us there after he was hired to run the resort’s ski school, these mountains amounted to no more than hills. To my Brooklyn-born mother, the mountains felt isolating — a barrier between us and the rest of the world, which announced itself in the form of a hum drum state college town some 30-minutes down the river. We went there once a week to go grocery shopping. No one felt more out of place, however, than me. I was a shy and introverted kid in the classroom, and my ungainliness and sensitivity did me no favors at recess.

Winter weekends were different. I could ski fast, and this made me popular in a racing program filled with brash boys whose wealthy families arrived every Friday night at the condos and stately second homes that stood otherwise vacant during the three other seasons of the year. Among these kids, I felt worldly, cavalier, and sometimes I could dish it out on the slopes just as badly as I got it on the school yard. In short, I was a vastly different boy on winter weekends. But, on Sunday nights, when the town cleared out and contracted back to its 250 full-time residents, when the moonlight glazed the snow between the trees at the back of our house and you could hear the coyotes howling off in the hills, when the prospect of all the ragging I’d surely endure at school throughout the week ahead began to hang in the air, the blues set in.

My parents must have felt these blues too, because — more times than not — my mother would pipe up with her usual suggestion:

“Oh let’s go out to dinner,” she’d say, always as if the thought had just come to her. My father would play his role too, hemming and hawing about money while wringing his thick farmer’s hands, complaining about exhaustion — the lessons he’d taught, the torch light parades he’d led, the skischule abends he’d hosted — yet always in the end surrendering to the whims of his wife. And then there was me, their only child, their perpetual sidekick, excited by the idea of staving off reality, if only for the course of a meal. Living in a tourist town, we served the tourists — even me, the shy townie who transformed into a wise-cracking ski racer nearly capable of tricking himself into thinking he was a rich kid on the slopes. But, on Sunday nights it was our turn to be pampered a little.

Plus, on Sunday nights our town’s handful of restaurants would be empty and that meant the whole place was ours, which lifted everyone’s spirits. My prematurely silver haired father, a natural skier and showman, something of a small-town celebrity, no longer had any over-enthusiastic tourists demanding his attention — free pointers under the lift, yodels for the kids on-demand — and ensuring he’d come home in a foul mood. At a restaurant on a Sunday night, Dad was just Dad. He was warm and hospitable, forever a figure and a focal point in our family, however antiquated and patriarchal that might sound now.

Mom, for her part, transformed back into the glamorous woman she’d once been before I was born, when a modeling career had brought her all the way to Paris, France, a city I’d only read about in books. “I just like going out sometimes,” she’d explain to me. “It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to cook. You get to dress up a little.” On went the makeup, the jewelry, and maybe even a fur from her ex husband. (Her ex a man my father might soon forget had he not found the look of his wife in such frocks so fetching.) I think my mother loved these nights best. Here was a woman who’d grown accustomed, among other things, to the best restaurants, and she’d given it all up for my father and for a lonely life in the sticks.

Of the ones we frequented, I remember two restaurants best: one Swiss, the other Mexican. At the Swiss restaurant we sat at a small table wedged into the corner of the nearly empty bar. Mom and Dad jokingly referred to the table as our *stammtisch. *My father would have a tall weisse beer — his only beer of the week — while my mother sipped Chardonnay, and I would guzzle down one Coke after the next, prosaic concerns about caffeine overdoses and being up all night belonging to the real world, not the magical, time-stands-still world of a restaurant. The fondue we always split would taste sharply of kirschwasser — I can still taste it — compliments of the cook, a good friend of my father’s. We’d eat the meal down to its dregs, scraping the burnt, blue-black cheese bruising the bottom of the pot, my father all the while instructing my mother and me how to do so and reminding us with the conspiratorial air of a connoisseur that this was secretly the best part.

The Mexican restaurant offered a more low-key affair, but a no less cherished one. My father wouldn’t be as deft with his fajitas as he was with fondue, my mother would prefer her margarita over the enchiladas she ordered, and there I’d be making quick work of my hamburger and fries, paired of course with a Coke. The couple who owned the place were transplants from Key West. They’d made some money down there as part of a diving crew that had discovered a trio of sunken, treasure-laden Spanish galleons, and this of course added to their fish-out-of-water lore. Whenever they came out of the kitchen and into the desolate dining room they would appear stunned, as if they’d only just realized they’d swapped the good life of the Florida Keys for the hardscrabble winters of northern New Hampshire. I was too naive back then to realize that the couple’s stunned demeanor had more to do with the fact that they were always half in the bag. Had I known so I doubt such knowledge would have diminished them in my eyes. Like all good restaurant folk, these were outlaws, characters, soldiers of fortune who’d chosen the path less traveled and all that jazz.

I mention this ancient history because these memories hit me squarely last Sunday night when I walked downstairs into the aforementioned red sauce joint’s subterranean dining room. Suddenly, I wasn’t the savvy, big city person it sometimes seems like I’m pretending to be, the one who’s made a career in media and now, at least tangentially, tech. Instead, I was still the kid from New Hampshire, the one not yet jaded enough to dismiss a Sunday night dinner at a less-than-hip restaurant. I told the hostess that I was meeting my family, and as I rounded the corner I saw them sitting there, halfway back in the brightly-lit room. My in-laws sat on one side of the table. I’d have preferred my own parents, but Mom now lives alone up in Vermont and Dad died three years ago. In fact, it was at this same restaurant that the three of us had dined together while Dad was receiving treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Not the best memory, but not the worst either, and probably one that explains why I have a soft spot I can’t quite pin down for this place. My wife sat on the other side of the table and saw me and smiled. We’ve had our problems like many couples, but on this night she was happy to see me, and I her. And then my kids spotted me, the two boys. They sprung up in their seats, their eyes wide. They cheered and chanted my name, much like I would have done for my own father. They beckoned me closer with great pomp and magnanimity, like two princes welcoming a guest into their domicile where an impressive feast was due to commence. “Esset mir hobn,” I could hear my father saying in the bastardized German dialect that was the preferred tongue of his tiny Tirolean town. “Eat, we have everything.” It’s what he’d say whenever we had guests for dinner, and then laugh and laugh at the resulting confusion. I could see my mother rolling her eyes at the heavy-handed joke she’d heard far too many times. I imagined her wishing now, just as I was, that we could hear him say it one more time.

And so I sat down. I smiled at everyone. My five year old got out of his seat and rounded the table to give me a hug, babbling this and that, aquiver with excitement. He often suffers from the same shyness that afflicted me as a kid, which makes me worry sometimes, especially on our walks to school. Thus, whenever I see him break out of his shell I’m happy. I looked around the room as he retook his seat. I looked at the other parties, saw the strangers, imagined their stories. I watched the waitstaff moving as if the place had an in-house choreographer, my pre-judgements about the restaurant now feeling capricious and silly. The tacky decor of the place seemed to fall away. So too, I hope, did my snobbery. It was Sunday night at a restaurant, and that was good enough for me.

James Jung VP, Content Blackbird Labs, Inc.

We have identity on the mind this week. The other day while listening to The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," I was struck by Richard Ashcroft shouting the seminal 90s anthem’s seminal verse: "I'm a million different people from one day to the next." This is, of course, true of everyone. As much as we'd love to believe it, character isn't fixed. We're different at work than we are at home and different still at the bar, restaurant, game, or wherever it is we choose to socialize on any given day. Humans are complex, after all, and not only do we shape-shift, but we need to constantly project these various identities we inhabit. The books on display in one’s videoconferencing background; how we curate our music playlists, spice racks, and laptop case stickers. Another example still, and relevant and fun: consider a hard-earned collection of matchbooks, the ultimate statement of one’s bonafides as an urban explorer. Indeed, we crave repositories of our different selves.

And, so, consider the crypto wallet, a crude, by-engineers-for-engineers type of product as it exists today, but a key technical building block, if we are ever to be able to prune and partition our digital identities in the way we so deeply crave to. Crypto wallets so far are weird, complicated, and often nausea-inducing for how little control and ownership of their contents they can seem to bestow on their owners. But someday they will be repositories of our various identities, and because individuals will own them digitally and completely, we will be able to build and curate around them, as well as experience the world through this identity graph.

Wallets as Social Currency

Speaking of graphs, it has been widely noted that the social graph has made way for the interest graph. As Li Jin, a partner at Variant Fund and investor in Blackbird, has pointed out, 2023 could well see the rise of decentralized social thanks to the power of a crypto-powered interest graph:

“The next big thing in 2023 is decentralized social networking. We're finally beginning to see users waking up en masse to the risks of centralized social networking companies, not least catalyzed by the recent threatened ban of TikTok and Twitter's capricious suspensions and prohibiting linking out to other platforms. Users, creators, and businesses have realized that it's dangerous to invest in building an audience on these platforms when there's a looming risk that the rug gets pulled out from under them. We're at a moment where there is a collective sense of ‘We’ve lived with the existing paradigm of closed social platforms for 15 years. What comes next?’ I think we'll see a decentralized social network start to gain steam in the next year that allows users to own their social graph and content and port it across various applications. We'll also see more creators experimenting with web3 tools that allow them to reach their audience in a platform-less way, i.e. through tokens acting as a new kind of social graph.”

If we think about how Li Jin’s prediction works at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds — say, to use a random example, the modern restaurant — then what we are really talking about is the crypto wallet as one’s identity graph. To be sure, the most successful NFT projects have been PFPs like CryptoPunks, proving that there's a strong appetite for using NFTs as avatars for your online identity — for wanting your crypto wallet to say something definitive about you. This used to be a wallet, with your Blockbuster card, your family photos, and a punch card for Jamba Juice. It’s exhilarating to think that we can reclaim some of what we lost in the web2 era to Facebook logins and Square terminals.

You Are What You Eat

They say you are what you eat, but maybe — especially in cities like New York — that old adage should be tweaked to read: you are where you eat. In her short story “Son of Friedman,” the novelist Emma Cline describes the past-his-prime central character as eating at a dated restaurant where, “the food was not very good. Big steaks, creamed vegetables, drizzles of raspberry coulis over everything, all the food you ate back then because caring about what you ate wasn’t yet part of having money.” Despite the inherent cynicism of such a devastating line, it’s an accurate take — where we eat serves as a cultural signifier; a piece of ourselves we present to the world. In many cases, restaurants are now the new clubs, and in this current nightlife paradigm there's nothing more clout-affirming than dining at a place that's fully booked out three to six months in advance. But, to what end do you share this? Yes, you can post a pic of your rainbow empanadas on Instagram, or do one of those voice-over videos on TikTok detailing your entire meal and how hard it "slaps," but all that amounts to no more than a flex, and as we've learned flexing on social quickly becomes a turnoff.

What's more interesting is to consider the existing and future platforms, Blackbird chiefly among them, that will allow you to connect with restaurants and fellow diners alike in more meaningful and ongoing ways. Operators will be able to see how many times you’ve been to their establishment before, but, also, where else you’ve been and what it’s going to take to get a 5-star review out of you. This data today is both silo’d and, in fact, not actually in the end-user’s control. A dining digital wallet may become equally useful across other services, such as solving the cold-start problem we face when traveling to a new destination or, even, in a dating app.

Thinking again of the bellwether that is the music biz, I often wonder why Spotify — despite its ubiquity and the almost insidious way it has inserted itself into our lives — serves users such a solitary experience. Aside from making playlists for friends and would be romantic partners or texting a track to someone, the bulk of our activity on the platform seems limited to looking up music or discovering new artists via its spookily accurate algorithm. Why can't we give props to someone for what they’re listening to? How can users showcase their taste? For someone who remembers pouring through the pages of friends' Case Logic CD books to peruse their carefully arranged music collections, I'm amazed that Spotify hardly allows users to lean on their Starred tracks and other playlists as cultural signifiers.

Blackbird will do better around one’s restaurant wallet, one’s food-based identity. We certainly don’t want the next generation of dining applications to become ensnared in the trap of silos, and with decentralized social and the ready availability of the crypto wallet-powered identity graph they most likely won’t be. Food is culture, it's community, it's passion, and it's exciting to imagine the deepening and illuminating ways in which we'll engage each other — through niche social platforms, token-gated communities, and our personalized selves — as we all build the next layer of the Internet, and of the dining ecosystem as well.

James Jung VP, Content Blackbird Labs, Inc.

Blackbird will launch in select restaurants later this year. In the meantime, if you dug this, please give it a like! We’re also on Twitter and would love to hear from you there.

This rule does not apply, however, to the world of restaurants. Regardless of what technology we use to secure a table, dining out remains an analogue, IRL experience. Meaning the perks earned by the business we bring and the vibe we exude continue to be tangible, taste-able, and — most importantly — feel good-able. To earn an unexpected gift from the kitchen or a free round from your bartender/new best friend releases a flood of endorphins, and this accompanying joy lasts long after you’ve consumed whatever’s been offered up before you. In fact, earn enough of these perks, and the goodwill will stay top of mind until the next time you make a reservation — you’ve been seen, you’ve been appreciated, maybe you’ve even been woven into the restaurant’s narrative (because, yes, everything in life has a narrative; all we do is tell stories upon stories), so why not go back to the same place instead of risking things at an establishment where you’re a nameless and faceless customer, thus rendering the meal merely transactional? Loyalty engenders perks, perks engender more loyalty. Win-win. In a sluggish economy where “it costs five times more to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing customers,” the importance of this self-fulfilling loyalty loop cannot be ignored.

Ok, so perks are nice. But how do they stack up? Which are more coveted than others? And how do you earn them? Below, Blackbird’s irrefutable gospel on what restaurant perks matter most and the best way to go about getting ‘em (hint: it requires some work, but the indulgent, boozy kind of work we like best).

The Perks

1.) Access

We’ll begin with the obvious best because you can’t get any of the other perks without scoring this one first. As in, can you actually get into the place? Only the most regular of the regulars (or important of the importants) can make this happen, but it turns out there’s three unwritten tiers to access. They are as follows:

Tier 3: The restaurant recognizes your name — upon checkin — as one of their habitués and thus try to accommodate you. 

Tier 2: They recognize you before you give your name and therefore move you up the list. Great, that’s huge, and well-earned. 

Tier 1: You have the ability to call ahead — preferably via some sort of secret, unlisted number — to see if they can make room for you at a desired hour. This is reserved for only the super regulars — i.e. you’ve been coming here once a week for ages and you have a personal relationship with the staff.

2.) Personalization

Feeling like you’re part of the action begins with a little bit of recognition. Beyond knowing your name, and perhaps even your children’s names, some restaurants will go the extra mile for special occasions, like personalizing a menu with your name and then, once the meal has concluded, presenting it to you framed to commemorate the night. Lighter touches include the chef or manager to come by your table for a quick chat and thank you.

But our favorite personal touch by far is the off-menu item(s). If receiving a perk anoints you as a regular, than ordering an off-menu item is the self-actualizing lingua franca that allows one to immediately level up one’s status. Personalization, it could be noted, is a state of mind — of having acquired secret intel or moves only known to special people. At the iconic Four Season’s it was the plain baked potato with a side of olive oil. At the original P.J. Clarke’s it was ordering the home fries well-done.

3.) Something for Free

Ok, you’ve sat down, and lo and behold your server brings over a glass of something sparkling, a cocktail, or maybe some amuse bouche or other compliments of the kitchen (usually paired with a beverage). It’s unexpected and appreciated — you’re being taken care of. Tip for restaurateurs operating on a tight budget but still keen to give that little extra: make the gratis off-menu item an ingredient to something you regularly serve so that you’re not buying extra. Then again, the item could be big. Sometimes a super regular who everyone loves will swing by for a drink when they have reservations elsewhere, and not long after their martini arrives so does a steak au poivre.

4.) Swag

Swag. Mech. Parting gifts. Call it what you will, but the end result remains the same: sweet, sweet sweetness. Whether it’s a corduroy ball cap, a signed cookbook, or a long sleeve T with your favorite pizzeria’s logo emblazoned on the back, it feels damn good getting some restaurant rarities for keeps.

There’s also ephemeral swag, as in food. Just because you’re too satiated for desert doesn’t mean you’ll turn down something sweet to nibble on later, or even the next day. Freshly baked pastries and house-made chocolate have long been the parting gifts of fine dining establishments. Here in New York, Eleven Madison Park used to send diners home with granola for the next morning’s breakfast.

5.) BTS

No matter how many culinary TV shows we consume, there’s nothing like going behind the scenes at one of our favorite restaurants. Chefs might bring you back into the kitchen to see how it’s done. Maybe they’ll walk you through their charcuterie program or — in the case of Korean steakhouse Cote — take you downstairs to scope their dry-aging facility. At The NoMad, certain customers were ushered upstairs after dinner to the hotel’s roof deck, where candles, cigars, and a bar cart awaited, along with sweeping nocturnal views of the city.

We’re sure the above sounds nice, but how do you endear yourself to the staff in order to score such perks? Thankfully, the rules are relatively simple.

The Rules

1.) Be Cool

That means be friendly. Be NICE. Be relaxed. Be enthusiastic. Sure, drink, but don’t get sloppy drunk. Never be impatient — it’s a popular place, and thus busy. Same goes for demanding attention — you’re not the only diner here, so don’t monopolize your server.

2.) Sit at the Bar

Do this often. You really want to be a regular at this joint? Go two times a week. The best way to get perks, after all, is to just keep going — be the ball, Danny. The beauty of the bar is that the bartender is always standing right there in front of you, meaning the conversation can just keep rolling and soon enough — voila — you two are fast friends.

3.) Know When to Engage

That said, bartenders are busy, so choose your time to strike up a conversation — and when to keep quiet — wisely. If they’re mixing seven martinis it’s probably a good moment to hit pause on whatever witty recollection you were no doubt regaling them with.

4.) Remember Names

Restaurateurs are known to keep a Notes file on their phone with names, physical descriptions, and other salient details of their best customers so that they never fail to engage them in a personal way. You should do the same. Yes, know the owner and manager’s names, but know everyone else’s too. Just because you want to climb your way up the customer social rank doesn’t mean you get to snub the folks working for tips. This is the hospitality industry and it goes both ways, so be hospitable.

5.) Tip Well

The best restaurant experiences should never feel transactional. That said, it doesn’t hurt to make it rain when you’re trying to ingratiate yourself to an establishment. Our rule of thumb: always tip in excess of 22 percent. You’ll consider it money well spent the next time you waltz through the front door of an impossible to get into restaurant and directly up to your unreserved table.

Incorporate the advice above into your restaurant repertoire and you’ll be treated like the oyster-slurping, Negroni-swilling habitué you’d always hoped to be. At Blackbird, we’re working hard on creating a platform and network that will reward operators and diners alike for such loyalty.

James Jung VP, Content  Blackbird Labs, Inc.

And yet perhaps the most palpable and prophetic takeaway from 2022 is that people want change — the kids demand to put their stamp on this decade! There was the much touted and equally lampooned “vibe shift” supposedly ushered in by Zoomers. Fashion took cues from the indie sleaze aughts. The Dare dropped “Girls,” which both sounded derivative of DFA-era bloghouse and refreshingly new, as if each synth stab of its earworm beat pointed us toward a more messy and carefree future. But, what of restaurants?

Here now, if we throw reason out the window and dare to dream, our grab bag of ideas for 2023, some 53 of them. Should you be declaring your own New Year’s predictions — or resolutions for that matter — in the coming days and weeks, feel free to crib as needed.

• Normalize single seating dinners Because what’s more luxurious than knowing a table is yours for the entire evening?

• Bring on the one-dish restaurants Menus are so 2019.

• No more house-made ketchup We love you, chef, but we also love Heinz.

• Make room for more Keith McNallys Sometimes his Insta is full-on, but WYSIWYG and his staff always comes first.

• More buy-backs, less free dessert Guess what inspires loyalty? Being rewarded for your drinking with more drinking.

• Know your guests’ kids’ names The game is changing, and that means you gotta know the next generation of your customers.

• Every menu should be omakase-able Being along for the ride is the new Type A.

• Embrace walk-in culture We need more spontaneity.

• Make cinnamon rolls great again We can do better, we must do better.

• Employee name tags at 4-star restaurants And maybe some flair, too.

• Make a Spotify playlist We hear it’s a great restaurant discovery hack.

• Elevate the nacho! It seems like all manners of comfort food have been given the gourmet treatment, while the nacho — merely a blank canvas of tortilla chips ready to be topped by virtually any ingredients — has been left to wallow in sports bars. We say no more!

• More tortoni, more tartufo Less olive oil cake.

• Let your guests be part of the research and development process Offer loyal customers not-yet-on-the-menu dishes and incorporate their feedback.

• No more QR codes We want to see and hold menus again! Never underestimate the fun of a good old fashioned form factor.

• Move tipping to the start of the meal You get what you pay for? Could be interesting.

• Bring back bananas foster It’s like Mardi Gras in a skillet, what’s not to love?

• New dress code idea: No Jackets Allowed Nice blazer, boomer, but you’re killing the vibe in here.

• Arrive when you want, but be willing to pay up for it 30-minute arrival windows for $50 a pop — better than the gratis 15-minute grace period?

• Let regulars enter through the kitchen Even the non-mobsters!

• Someone open a Michelin-starred buffet restaurant… Yeah, your food’s that good? Prove it.

• Or just cancel Michelin stars altogether.   No, they don’t matter anymore.

• …And restaurant week, too It’s good for biz, but so are Groupons. We can do better.

• Celebrity chefs do their own Happy Meals Forget the Monopoly Man, let’s get David Chang’s take on chicken nuggets and fries.

• Make fondue groovy again Come on, it’s like Swiss Queso, and there’s a good chance your parents conceived you after having split one.

• No more skimpy lobster rolls If lobsters are indeed the cockroaches of the sea, then why are we portioning them like truffles? Chop, chop! Load ‘em up!

• Retire the word ‘foodie.’
  Ok, Millennial…

• Make food photography less precious, more messy Life is messy, and so is good food. Enough with the phony Instagram aesthetic, already.

• Put an ‘add caviar’ upsell on every dish If these ‘20s are going to roar, caviar will play a role.

• Early bird specials for parents with young kids That 5 p.m. turn is easier than it looks.

• Dim Sum carts for everything. Chinese food or otherwise, there’s nothing wrong with a rolling cart and servers slinging delicious fare.

• Consider the pretzel bunAnd don’t skimp on the salt.

• Three words: Whisky Sour Renaissance.
  Move over Espresso Martini, the real alcoholic’s here to play.

• Keep the white table cloth trend going No, despite what the hirsute hipsters who believe they discovered Brooklyn will tell you, there’s nothing passé about crisp linens.

• Offer a Turbo Turn high-speed option Sometimes three courses in 45 minutes is exactly the right pace.

• Edison bulbs be gone! We get it, you’re ‘unique.’ But then stop complaining about your margins if you’re paying $12 for a light bulb that lasts a month.

• Restaurant Captains must wear full military regalia With brass buttons and epaulettes!

• Turn more foods into dumplings Why, yes, we will have another order of spicy rigatoni dumplings.

• Up the bathroom mint game Let’s put as much thought into our bathrooms as we do the dining room.

• Bring back late-night dining 11 p.m. is the most underrated seating of all

• Gentleman’s pour obligatory for wine by the glass Like the buy back, the more you hook us up, the more we drink.

• Matchbooks, please Whether or not smoking is back, the restaurant matchbook remains timeless.

• Cookbooks! Merch! Take.👏 Our.👏 Money.👏 Restaurants are entertainment, and we want to support our favorite teams.

• It’s time for the music-food festival with band-chef pairings If James Murphy already owns a restaurant, can’t we get some live LCD Soundsystem to go with our pork buns?

• Food, but make it a dating app We’ve already put the business model together…

• Universal gratis sparkling water Because we want to feel European without paying for it.

• Replace brunch with a TikTok’ers-Only seating They’re good for business, but bad for lighting. Maybe we could batch process them?

• Valet stroller parking Ever been to the Upper West Side on a weekend?

• Country clubs for folks under 40 Update the cuisine (but keep the shrimp cocktail) and replace golf and tennis with pickleball. Ka-ching 💵

• Enact regulation making Lazy Susans mandatory on round tables We’ve literally already invented this wheel, and it works great.

• More high-low collabs The world needs a 4 Charles x Upside Pizza Burger.

• A chain of 50 cent slice joints Brought to you by 50 Cent, of course.

• Retire shoestring fries permanently The grip is terrible on these unwieldily rascals.

Formula One — the global motor-racing competition that ranks as the ne plus ultra of jet set sports — has finally exploded in the United States. It only took 75 years to do so.

The racing series’ rapid rise in popularity can be credited, in a large part, to Netflix’s Drive to Survive. Now in its fourth season, the 40-episode docudrama lifts the hood on the complex sport’s seemingly endless intricacies in the form of rules, tech, gamesmanship, and major players — from team owners to pit crews to the 20 charismatic drivers who put their lives on the line every time they hit the gas. According to a Morning Consult survey, fandom is up 33 percent in the U.S. over the past two years, with over half those folks attributing their new F1 interest to the Netflix series. Add the Las Vegas Grand Prix debuting in 2023, ESPN inking a massive three-year broadcasting deal, and American driver Logan Sergeant signing with Williams Racing, and it’s a good time to be an American F1 fan.

What excites me most about F1, however, is how ripe the sport is for the NFT marketplace. NFTs represent a way for deeper fan engagement. Current F1 NFTs can get fans into private Discords or IRL meet and greets with drivers; you can own faithful 3D renderings of classic cars (I recommend Nigel Mansell’s iconic Williams Renault) and other historic paraphernalia; you can even customize your own digital chassis and race it across simulators featuring laser traced tracks that replicate every ripple in the tarmac of the real thing, from Monza to Austin. And I am sure, down the line, there will be digital collectibles from the races themselves a la NBA Top Shot (one of the most successful NFT examples, IMO). A 90-minute F1 race is fleeting — the smell of gasoline dissipates, the scream of V6 engines fades, the spectators clear the stands — but through creative NFTs we can extend the experience long after the checkered flag is waved.

Some of this might sound a bit far-fetched, but it’s starting to work. Oracle Red Bull Racing’s private, token-gated Discord has over 16,000 active users. Motorsport Multiverse was recently valued at $400,000,000 (and partnered with Motorsport Images, whose websites receive 62 million monthly unique visitors). Even the Delta Time video game debacle, while by no means a success story, was a failure of creators Animoca Brands ability to renew their F1 license rather than any dip in demand (in 2019, their 1-1-1 diamond-encrusted digital race car sold for $110,000).

F1 and restaurants probably feel like two disparate worlds, with zero overlap in a Venn diagram, but turns out there is a stronger connection than one might think. Like attending a Grand Prix, dining at a great restaurant is an inherently ephemeral experience. It’s visual, sensual, often expensive, maybe even exotic, and sometimes packed with drama. There’s tradition, too, a sense of immersive entertainment, and the feeling of being connected to a greater community that extends beyond your dinner party. Think of chefs as the star drivers, the diligent waitstaff like the pit crew, FOH and BOH the behind-the-scenes…ok, so maybe I’m getting a bit carried away, but you get the picture. Once you pay the check, however — poof! — it’s all over; a unique, non-fungible experience confined to your memory.

And yet it needn’t be. Through NFTs, restaurant brands can engage deeper with their customers, all while extending the magic of a memorable night out. For years, people collected matchbooks, pens, and even menus from their favorite restaurants. With NFTs, we can not only replicate that concept, but improve upon it in the shape of one-of-a-kind digital collectibles that have actual real world value. Think access to private Discord channels with renowned chefs,  VIP text services, and standing reservations at your favorite spots. We can deploy cookbooks, merch, tickets to private dinners or destination food festivals where you can connect with a passionate community of like-minded food lovers.

These are exciting times to be in the world of food tech, and we believe hospitality NFTs are the path forward for the industry.

Jeff Blanchette Senior Software Engineer Blackbird Labs, Inc.

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The joke, of course, is Elaine being driven mad in the pursuit of a reward she doesn’t even want — a free sub from a place whose food she can only describe as “crap.” Seinfeld’s appeal has always been the outlandish way its four main characters act. But in this particular case, Elaine’s behavior is completely relatable. Who of us hasn’t been ensnared by the prospect of a freebie, if only we make the requisite amount of purchases first?

As Gaurav Sables explains, Elaine falls victim to what economists call Transaction Utility Theory. Developed by Nobel Prize Winning Economist Richard Thaler, Transaction Utility Theory argues that consumers can derive satisfaction from an actual transaction in and of itself, particularly one they believe to be a good deal. Sometimes the deal is indeed good — a steal of a car, a deeply discounted home. Sometimes, however, it is not so good, as was the case with Elaine and her free sub.

But What About The Form Factor?

What the Seinfeld episode misses, however, is the amount of pleasure human’s derive from collecting things. In the digital age, we’ve moved passed stamp cards and other analogue loyalty programs. Instead, we have apps for that, in which points are seamlessly (and almost invisibly) accrued into an account. Sure, a free cup of coffee at Starbucks is a decent perk, but where’s the real pleasure in racking up those points when you’ve got nothing physical or visual to show for it?

From coins to stamps to baseball cards (which recently enjoyed a pandemic boom), people love amassing collections. It’s estimated that up to 40 percent of Americans have some kind of collection. The psychological factors explaining this phenomenon are myriad. Some people collect for a sense of history. Some for access to a social network. Still others simply take pleasure in the control factor of building and curating an enviable collection. Status can be at play. A sign of taste or intelligence, too. Remember flipping through a Case Logic book to admire your CDs? Or how about taking pride in the multicolored spines of tomes lining your bookshelves? Suffice it to say, collecting things we love is baked into human brain chemistry.

To see what we’ve lost to modernity, let’s consider some form factors of historically famous loyalty programs. Be its stamps, box tops, or punch cards, loyalty programs have been around in some way, shape, or form since the dawn of mass consumer culture. S&H Green Stamps pioneered perhaps the oldest such program. Launched in 1896, the stamps — doled out at supermarket registers and gas stations, and which could be redeemed for goods in an accompanying catalogue — became so popular that by the 1960s S&H was issuing more stamps than the USPS. Betty Crocker (that sly old fox) would create the most successful loyalty program — at least in terms of longevity — when they introduced their box top point system on package goods in 1929. The program ran until 2006. Department stores and cereal brands followed suit (as any child of the ‘70s or ’80s can attest). Half of the fun of earning these loyalty perks was having something physical to show for it!

What’s Old Is New

While the programs above have been phased out, their inherent form factors needn’t be — especially at the dawn of web3, where tokenized assets can have truly compelling visuals. Now add real world value, and the collecting of these tokens becomes even more interesting. While Elaine was caught up in the bum deal of scoring a soggy sub, loyalty perks — part of the CRM strategy of any healthy brand — can indeed trigger dopamine hits, and be a perfect way for consumers to visualize the value their loyalty is creating. In terms of the dining industry, imagine a wallet that creatively reflects the points, prestige, and different levels of access you’ve earned at your favorite restaurants. Whether such tokens get you into a hot restaurant, earn you an off-menu item or a buy back from the bartender, or serve as your ticket into a cool food and wine festival, the form factor of each should be as magical as the experience itself.

Without playing our hand just yet, I can say this is one of the things we’re working on here at Blackbird — a visual way of collecting restaurant perks that will ultimately make the dining and restaurant discovery experience just that much more fun.

Ben Leventhal Founder + CEOBlackbird Labs, Inc.

For the sake of this post, when I talk about skiing, I’m talking about the resorts of the Austrian Alps. My father grew up in the Tirol, the Austrian state with the most skiing, and from 2018 through 2020 (while living in neighboring Switzerland) I explored much of region’s resorts. Today, I’ll be focusing on the Arlberg. Comprised of five villages, spanning two states, webbed by 187 miles of in-bounds runs (the off-piste could well triple the terrain), and serviced by 89 lifts, the Arlberg is one of the world’s largest ski resorts.

It’s also, in comparison to its American counterparts, one of the world’s cheapest. All the aforementioned stats can be skied for a single-day lift ticket cost of 67 euros, or just under $70. Vail, Colorado, on the other hand, will charge $275 for single day tickets purchased day of during peak season this winter (yes, they are significantly cheaper if bought well in advance, but this eliminates the spontaneity of a powder day). Most big American ski resorts are no different. From Aspen to Park City, Steamboat to Jackson Hole, expect to fork over north of $200 at the ticket window.

Let’s dispose with the obvious first: Whether you prefer skiing in America or Europe is a matter of personal taste. On the whole, European resorts tend to be grander in scale, history, and charm, while their American peers (especially those out West) often boast better grooming, wider runs, and more reliable snowfall.

What isn’t up for debate is price. Austrian skiing (as well as European skiing in general) is far more affordable than American skiing. Why is that? Simple, because Austrian ski resorts are DECENTRALIZED.

In America, one company owns the resort. Sure, they might lease the land on which the actual trails are cut (typically from the National Forest Service), but everything else — from the lifts to the ski school to the rental shops to the cafeterias slinging severely overpriced fast food — falls under the single umbrella of the parent company. A monopoly, if you will. Or Disney World, minus the mouse but retaining the captive audience.

In recent years, the rising supermarket-ification of American skiing has only compounded these problems. Five companies own 71 of North America’s biggest ski resorts, with Vail laying claim to 31 of those. Season pass deals like Epic and Ikon are offered each winter and grant pass-holders access to all ski resorts within the company’s portfolio. This has only led to further problems, with a greater influx of skiers descending en masse to these resorts during holidays and often over-stressing the existing infrastructure. The lifts and staff simply cannot keep up with the demand. Rather than ski all day, many American skiers and snowboarders now find themselves stuck in comically gargantuan lift lines like the ones pictured below.

When considering all this, it could be argued that the greatest threat to American skiing isn’t climate change, but the one-two punch of stratospheric lift ticket prices and the corporations that keep jacking up said prices.

“It’s a theme park,” says Daniel Keiper-Knorr, a founding partner at VC firm Speedinvest. As a former ski instructor and a life-long fan of the Arlberg (his grandfather bought an apartment in Lech in the late 1960s), Daniel is mystified by the American model — at least from a consumer standpoint. “It’s perfectly organized skiing; for the supplier, not the guest.”

In Austria, Daniel tells me, things are done differently. This has a lot to do with how the sport arose in the Alps, where farming villages, not purpose-built resorts designed to sell vacation homes, are where skiing took hold.

“Ski resorts were not built by the drawing board here,” he says. “They grew organically.” He explains how these Alpine farming communities, many dating back to the 16th century, realized that skiing could add an extra revenue stream during the dead months of winter, and with the arrival of tourists — particularly Brits, who brought with them an aura of glamor — in the early 1920s, up went lifts, farm houses and post offices became hotels and restaurants, and shepherds and cheesemakers began teaching foreigners how to make parallel turns.

In terms of a decentralized model, it’s the ski lifts that prove most fascinating. In America, one company owns all the ski lifts at a resort. In Austria, there is no single owner, but rather hundreds, even — in the case of the interconnected Arlberg — thousands. This has to do with the fact that much of the land on which lifts are built and on which people ski down is farmland, which can be owned by multiple families.

Or, as Daniel puts it: “Typically the income of the lift is shared by the people who own the land over which it spans.”

In other words, a cluster of say 12 families might own five lifts on one side of the mountain, while another cluster owns lifts on the opposite side. Interestingly enough, not only does this lead to myriad owners (“all under one unified brand”), but it also creates healthy competition among lift operators that, in turn, ensures they are constantly upgrading their chairs and gondolas — good news for the consumer.

“If one starts to invest that triggers a chain reaction,” Daniel explains. “It forces the others to invest as well.”

For instance, last season in the Arlberg the old Madlochbahn double chair in Zürs (one of the resort’s five villages) was upgraded to a high-speed six-pack. This meant a far greater number of skiers and snowboarders would come down the Madloch run into the hamlet of Zug — too many people for the existing double chair at the bottom of the trail to handle. To avoid creating a bottleneck, the lift owners in Zug put in a state-of-the-art gondola linking guests up into Lech.

This same logic applies to the independently-owned restaurants and hotels in the resort. When I ask Daniel why they don’t all charge more for such excellent infrastructure, thus raising prices to the levels of American ski resorts, he laughs and says, “Because the next ski resort is just a valley away.”

Herein lies the rub: the small country of Austria has over 400 ski resorts, all of them locally owned; there is no one behemoth — a la Vail — that can gobble up the best mountains and charge exorbitant fees for access.

The other interesting facet in play are the ski schools. American resorts have one ski school per resort. There are no other options. Austrian resorts have many. For years in the Arlberg, each of the five villages had their own ski school. But today, following a lawsuit that hinged on the fact that these ski schools didn’t offer full-time employment benefits to their instructors, there are now many. Some might have 300 instructors, while another might have five. One outfit could specialize in beginners, the other off-piste guiding and heli-skiing. All this has resulted in affordable ski lessons for the consumer. For example, a full-day private lesson in Vail costs nearly $1,200, while a similar private lesson in Lech clocks in at $470.

“It’s basic economic theory,” Daniel says, referring to the 20 to 30 ski schools offering services across the Arlberg. “A monopoly can ask any price; the more fractionalized the market is, the more the true price emerges — what people are willing to pay equals the maximum the supplier can ask.”

In our opinion, The 100-year old Austrian ski model shows that decentralization works in business — and in web3! Whether we’re optimizing the existing Internet to become more user-centric, or rebuilding it anew, the principle remains: web3 start-ups are creating a world in which consumers benefit from fair prices, and independent operators/suppliers have the opportunity to build their own brands and connect with their growing community.

In terms of restaurants, the idea gets a bit trickier. Like web3, the restaurant business is also decentralized. This is a good thing for consumers, as a decentralized system promotes creativity and diversity. However, it plays out less well for restaurant owners and operators, which helps to explain why no one has any price leverage. Additionally, a key question for Blackbird is how do we — a web3 brand focused on connecting restaurants and diners closer than ever before — operate within this decentralized world of dining without homogenizing it, which is the last thing we want.

There is a solve for the issues and questions above, one in which both the restaurant and the diner benefit, and we’re busy finding the best solution. All of which sounds pretty wunderbar to us.

James Jung VP, Content  Blackbird Labs, Inc.