The restaurant industry is in a scary place, one that fairly guarantees heartbreak. Restaurant traffic was “flat” at the end of 2019 and “sluggish” the year before that, according to The NPD Group, a research firm that tracks how often we spend money at five types of businesses: fine dining, midscale, casual dining, retail, and, the biggest category, with 62 percent of the pie, quick-service restaurants (QSRs). Quick-service and retail qualified as “relative bright spots,” according to NPD, and casual places managed not to endure a fifth straight year of losses. But full-service restaurants dragged everything down: “Visit declines in the full-service restaurant segment continue to prevent the industry from growing.”..
Chefs and restaurateurs on both coasts take a dim view of the future, not because of the numbers but because of their own experience, going to work and talking to their peers: Too many restaurants open and then close too fast, after months, not years. And closures are an equal-opportunity phenomenon, nationwide. If you live someplace that grows or raises the food these city chefs sell, you might want to make sure your local Applebee’s is still open before you pile the family in the car and head over—the chain just announced a new growth strategy, but it centers on catering and delivery, not restaurants...
Experienced restaurateurs say it’s a paradigm shift—new people, new sources of money, new expectations, most of them unrealistic, and a new generation of diners who don’t consider seats and service a priority. As more businesses look for more ways to feed us, today’s definition of “restaurant” may take its place on the shelf right next to the typewriter.
Restaurants are an at-risk population even in more stable times, in part because their owners embody the American ethos of the independent, can-do spirit, which means they have no safety net. The National Restaurant Association (NRA) says that 70 percent of America’s restaurants are owned by individuals, not operating companies or venture capitalists—people who don’t have the kind of deep pockets a bigger company might...Lots more details and discussion at this well written article. Via Neatorama.
Venture capital is throwing money at the end of restaurants. CloudKitchens, a start-up from ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, has received $400 million from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund, according to The New York Times. Reef Technology, a Miami start-up, has funding from SoftBank, the Tokyo-based multinational whose previous, oft-troubled investments include Uber and WeWork. And Kitopi (short for Kitchen Operation Innovation), based in Dubai and New York City, is about to spend $60 million to expand its U.S. business.
The money’s for ghost kitchens, volume operations designed to cook and deliver multiple cuisines from a single, massive kitchen. The latest iteration, from Kitopi, is the ghost kitchen as remote franchise, contracting with a brick-and-mortar restaurant to make and deliver its dishes. Whatever the model, big money is banking on a stay-at-home future. The old-school argument about who wants what for dinner will be resolved by a driver who pulls up to your home with one Chinese meal, one Italian, one vegan, and one hot-chicken plate...
As our homes turn into sophisticated entertainment centers, the old notion of a sad sack slumped on the couch with cold pizza (offspring of the sad sack slumped on the couch with a foil-wrapped TV dinner) has given way to a new reality. We can order a great meal from a favorite restaurant via a delivery service, or from meal suppliers that didn’t exist 10 years ago—or did, but have since upped the quality of what they sell...
Portable food appeals, in our multi-tasking culture, because linear behavior—I drive, I park, I order, I eat, and then I go home to my landline phone—has been replaced by a polyphasic model. Nobody’s sorry to eat and run anymore, but rather, proud of it...
“The rise of ‘placeless’ restaurants,” the report notes, referring to every variation on the ghost kitchen model, “will challenge and redefine the concept of what a restaurant is.” Get ready for restaurants without borders...
If this were a conversation about a landmark building, futurists would complain about empty nostalgia, while preservationists stressed the importance of protecting our history. Since it’s about endangered restaurants, futurists point out that face-to-face interaction is merely one of myriad ways people connect, and we can and should embrace great food wherever it is, while preservationists talk about the civilizing nature of a meal taken with friends and family, possibly without cellphones, away from the distractions of daily life.
It’s democracy in action. Or it’s the end of the world as we know it. Too soon to tell.
"The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of its DNA revealed that it was neither animal, plant, fungus nor any recognized type of protozoan — that it in fact fell far outside any of the known large categories for classifying complex forms of life (eukaryotes). Instead, this flagella-waving oddball stands as the first member of its own “supra-kingdom” group, which probably peeled away from the other big branches of life at least a billion years ago."More at Quanta magazine.
A 50 cent flea market find has been certified as a rare 1776 pewter Continental Currency dollar valued at $97,500. The buyer spotted it in a junk box full of assorted coins at a market in Northern France in June 2018. He was curious about this unusual American piece and agreed to shell out half a euro (56 American cents)...More info at The History Blog.
Both obverse and reverse were designed by Benjamin Franklin. The inscriptions and iconography on the obverse were meant to be read as a rebus. Fugio, meaning “I flee” in Latin, connects to the sun which casts shadow on the sundial. “Mind your business” didn’t mean what it means now. It’s literal, as in “see to your business interests.” All together, the obverse advises that time is fleeting, so mind your business. The reverse is an appeal for unity among states rendered as a linked chain.
Unable to secure anything like the amount of silver necessary for coinage issue, the Continental Currency coin never was circulated. They went with paper money instead, and it was an unmitigated disaster of devaluation and counterfeiting.
And with these unprecedented temperatures [in Antarctica], the algae that normally thrive in freezing water and lie dormant across the continent’s snow and ice are now in full bloom and cover the Antarctic Peninsula with blood-red, flower-like spores...
This red-pigmented algae, also known as Chlamydomonas nivalis, has the potential to jumpstart a feedback loop of warming and melting... “Because of the red-crimson color, the snow reflects less sunlight and melts faster. As a consequence, it produces more and more bright algae.”
"Blood red” snow has been observed many times before. Aristotle noticed this phenomenon in the third century B.C., reports Brandon Specktor of Live Science. In 1818, Captain John Ross found pink snow during his expedition through the Northwest Passage...
But this type of algae is actually a member of the green algae family. It won’t turn red until the weather warms up, the cell’s carotenoids—the same pigment that gives pumpkins and carrots their orange hue—absorb heat and protect the algae from ultraviolet light...
Amish girls have no way of knowing if it's a romantic candlelit dinner or just a regular dinner.
Kids want to grow up and become more powerful. Adults miss being young and having less responsibility.
If reincarnation is real, then maybe flies and other bugs are purposely annoying because they want to get killed and get reincarnated as something better.
The older you get, the more you realize that socks are actually a decent present.
Going to McDonald’s and ordering a salad is like going to a prostitute and asking for a hug.
The first person to make ice cream probably ate all the ice cream in the world (at the time).
If Satan punishes bad people, he must be good.
If kids are watching too much TV, mute it and put on subtitles so they will be forced to read.
Aliens in UFOs probably lock their doors when they go past Earth.
Not having insurance is like an opposite lottery, you gain a little bit of money every day with the possibility of losing big.
When you’re happy you hear the melody; when you’re sad you hear the lyrics.
Either someone will watch you die, somebody will find your dead body, or your body will never be found.
The first humans sent on a voyage to another solar system might be greeted by humans who were sent later using faster space ships.
A person wearing a suit in a room of people wearing t-shirts is probably the most important person in the room. Similarly, a person wearing a t-shirt in a room full of people wearing suits is probably the most important person in that room.
We live in an age when some people will get antivirus material for their computers, but not for their children.
Characters in movies never have to adjust the driver’s seat when they buy or steal a car.
It would be cool if, when you die, you could see the top five times you almost died.
At the same time your parents were watching you getting older, you were watching them getting older – but you didn’t know it.
In the future when sex robots are perfected, the only way to know whether your partner is human or a robot will be to show them a set of pictures and ask which show airplanes.
Before social media, all this shit just stayed in people’s heads.
Everyone wonders where we go after we die, but not as many people wonder where we were before we were born.
Someone developed the internet without the benefit of the internet.
If you think law enforcement officers are bad because a few of them are bad, then you have the same mindset as those who think all Muslims are bad because some are terrorists.
A high-school student who learns calculus knows more math than Isaac Newton did at the same age.
We have all at one point kicked a pregnant lady.
The whole point of a book’s cover is so that people can judge it.
The nicer the house, the harder it is to find the kitchen garbage can.
You can’t write the digits of pi backwards.
People are so amazed by the fact that every snowflake is different, but nobody cares that every potato is unique.
As soon as you start having kids, you have to go back to asking your parents if you can go out.
"Come to an all-night prayer vigil to welcome the ember months," read a text from my mother."The Oxford lexicographers have updated the dictionary with 29 Nigerian words, recognising the "unique and distinctive contribution to English as a global language" of Africa's most populous country...
It was an August ritual she had reminded me about severally.
"I have something to do next tomorrow," I texted back from the barbing salon.
"You sef," came her instant reply, half-irritated, half-rebuking.
