Our annual CREATE conference was full of all the things you want and expect from a restaurant conference — smart operators talking about what they’re doing, amusing anecdotes from celebrities we hire for that purpose, plenty of networking — although in the case of CREATE it’s a fairly intimate setting, and this year it was at the beautiful Terranea Resort on the Los Angeles coast. The ocean views were grand and flocks of pelicans flew overhead, which was awfully cool. Some people spotted whales.
But I was struck by the overarching theme that emerged from the event — when customers go to restaurants, they want to interact with their fellow humans.
We, and probably you, talk about this a lot, often when referring to “experiential dining,” and I think it’s becoming increasingly important.
Robert Byrne, senior director for consumer research at our sibling research company, Technomic, gave us a mid-year snapshot of the restaurant industry as a whole at CREATE, but he also touched on a rebellion going on among the digital natives who were born after 1995. Members of GenZ don’t know of a time when pretty much all of the information in the world wasn’t at their fingertips. They have nearly always had nearly instant access to everything, such as any TV show or movie, and whatever food, clothing, or toys they wanted delivered to their door.
Increasingly, that kind of convenience isn’t interesting to them.
Byrne pointed to a move by younger consumers toward “tech minimalism” and “friction maxxing” — switching from smart phones to flip phones to prevent the mentally unhealthy habit of doom scrolling, and avoiding QR codes, kiosks, and AI voice recognition software.
This is understandable. Their psyches were smashed as blossoming young adults by the isolation of the pandemic and, in many ways, they’re still trying to figure out what it means to be an adult human being.
And in many ways, we all are.
I wrote about my own re-entry into the world, after 13 months of isolation, back in 2021.
That’s when I started to become a regular at restaurants and bars. Before then, I did my job as a food & beverage trend reporter by going to all the new spots in New York City that I assumed my audience was interested in learning about.
But once I was fully vaccinated and working from home, I found myself going to the same bars in my Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope over and over again, not because of the food or drink, or even the ambience or lighting or service, but because of the people — the ones who worked there even more than the other regular customers. And they didn’t care that I was a food writer. They liked me because I showed up, tipped reasonably well, and was an engaging conversationalist.
And I liked them because they knew me.
I’ve since moved to a completely different part of Brooklyn — in the deep south of the borough on the Sheepshead Bay-Brighton Beach border — and I’ve repeated the pattern. So the guy who usually works the counter at Randazzo’s Clam Bar doesn’t need to ask what I want when I sit down. He just sets a “bowl o’ red” in front of me — Manhattan clam chowder (if I go with friends I get the legendary calamari).
The bartenders at Wheeler’s, a beloved, big-shouldered neighborhood bar and restaurant whose POS system is two cash registers, know I’m going to get Buffalo Trace on the rocks, and apologize when they run out.
At Ador, a new place on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, the owner, Radu, greets me with a kiss on the cheek.
George, the beverage director at a new Georgian restaurant in Sheepshead Bay called Rtveli, tells me I’m part of the family as he facilitates my education about Georgian wines and other beverages — it turns out that Georgia, the former Soviet republic, has a longstanding lemonade tradition.
I asked my AI about this, and it spit out an 1,100-word commentary about how in our day-to-day lives “human interaction has become a burden to minimize” — email instead of phone calls, online meetings instead of real ones.
“The very thing we're eliminating everywhere else — unhurried human attention — is what we're paying for when we dine out.”
It concluded: “The meal is the excuse; the human interaction is the product.”
AI sees it, and I’m pretty sure you see it, too.