Longtime New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells published his final column this week. In it, he argues that the steady creep of technology into restaurants is ruining hospitality. Restaurants, he laments, “are turning into vending machines with chairs.”
While that last part is clearly an exaggeration (they also have tables!), it’s true that technology has allowed for more self-service in restaurants. Thanks to online reservation systems, QR codes and mobile payments, customers have fewer and fewer reasons to interact with staff, assuming they even set foot in the restaurant at all.
This has in many cases put more distance between restaurants and their guests, at least physically. This is not always ideal. But Wells’ piece, like so much discourse about restaurants and technology these days, holds restaurants to an unfair standard.
While banks, retailers, hotels and airlines sped ahead with technology for decades, restaurants lagged behind. The mom-and-pops that make up the backbone of the industry couldn’t afford tech, let alone spend time learning how to use it. Plus, tech and hospitality were not, at first glance, a natural fit.
It would ultimately take a once-in-a-century pandemic to push restaurants into the future. In that heady spring of 2020, the industry made years’ worth of technological progress in weeks, sometimes days. Did it have an impact on hospitality as we knew it? Probably. Was there any other option?
Meanwhile, imagine calling an airline to book a flight, or standing in line at the bank to withdraw cash. Humanity was excised from both experiences long ago, but no one complains, because it was never really about that to begin with.
Restaurants, on the other hand, still have to bear the weight of being society’s last bastion of hospitality—“one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human,” as Wells put it. But little thought is given to the costs of preserving that experience in a world that no longer accommodates it.
The pandemic may have brought tech into restaurants. But it was the aftermath that has proven why it was needed. Historic increases in the cost of labor, food, rent and construction, combined with sweeping changes in consumer habits, have forced restaurants to adjust how they hire, how they market themselves and what they serve.
At the same time, customers’ expectations have generally stayed the same. When they go to a restaurant, they still demand a fast, fresh, decently priced meal served by smiling staff in a comfortable environment.
If tech can help restaurants navigate that challenge, then I’m all for it. And it doesn’t have to come at the expense of good service. Just ask Danny Meyer, the guy who literally wrote the book on modern hospitality.
“I’ll never forget when Shake Shack first started to utilize kiosks in our very first restaurant,” the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group told me in an interview last year. “One of the concerns we had was … what would this do to our ability to have a real human interaction with somebody?”
What Meyer learned was that by offloading some orders to kiosks, “that freed up a whole person to spend the entire time in the dining room with guests, offering hospitality.”
That right there is as good a model as any for the future of hospitality. It’s up to restaurants to make it happen. The least the rest of us can do is cheer them on.