Bomb The Restaurant Industry: How Food Is Having Its Napster Moment
It’s the year 2000.
You’re sitting in front of your Pentium III Packard Bell eating Tombstone french bread pizza and waiting for Hybrid Theory to finish downloading while you watch a pirated copy of The Matrix and hoping Tower Records will finally give you a call back for an interview.
What you don’t realize is that while you eventually will get that job at the record store your teenage heart was set on, the way in which you consumed media was already an indicator of how short lived that career choice would be.
Ironically, after mocking Metallica as old dudes that just didn’t get it, it was actually you that didn’t understand it was already over. The music industry bubble had popped. And while it would be another six years before the fall of Tower Records, a huge blow to traditional brick and mortar retail, the writing was on the wall.
The first shot of the digital revolution had been fired.
Fast forward a couple decades and the rockstars had become cooks and cooks were now the rockstars.
Kitchen Confidential. Chopped. Iron Chef and a weekly walk of shame through Flavortown. Replace Carson Daly & Ryan Seacrest with Alex Guarnaschelli and Anthony Bourdain and food had suddenly become the new rock n roll. There was money to be made in an industry that allowed one to keep the same hard and fast lifestyle while continuing to find satisfaction producing a product that required exceptional discipline, passion and creativity.
I worked a few shifts at a wine and tapas bar in San Francisco shortly before COVID hit. As the chef and I were getting to know one another I briefly mentioned that I was a freelance writer. He had said something that at the time I found to be interesting but as we have seen how the market turned this year it was definitely a no shit moment.
“I wish I was a writer because you can’t serve food through the internet.”
Yes, I understand that one cannot physically shove a hamburger through a T1 line. And yes, ghost kitchens and delivery exist in the age of the internet. Which I suppose is the closest us kitchen folk will get to remote work. Although, what I believe he was referring to, was the ability to monetize and sell an infinite number of times a product he only had to create once.
What causes that disconnect? Why was it that such a creative career as being a chef was tied to such a toxic industry? Long hours. Shit pay. A wildly volatile business with no real apparent benefit save for glory and easy access to a life of excess.
Not exactly sustainable.
COVID has shined a light on all the gunk of the industry. And the cracks in the entire food system. Mixing a pandemic into an already exhausted and stretched work force and clearly there has to be a better way.
After Napster, bands no longer needed major labels – or any label really – to push their product.
And despite Old Man Ulrich’s stubbornness, the proverbial toothpaste would never be put back in the tube. Because if it wasn’t Napster, it would be KaZaA or LimeWire or Morpheus or FTP servers on IRC.
The more legitimate MP3 dot com, and later PureVolume further democratized distribution. Artists could market themselves on blogs and MySpace and Tumblr. They had YouTube and Twitter. No longer did you need the culture vultures and suits at major corporations to co-sign for an audience to take you seriously. An artist could control their own narrative and craft a distribution strategy that fit their unique vision.
A level of control and agency rarely, if ever, afforded to young artists. In addition to the ability to create and publish at speeds you could never achieve before through traditional channels.
2005 saw Jeff Rosenstock’s Quote Unquote Records become the first label driven entirely by donations. There weren’t any physical pressings of records. The Long Island record label’s entire catalog only existed as digital downloads. There were no t-shirts or merchandise for sale. Instead, fans could download stencils to create their own.
Remember how crazy the mainstream radio personalities thought Radiohead were when they let the listener name their price for 2007’s In Rainbows?
Fast forward to 2019 and look at Thom Yorke’s collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson on the visual album, Anima, which saw a release on Netflix. Sturgil Simpson’s Sound & Fury also saw a release through Netflix. Not only are they not crazy but we celebrate the fuck out of the artistic vision of innovators pushing the ways in which we consume content.
I remember being a teen and logging on to some server where people would trade live Deftones bootlegs. I had so many shows downloaded. I couldn’t tell you why except that I thought it was cool. I thought it was even cooler when I had heard that the Deftones didn’t really take issue with it. Maybe not officially, but I liked to believe that at least they understood the community aspect of tape trading and fandom. They understood that ultimately this community engagement was an asset.
The band understood the mixtape culture that made Metallica the biggest band in the world. The act of dubbing a tape and passing on to a friend was what allowed their fan base to grow like wildfire in the 80s and 90s. And their perceived contempt for the peer-to-peer community was viewed as a betrayal of a passionate and loyal fan base. The perception being that the monetary value of royalties remained the main incentive and metric instead of recognizing and embracing the changes in how their fans engaged with and consumed content.
Younger, hungrier bands took advantage of how easy it was to reach an audience and erased the financial risk of listening to a new band. Bands were no longer cut off at the knee if their local scene didn’t resonate with what they were doing or if the scene didn’t even exist at all.
You could build online and then physically go where your audience was.
The cost of production was pennies. You recorded on DAWs (most likely with pirated or open source software )and immediately exported and uploaded MP3s to the internet channel of your choosing.
By cutting out the naysayers and gatekeepers, broke and hungry artists were going direct to consumer from their bedroom. The internet had become the ultimate equalizer. Everyone gets an at bat now.
Everyone.
And the more eyes on content meant a greater conversion from listener to fan. The more fans meant the more people willing to pay for your shows once you hit the road. Live performances were the true game after all. Tickets prices inflated because while you could replicate an MP3 an infinite number of times there are only so many tickets to a particular show available.
There is a reason people go to multiple nights of the same tour. Every single live performance would be unique. Sure you could bootleg it, but it would never quite be the full experience.
There’s no school that will walk us through this. There is no ladder to climb or doors to break down.
This is on us to collaborate and pave a path forward.
We no longer need the right resume with the right restaurants or chefs we’ve worked under to become a player. We don’t even need to stay within the confines of what we imagine a restaurant should appear to be in its traditional form.
The well financed and politically connected were foolish to believe this would end with the food truck movement. Again – the toothpaste shall not be returned to the tube. The strength of the industry and of the food system as a whole, will not be determined by who is locked in at the best location, but by its ability to adapt. To remain agile enough to shuffle the pieces around and continuously and consistently serve the people in an ever changing climate.
Where there is hunger, that is where we shall be.
We can evolve as chefs and cooks and focus on what truly matters – feeding the people and through that interaction – cultivating community. Instead of placing ourselves in the center to be idolized, we should be focusing on how to best serve the people with an emphasis on education and advocacy. We should be leveraging our experience and relationships in the trenches of building a stronger and more equitable food system.
The industry cannot allow itself to become stuck with an outdated and archaic mentality, spinning its collective wheels, refusing to see the writing on the wall. And all that shall refuse to evolve should be left behind.
While there will still be room to use our creativity to inspire and delight. We should be putting in the same effort it takes to craft a $300 tasting menu into building stronger, more equitable, inclusive and decentralized food systems.
The greatest opportunity is one where we become less rock star and more community leader. Where we facilitate less consumption and more connection.
The internet has erased the lines in which we were forced to color before. All you have to have is the willingness to get your hands dirty and the courage to share yourself. We must build faster than our systems are currently failing.
Can I get some hands, please?
The revolution is here.
DIY or Die.