Been a week or so since the latest Michelin guide was released and it seems like no one really cares about them anymore. Wonder if Michelin is on the decline?
I can't stress this enough, if you try to "optimize" the overall experience of restaurant like you would a tech product, it will become the worst restaurant in town.
Instinct CEO Noah Shinn says agents will let restaurants give tables to birthdays and anniversaries over whoever clicks first
"And traditionally, because of the way that the internet has worked, at least for reservations, it's been first come first serve. So anyone that comes in, no matter how important or how not important it might be, whoever gets in first gets the reservation."
"But what if you had the ability for the agent to be able to communicate on both sides, communicate, hey, this is important. This is actually the person's spouse's birthday, the 30th birthday, a very special event is coming up."
"And the restaurant too can say, let's actually prioritize birthdays or major decade birthdays or major anniversaries or these certain people, I don't know, whatever it might be, right?"
"So now with the ability, with all of the logistical burden of having to describe exactly what your case is and what's happening and why it's important. Now we have the ability to perfectly match what does the restaurant want? What does the user want?"
"And that will result in more special events for the users being able to actually have a spot in the restaurant."
Toronto chef David Schwartz runs two of the city’s most prominent Chinese restaurants, Mimi Chinese and Sunnys Chinese.
Schwartz says the restaurants were created to represent what he considers “the most historically deep and diverse food culture on the planet.”
“Those restaurants aren’t just about me, they never have been.”
Schwartz points to the teams behind the restaurants, including chef Braden Chong, who he says was one of the first people he called when starting the project.
“We’re really about representation over creativity.”
He says that philosophy generally leads them down one of two paths, taking an iconic dish like Char Siu and trying to make the best version they can using local ingredients, or creating something new while cooking in the spirit and flavour profile of a particular region of China.
I asked Schwartz what it feels like to run two Chinese restaurants in Toronto as a Jewish man.
Asking Chef David Schwartz of Linny's, Mimi Chinese, and Sunny's in Toronto if there's a spot in the city that doesn't have a Michelin star that he thinks should have one.
jg melon’s was never supposed to be the “best” burger in nyc in the age of tiktok. it was the best burger in nyc when you spent all day in the park and were hungry as hell at a weird liminal time, or when you needed a place to meet your most Alcoholic relatives for dinner
Another annoying thing about getting emails people have used AIs to write for them is that they're usually longer than they'd have written by themselves. Paragraphs and paragraphs of plausible-sounding text. Ugh.
Every time I click a link to read an article on a mobile device, at least one of these happens:
1) Autoplay video ad taking up ~25% of screen
2) Accepting cookies window prompt
3) Banner ads in middle of paragraphs
4) Crash & Reload
5) Paywall
6) Enter email to keep reading prompt
Big reason why digital reading comprehension is an endangered species imo.