The restaurant of the future will look like the restaurant of today

A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal published a piece called The Restaurant of the future?. The question mark answered this question by saying no.  The same title without a question mark would have meant yes.

Even if its subtitle -“A new model is changing the dining landscape across the country. The rise of small plates, big bars and hotel restaurants.”- tries to give some kind of an appetizer to the reader, there is not a lot to chew in the article, just the proof that a futuristic title can try to make up for when there are not a lot financial news to report.

The piece does not deal with any kind of restaurant but just with the ones serving fine-dining meals –costing more than $70- and takes The Bazaar in West Hollywood as an example of what the now $7 billion industry could look like in a few years.

Basically, the article asks whether we will eat tapas-like in hotel bars.  For some time now, gourmet restaurants have been located in hotels, places that can afford such low-margin businesses but that benefit from the excellence of the cuisine and the reputation of the chef.  A win-win agreement: marketing vs. no profits (or small losses).

When it comes to what and how we will eat it, I think that it will take some time before we abandon the classic three-course meal format.  Remember in the 80’s when prophets and experts were predicting that we would eat pills in 2000.  Tapas have been around for a long time and other countries haven’t tried to serve their food the Spanish way despite its convivial form.

Also, restaurant patrons are very conservative and molecular gastronomy has a long way to go before it becomes the norm.  There have been controversies –especially in France, Spain, and the UK- around this kind of gastronomy that plays with technique and the chemistry of cooking.  But it seems that this topic only interests specialists (international foodies, PhD’s in chemistry, food critics…) given that molecular restaurants are still a rare species: wd~50 in New York, Alinea in Chicago, and I can’t name any in Paris.  Of course, there are millions of people who would love to have dinner at elBulli every year but very few of them would pay to go to one of is copycats.  And in times during which science is everywhere but not lauded and national concerns (cf. Sarkozy’s National Identity) challenge any form of globalization, I can’t see how a non-locally rooted cuisine will become a worldwide standard.

Why do we go to restaurants?

• To feed ourselves,
• To share moments with relatives, friends, clients, business or sentimental prospects…
• To be in a neutral place,
• To find a solution to our entertaining at home laziness,
• To celebrate,
• To experience/discover food,
• To brag.

These answers are not restrictive and not mutually exclusive but restaurants such as The Bazaar satisfy especially the last two items and these restaurants’ inability (or non-desire) to become larger and blander social environments will prevent them from becoming the new face of fine dining.  Try to go to a place such as The Bazaar or elBulli with your parents/grandparents/friends and you will either (very likely) hear unpleasant comments or be blessed to eat with open-minded people.

Molecular gastronomy -or whatever you want to name it- is not a trend and will remain a niche, in which chefs will create ideas for their fine-dining peers in particular and for the restaurant industry in general; a laboratory with curious and paying guinea pigs.

Veggie? Not today!

Had you asked me a year ago if, one day, I would become a vegetarian, I would have laughed loud, very loud.  Ask me the same question today and you will hear less confidence in my voice.  It’s not because of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book; a book that is on my shopping list on Amazon, so soon on my night table and maybe -in 2011- in my hands.  But first, I want to read The Jungle, Too big to fail, Nudge, Le sorcier de l’Elysée and a bunch of other books.

If I won’t stop eating meat because I love a good steak.  I think that my personal consumption will decline over the coming years even if it is already moderate.  I have some meat as a protein in my salad (when I have one for lunch but nowadays, I prefer to have soups).  I rarely eat meat twice a day.  I haven’t gone to a fast-food in years unless I really need to use their bathrooms.  Ok, ok, I have regularly two or three slices of ham when I eat at home. I don’t know if it’ a lot (or not) but it seems balanced.

The more I read about our agricultural model, the more I think that something is screwed with it.  I don’t like millenarists -don’t look for this word in the dictionary, it’s a neologism-, prophets, and fortune-tellers.  But I think that the way we eat and we produce our food is not sustainable.  For example, there is an interesting article in the Forbes’s November 30th’s issue about Pat Brown, a Stanford University biochemist, who professes (in a nutshell) that being vegetarian helps fight global warming.

The one thing I’m convinced of is that the price of meat will increase.  Will people keep on eating meat the way they currently do and devote a bigger part of their personal income, or will they curb their consumption and find proteins elsewhere?  I’m not able to answer to this question –I have forgotten my crystal ball- but I can try to demonstrate why meat will be more expensive in the future.

First, I see a set of structural elements for more expensive meat fueled by an increase of demand.

• Price of commodities will rise again (remember summer of 2007!) and some have already started (corn, oil, wheat).  Future commodities output will not probably be able to keep up with the expected population growth on Earth.   The price of meat will follow this trend as animals are mainly fed with corn and you need oil to transform animals into meat and then to deliver the meat to your local supermarket.  I don’t even mention water that is going to be scarcer, more expensive.  Thank you, global warming!
• Also, a growing middle class in developing countries is an aggravating factor.  The more this group of people is expanding, the more they adopt Western habits and eat more meat.  China and India are still considered developing countries according to the IMF but I wonder how much time it will last. A recent trip to Shanghai and Beijing made me see that these cities were more on the New York’s side than on the Timbuktu’s one.

There is also a more wishful/virtuous set of reasons.

• Governments gathered in Copenhagen for the Climate Change Conference will have to face that livestock has a negative impact on global warning: 9% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, 37% of human-caused methane –basically, animals farting_, and 65% of human-caused nitrous oxide.  All of these numbers are mentioned in Forbes piece and are originally produced by the Food & Agriculture Organizations at the United Nations.  If farmers escape taxes this time, I doubt they will do the next time governments meet.

• Will Barack Obama do the same as Teddy Roosevelt when the latter read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (or when someone read it for him)?  After the book was published in 1906, President Roosevelt sent people to do surprise visits in slaughterhouses in Chicago and these people confirmed what the book described.  The same year, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were passed. Who will give The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Fast Food Nation to Barack Obama for Christmas? Michelle?  Malia? Sasha?  It may be a long shot but if the US government decides to act and impose stricter regulation on slaughterhouses and CAFOs, costs will likely go up and so will the price of meat providing that industrials -and not taxpayers- will be asked to bear the brunt of the costs of the new requirements.  I tend to believe that CAFO’s and slaughterhouse operators have worked hard to trim costs and that there is very little fat left in these operations to save more money.
• In between (because I don’t know whether it’s a good measure), I think that governments will stop subsidizing farmers as they’ve been doing it for decades.  The necessity to reduce huge debts and the ineffectiveness of these policies will push them to look at subsidies differently.  This movement has already started with the reduction of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy.

In a better world, meat will become like wine in France, a kind of luxury product, meaning a smaller consumption of a better product.