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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

David Chang

Re-Blog: David Chang Talks Moneyballing Restaurants and Melted Cheese

At the risk of tooting our own horn here, I kinda feel like David Chang should read The Spoon.

The famed chef/restauranteur/TV personality was back on The Bill Simmons Podcast this week. The last time Chang was on there (if I recall correctly), it was at the very start of the pandemic, and the more pressing concern at that time was how third-party delivery services would decimate the restaurant industry (a topic we cover quite a bit!).

Normally, we wouldn’t write about someone’s appearance on another podcast, but since we started the pandemic with Chef Chang, I thought it was worth checking back in as we close out the year to hear what he had to say about the restaurant biz with the pandemic still in effect nine months later.

As we’ve been saying for awhile, winter is coming here, and Chang’s biggest fear for restaurants is their ability to survive until Spring. In addition to a lack of dine-in options, restaurants are also being hurt by the disappearance of downtown office workers/restaurant customers that are no longer coming in to work on a daily basis and buying sandwiches. All of this, Chang continued, is compounded by an administration that isn’t doing anything to help the industry or the people who work in it.

In order to survive, Chang said on the podcast restaurant owners need to adapt, whether that’s by selling packaged goods (homemade sauces, spices, etc.), or Moneyballing their menus. As Chang suggests (and we’ve covered before), restaurants may need to embrace analytics and pare down their offerings to just the dishes that are good for delivery and that generate the most revenue.

As the two talked about how restaurants will change, how owners won’t put a lot of effort/energy in the dining rooms and will focus more on setting themselves up for delivery. What struck me as I listened to Chang was that he didn’t once mention ghost or dark kitchens. He obviously knows what they are (I mean, he sold his delivery-only concept, Ando, to Uber).

Maybe the Bill Simmons podcast isn’t the place to discuss such matters, and maybe Chang talks about it on his own podcast. I get that. But it was still odd that the topic didn’t even come up, especially since they are in Los Angeles, which is home to ghost kitchen outfits Kitchen United and CloudKitchens (for more, check out The Spoon Plus Guide to Ghost Kitchens).

The conversation between Chang and Simmons drifted to restaurant delivery. Instead of talking about the economics of delivery this time around, the two soft-balled it and spoke more about the types of food that deliver well again (pizza, sushi, Chinese, fried chicken). One funny sidenote was dispelling the notion that cheese was good for delivery. Outside of pizza, Chang commented, melted cheese dishes do not travel well in delivery, which, I hadn’t thought about but is totally true. I mean, Soggy Food Sucks.

Ultimately, what struck me about the interview was that nobody, not even a famous high-end chef who won Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (and donated the money to restaurant workers), really has the answers as to what’s going to happen next with restaurants, especially independent ones. Everyone is just doing their best to just make it through, and we at The Spoon doing our best to inform you about developments and innovations that can help. Even if it’s as simple as getting dropping melted cheese items off the menu.

David Chang on Restaurant Delivery “It’s Going to Decimate the Business”

Famed restauranteur and Netflix’s Ugly Delicious host David Chang was on the Bill Simmons podcast this week. And while Chang was there to promote his new book, he and Simmons actually spent a lot of time discussing food delivery and its impact on the restaurant industry.

You should listen to the entire episode, but here are a few highlights.

Chang said that the biggest story in restaurants right now is the rise of delivery. “That’s going to be the story of the next ten years,” Chang said before adding, grimly, “It’s going to decimate the business.”

Basically, as Chang pointed out, because of delivery, restaurants now aren’t just competing with other neighborhood restaurants, they are competing with restaurant across an entire city. So restaurants now find themselves in even tougher environments when it comes to standing out from competitors.

Additionally, Chang suggests the math doesn’t really add up. If a restaurant is only eking out a 5–10 percent profit overall, what happens when they pay 30 percent commissions on deliveries through a third party like DoorDash, and customers are ordering 3 – 4 meals per week through delivery? Chang worried that this could turn restaurants into a form of indentured servitude, saying “The model has to improve for actual restaurants,” and “The 30 percent fee of delivery services is a model that’s not going to work long-term.”

Having said that, Chang also admitted that if DoorDash asked to be the exclusive delivery partner for his restaurant, he’d have to say yes “because they are driving so much traffic.”

Our own Jenn Marston has written quite a bit about this Faustian bargain that restaurants strike with third-party delivery services. And how that model is starting to change as restaurants begin to bring delivery in-house or create some kind of hybrid of in-house and third-party delivery.

Chang doesn’t think that eating at a restaurant will go away entirely, “They’re just going to be a specific kind of restaurant,” he said “They’re going to be the shit you can’t deliver, ultimately.”

In a fun aside, Chang actually ranked food that’s best for delivery. Pizza was the best followed by Chinese food and fried chicken. Host Bill Simmons lamented that “they have not been able to figure out fries.” Perhaps he should check out Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase winner Soggy Food Sucks.

Chang’s opinions, of course, come during a global pandemic, where people are being encouraged to practice active social distancing and avoid large gatherings. In Jersey City, the mayor has asked bars and restaurants in that town to take attendance in an effort to minimize the impact of the coronavirus. And in Seattle, restauranteur Tom Douglas said that he is temporarily closing 12 restaurants for up to three months after seeing a 90 percent drop in business since the outbreak.

You should listen to the whole Simmons podcast. Chang is a great interview who doesn’t pull any punches. And while “decimate” is kind of a pejorative term, Chang is right, delivery will cause fundamental changes to the restaurant biz. How it does so, remains to be seen.

Lazy Sunday: Four Food Shows to Binge After the World Cup

Yes, it’s the summertime and you should probably be spending your weekend grilling various meats (and meat look-alikes) or sipping Pina Coladas on the beach. But there’s a chance a good chunk of you will be watching the World Cup Final on Sunday morning. (Team Croatia for the win!)

So when you’re done watching men with absurd hairstyles run hundreds of miles on a field, keep the tube on and queue up some top-notch food television to while away the day. Be sure to have some snacks on hand, because you will get hungry.

[Full disclosure: I know I should be telling you to watch deep-dive documentaries that teach lessons about food and make you realize how f&#*-ed up our food system is, but we get enough of that during the week. It’s Sunday — let’s just let our brains relax, okay?]

 

Chef's Table | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

Chef’s Table

This one’s for all your aesthetes, you food porn-lovers, you aspirational diners. Chef’s Table is the crème de la crème of luxurious food shows, what with its slow-motion shots of the world’s best chefs elegantly plating food with tweezers and doing radical things like making sugar balloons or creating a dish around ants. It makes your most elegant dishes made with a sous vide circulator and a smart oven look like child’s play.

If you have a sweet tooth, be sure to check out Chef’s Table: Pastry. It only has four episodes so you can blow through the whole season, from the maestro of Italian gelato to an American ex-pat making dessert tastings in Bali, in no time.

 

Mind Of A Chef, Season 2: April Bloomfield | Extended Trailer

Mind of a Chef

This show centers around celebrity chefs and the food that made them what they are. Each episode explores one theme near and dear to their heart (noodles, smoke, New York, etc), and is peppered with acid trip-worthy graphics, nerdy science tidbits from author Harold McGee, and wry narration from the late, great Anthony Bourdain.

I personally love the second half of Season Two with April Bloomfield (the first half follows Southern chef Sean Brock, and is also aces). Despite the recent controversy around the British chef’s restaurant partner, she’s utterly unpretentious and charming on the show. Watch her make food with the Italian cookery legend Marcella Hazan, or explore Britain’s obsession with curry.

 

THE GREAT BRITISH BAKING SHOW | Introduction | PBS

Great British Baking Show

Known as GBBO to its fans, this is the show to watch if you’re feeling that the world is a burning garbage heap and you just need something pure and hopeful to light your spirit. And you like hearing the word “sponge” a lot. Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood are delightful as the judges of this baking show, which takes place in a tent in the middle of the idyllic English countryside. The competitors are adorably supportive of each other, the hosts are wonderfully cheesy, and everything is gingham-covered. Be sure to only watch one of the first 7 seasons — in Season 8, most of the original cast has been replaced. It is just not the same.

Ugly Delicious | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

Ugly Delicious

One of the newer food tv shows, Ugly Delicious rolled onto Netflix screens this February with its irreverent, “let’s get real for a second” attitude — and plenty of sexy food scenes. The series stars David Chang, the Michelin star-awarded celebrity chef behind the Momofuku Restaurant Group (who was also the star of Season 1 of Mind of a Chef).

It’s funny, it’s star-studded (hey, Aziz Ansari), and it has darn beautiful footage of Chang eating food around the world. Ugly Delicious also admirably tries to tackle issues like race, gender, and authenticity in the food world — though it doesn’t always push the envelope as much as it likes to think. (One admirable exception is the episode about fried chicken.) At the very least, this show made me really, really want to try Viet-Cajun crawfish, so there’s that.

The Year in Food Delivery

Despite a distinct cooling off of investment in the food delivery space this year, some big names like Uber, Google, and David Chang threw their hats in the ring.

That’s because the online food delivery market is estimated around $210 billion, with companies like FreshDirect raising $189 million in the past 12 months. It’s become such a pervasive part of our way of life that Google even added a food-delivery shortcut to Maps. And there are plenty of food-delivery crowdfunding projects to go around.

But enough with the numbers. Here are the highlights in this space over the past 12 months.

More Big Players Joined the Party

This year everyone wanted a piece of the pie. Google started to ship fresh food to customers in California through Google Express. Instacart and the Food Network launched a meal-kit delivery service, and Square acquired startup Maine Line Delivery in Philadelphia to boost Caviar. Meanwhile Facebook and Foursquare made it easier to order food from within their apps through Delivery.com.

NYC darling chef David Chang decided to blow up the entire idea of a nice restaurant by launching Ando, a restaurant that only does deliveries, and he raised the bar on delivery food everywhere by launching Maple, his own delivery service that promises a daily delicious menu.

Plus, where would the year be without a few gimmicks? Taco Bell and Whole Foods both came up with ChatBots that help you order food or suggest recipes, respectively, solely through the power of emojis. And Domino’s will now let you order pizza with one tap on your Apple Watch.

The Year of UberEats

So far I haven’t mentioned the biggest player, though: Uber. The company has had quite the year in food delivery. It shut down Instant Delivery in New York City, then launched UberEats in both the U.S. and London. Next UberEats drivers staged protests over the way the pay structure has been changed, and in November a courier filed a lawsuit against the company for missing food delivery tips. Yikes.

All of this commotion from big names and turmoil within UberEats suggest that the food delivery space is still young enough that no one has solved some of the primary problems within it. Companies are grabbing on to any stronghold they see (emojis! self-driving trucks! drones! more drones!), without regard to the longevity of the solution. Uber has faced the brunt of this fast-paced growth, but we expect to see more struggles in the coming years for other players as well.

Eat Local

This year the quest to eat healthily expanded even more into food delivery. Whole Foods hinted at a “meal solution spectrum” with some sort of delivery component in the future. Good Eggs, which many thought was defunct by this point, rose from the ashes with a $15 million round of funding to help it deliver local, quality food.

And Amazon, never one to be shown up, expanded its Amazon Fresh program to Boston, among other major cities. The difference here is that Boston customers can shop from local markets, a feature that we imagine will be implemented elsewhere if it’s successful in Beantown.

You Say Potato, I Say Share Economy

In such a young and moneyed space, different business models are flying around faster than those drones I mentioned earlier.

Some want to deliver fresh ingredients to customers to help simplify cooking at home. Juicero, for example, delivers prepackaged ingredients for green juice, made in its blender that doesn’t even require cleaning. Similarly, Raised Real wants to deliver ingredients for homemade baby food, thereby making it that much easier to make your baby’s food from scratch (sounds ambitious to me).

Speaking of raising babies and tapping new markets, Drizly raised $15 million for its liquor delivery service, among other parts of its ecommerce model. And DoorDash added alcohol to its food delivery options in California (what about the rest of us?!).

Meanwhile Foodhini calls itself a “for profit social enterprise” and delivers ethnic food made by immigrant chefs: Foodhini and the chefs each receive $2.50 from each meal, after costs.

And BringMe wants to out-Uber Uber by combining delivery with the share economy in Fairfax, VA, enlisting regular folks to deliver food as “bringers.” There are already a few models out there like this, such as Favor in Texas and Tennessee, and we expect to see more too.

Of course, while all of these business models are innovative and interesting, none of them beat the ultimate and original delivery food: pizza.

Plant-Based Food Was Red Hot In 2016

I live in Brooklyn, which means I come across vegan food trucks pretty often. They almost always have something called “faux gras” on the menu: a vegan version of foie gras. Why any vegan wants to pretend she’s eating fatty duck liver is beyond me, but it seems to be a staple of their diet.

It turns out this trend is pretty widespread, and not just among dreadlocked hipsters in Bushwick. Eating sustainably is top of many people’s minds these days, and tech companies are jumping on the opportunity.

Take Impossible Foods, the Silicon Valley sweetheart that has raised more than $150 million to make its veggie burgers that “bleed.” Biochemist and founder Patrick Brown spent around five years and $80 million to develop textured wheat protein, coconut oil, and other plant-based ingredients into the meat patty, and the result is a patty that uses 74 percent water and 95 percent less land, and emits 87 percent less greenhouse gas than its beefy counterpart. In July 2016 celebrity chef and New York City sweetheart David Chang started offering the veggie burger on his menu at Momofuku Nishi, on a first come, first serve basis, of course.

NotCo’s plant-based Mayo, gif via GIPHY

Now there’s news that another company is coming onto the scene. Chilean startup NotCo uses artificial intelligence to help it recreate the flavors and textures of animal-based foods with plants. Its Not Mayo (made with potatoes, peas, basil, and canola oil rather than vegetable oil and eggs) is already available at a major supermarket in Chile, and the company is working on plant-based cheese, yogurt, milk, and (you guessed it) pate. NotCo has also spoken with Coca-Cola, Hershey, and Mars about recreating both soda and milk chocolate with solely plant-based ingredients.

Just think: In a few years you may be able to grab a “bleeding veggie” burger to go, then eat it at home with a plant-based “chocolate milkshake,” illuminated by a lamp made out of mushrooms.