Guest Post: The Biggest Problem With Restaurants And Bars Today

Aside from the high, often outrageous prices on food and drink

I’m taking a bit of time off during August so my good friend

Rocco Pendola

has stepped in this week with a guest post.

Rocco initially published this story in my food and drink publication Rooted over on Medium, where writers like Rocco, me (and 200+ others!) write honest personal and persuasive essays about the state of food and drink in this world we call home.

You can follow Rocco’s food writing (amongst other topics) at Medium.

And if you’re interested in retirement — or lack thereof— and finance, he does a great job here on his Substack The Semi-Retired Life. Give it a follow ⬇️

Source: Author / That’s a pizza in Rome, Italy

Everything is a concept.

But a concept doesn’t mean a thing without good food, good hospitality and genuine heart and soul that you can taste and feel in a space.

In the shell of a nut, other than the prices, this is the biggest problem with restaurants and bars lately. Especially new ones.

Let’s illustrate what I mean by this.

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My wife and I spent a week in San Francisco last month.

We were excited to try a new restaurant we found on social media.

I don’t want to use actual quotes from articles I read about the place or get too specific about the ownership or menu. Because the point of this article isn’t to bash a particular establishment.

The one I’m using as an example just opened. I’m sure they mean well and certainly could be working out the initial kinks. So it would be unfair to publicly trash the place. I have no interest in seeing them fail.

When they asked, I let them know the food was underwhelming. I also gave them a lackluster review online. I don’t believe in not leaving reviews or sugarcoating them when you’re unhappy. Why have review platforms in the first place?

Anyhow —

Everything the owner of this place said in one of the hype pieces I read online screams concept. Everything this restaurant embodies will be just like it is in Rome!

From being a laid-back spot for locals to linger to serving food the way a well-regarded restaurant in Italy does. The owner even claimed that his restaurant will bring back something restaurants these days lack: entertainers who provide exceptional hospitality. Certainly in the spirit of what we discussed earlier this month here on Medium in Rooted.

This all sounds incredible. However, it’s little more than a concept.

Taking everything that’s romantic and often true about a place such as Rome and transplanting it into the middle of a nondescript San Francisco neighborhood.

If only it were so easy.

Merely suggesting you can pull something like this off — to this extent — shows a level of ignorance with respect to sense of place:

… the emotive bonds and attachments people develop or experience in particular locations and environments, at scales ranging from the home to the nation. Sense of place is also used to describe the distinctiveness or unique character of particular localities and regions.

You can’t pick up Rome and put it in San Francisco. Not even a small sliver of it. No matter how eloquently you say you will or how hard you try.

It’s slightly offensive to even float this type of fluff. Offensive to Rome and San Francisco, not to mention the people who love both places for what they — distinctively — are.

And it’s even more difficult to do when the food you put on the table doesn’t come anywhere near Italian standards.

The plates we ordered at this restaurant are the same ones my grandmother and mother used to make — day in and day out. They’re the same ones I was excited to try when I visited Italy.

The only difference is that, in this Italian concept in San Francisco, the food was — in a word — bland, bordering on terrible. After I ate pasta e fagioli in Italy, I had to bite my tongue. I couldn’t tell my Mother that it was better than hers.

But, in San Francisco last month, I closed my eyes and remembered my late Grandmother’s cooking and how my Mom carried on her Italian(-American) tradition. In the aforementioned hype piece, the restaurateur also said that you’d be able to sense that your parents and grandparents were right there with you in the room. I don’t think he intended for guests to conjure those nostalgic and sentimental images quite the way I did.

The fact is when you block out social media, ignore fluff write-ups on foodie sites and look past cheesy prints on the wall all you have is the staff and the food.

It didn’t appear that there was anybody of Italian descent behind the counter or in the kitchen. And, when — after being asked what do you think of the food? and I politely said it was bland — our server’s response (I think the GM) was:

Is that what you thought?

So much for being an entertainer.

So much for exploiting my dead Grandmother (I say that half-joking with a smile on my face, knowing it would make her laugh!).

So much for making me want to be able to eat authentic Italian food on the regular even more when we move to Europe next year.

But, seriously, you have a concept, a good social media person and some nifty PR placement. You say all of the right things. But you don’t deliver. You don’t execute. Not even close.

And — again — this one experience is the stand-in, the placeholder, the poster boy for dozens of similar experiences. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve been there before.

You’re super excited to try a place, then you leave feeling like a fool for having been sucked in by the hype.

In 2024, a social media presence and such might be a red flag.

Because there are too many opportunists in the hospitality industry who see more than half of their battle as creating and selling an image, especially if they can harken it back to simpler times and iconic, aspirational places. And, sadly, more than a few places appear to be successful (they look busy!) or, at least, getting by (as in, they’re still open!) using generic and prescribed cookie-cutter formulas.

Have our expectations dropped so low that if you sort of get the concept right — if you paint the picture and design the space well enough — we’ll give you a pass?

We’ll tell our taste buds to take a smoke break while we’re eating because we really want to like a place. We’re so desperate to have a good restaurant or bar experience that we’ll fool ourselves into thinking something barely mediocre actually hits the mark.

Here again, I’m only using my most recent disappointing experience to describe something that feels close to, if not the norm lately. I could see, and I hope this place will turn things around.

I hope they and others do because I feel like we have reached a point where many of us view going out for a meal and/or drinks as a risk. Unless it’s a known entity or inexpensive, we don’t want to take the chance that the cost of falling for smoke and mirrors leaves a meaningful dent in our checking accounts.

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