It could be the first social media menu driven restaurant where the most liked Tasty videos/dishes establish the menu.
I mean I don't cook, but constantly salivate over their videos.
I may personally hate the idea of social media popularity being used to dictate the content of a menu, but I suspect there's a kernel of a great idea there. After all, this is essentially the big data or Netflix approach to deciding what content to make. Likes are just one metric that would be needed, but you can certainly get an idea of the kinds of things that make people drool.
Buzzfeed will likely first want to move into more cooking shows before opening a full restaurant to see if they can create some more fans, possibly even see if they can have their own homegrown celebrity chefs, then branch into restaurant/food space.
If the doubters want to see their reach, just see how many people have taken the time to create their own parody videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMPaIgVeCT0
Tasty itself is in a few different languages and regions, so to the GP's point, it clearly has some brand power and "Tasty Cafe" or a concept along those lines could work.
https://mic.com/articles/163958/the-secret-ingredient-to-buz...
Also, there is a reason we have an executive chef developing menus. Ever heard of too many cooks spoiling the soup? That, and the general population has shit taste in everything from food, to entertainment. Having the children of buzzfeed deciding this, will end up with a menu full of macaroni and cheese, and pizza logs.
Also, recipes are not copyrightable or otherwise able to be locked up in some form of intellectual property. Thankfully. I would hate to see a world where I could only buy chocolate chips and chocolate chip cookie recipes from Nestle.
Of course, it would be nice if they add attribution as needed, but tough to prove for something like this (bacon weave being a fairly common new fangled technique applied to everything from tacos to ice cream).
I want what tastes good to me, not what tastes good to most people. You can't solve personal subjective problems with data.
Most internet recipes are made by food bloggers and grandmas, not executive chefs.
"Too many cooks spoil the soup" doesn't mean "most people can't make good recipes."
Tasty existing doesn't preclude pretentiousrecipes.com so I'm not sure I understand that criticism.
It’s like the old story about how Prego discovered that you can’t just make one sauce everyone loves, you make a chunky and a smooth and a meaty and meet the needs of each different set of tastes. Just like how Netflix doesn’t have a single hit show, they hit all the different demos.
Also, they could just license their name to say the owners of Ruby Tuesday's or another dying chain to revitalize itself(at least try something new).