The death of the middle-class restaurant
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- Decline in quality of food: As far as I know, pan pizza in the 90s at Pizza Hut (that the article talks about) had the dough made in house; modern versions have reheated frozen dough. I feel like this is an important distinction. If I'm just reheating frozen pizza, I can do that at home.
- Decline in quality of service: The article mentions this in passing (server knowing the order of a frequent customer) but doesn't go any deeper. In my experience, a lot of the servers (not just at chains, but everywhere) these days are younger people who seem pretty indifferent to the customer experience. Certainly I don't think that any servers at a Pizza Hut will remember someone's order in 2025.
The factors I mention above are hard to measure, especially over time. But I do feel like they have contributed to the decline of chains to some degree as well as things like orders to go, did delivery apps, etc.
I honestly think this is a big one. I love restaurants and love going out to eat, but the number of restaurants I feel I want to go to just keeps declining. Places I used to love and go to weekly, I don't visit any more because the food just isn't good. I'm honestly having a hard time remembering the last time a new place blew me away. Combine that with rapidly rising food prices, and it's just not fun any more. Going out dropping $50+ and leaving slightly disappointed, is just depressing.
It doesn't stop there. Many of the big chain sit-down restaurants do little more than reheat pre-prepared items. You are basically getting airplane dinners. Its all centralized, mass produced, and cost-optimized.
There are about 40 Mc Donald's restaurants in Berlin. About 1 per 100K citizens. There are a few other chains operating of course but they are similarly small. There are 4000 kebab restaurants in Berlin. And loads of pizza, pasta, currywurst, sushi, etc. restaurants too. Probably close to 10K restaurants or so. The vast majority of which are not franchises. It's great.
Germany just seems to have a lot of rules that prevent franchising from being very lucrative. Whatever it is, I love it. I'm from the Netherlands. That's more like the US. Restaurants are expensive. Sitting down for a quick, affordable lunch is not much of a thing. It's either cheap fast food or self-catering in the super market/bakery. With all the health consequences as well. Obesity is on the rise and it's a poverty correlated thing. Food poverty means lots of fast food.
However thanks to the excellent Dutch pension system there is a boomer class that has lots of money keeping the economy afloat.
Even though this is a bit tangential (and not something you're calling out here), I'll also add that having struggled with being picky with things that are ostensibly the type of foods that picky eaters enjoy like fries has led to me to absolutely loath having to ask for details about stuff in restaurants. It probably doesn't help that I'm also on the spectrum and have suffered from social anxiety a lot over the years, but I'll never understand why so many people feel so entitled to demand explanations about why I don't like certain foods or ways that they're prepared when it doesn't affect them at all. It's not like I _want_ so many foods to taste worse to me than others, and yes I'm sure that with the right amount of effort and diligence I probably would eventually be able to get past most of it, but I don't see why that means that acquaintances or coworkers I'm not particularly close would think it's reasonable to interrogate me about it; if anything, having to try to explain myself makes it _more_ stressful and reduces the emotional energy I have to try to change things! Back when I worked in an office, I sometimes would literally try to time my lunch break to when nobody else would be in the cafeteria because so many people over the years would try to get me to explain why I would eat get food from the same restaurant multiple days in a row, and I got to the point where I would have anxiety about eating in front of other people. This isn't even touching on stuff like how hard it seems to be for some restaurants to follow what I'd consider to be very basic instructions (like "don't put mayonnaise on this sandwich" and how often times the "default" way something will be served will contain extra condiments or toppings that weren't even listed on the menu, and trying to deal with that just adds to the stress given how often times asking for the issue to be just leads to frustration on both sides. My point is that sometimes the choice of what to eat isn't just a choice of how to ingest calories but has social implications as well, and I think that attitudes like "I don't understand why people do this" can end up just reinforcing trends where some people will value consistency. If I'm hungry and just want to eat and get back to whatever I was doing beforehand, sometimes I'm just going to want to know exactly what I'm gonna be dealing with in advance, and unless I happen to already have spent the time to try out enough places to know what I like in the area, a national chain is a way for me to be reasonably confident about that.
If I'm in my small local town centre and want to grab a burger, the (slightly better) national chain is simply best burger on offer.
So i can fully imagine that this article has it right, i just don't see it where i live.
I admittedly lost the patience to sit there and wait instead of doing something else, having the food delivered, and immediately eating upon starting the process.
Eating at a restaurant seems like a subpar experience now compared to my own table.
It isn’t just me. Everyone from my grandparents to my friend groups is increasingly takeout and delivery driven.
Also most midrange restaurants I have been to lately are just so _loud_. Not sure if it is all the hard surfaces that are so popular, or if people just have less social awareness anymore and yap away at such high volumes.
Seems wild. I’d rather just make something at home, hit up a good food truck, or go somewhere fancy.
I agree it seems the whole middle part of the of restaurant market is terrible. I can think of several places where I'm happy to pay $15-20 for a meal and several places where I'm happy to pay $100+, but hardly anywhere in the $30-40 range where I feel I'm getting value for money.
But I will still opt to eat in at nicer establishments, where I'm paying for quality and don't want to suffer any lose of it. A nice plus is they usually have a nice atmosphere and a selection of cocktails/cocktails that I wouldn't make at home.
Milk bars were started during the communist era and are still popular amongst the older (70+) crowd, but modern versions are a go-to for younger people too. And so you'll usually get a very interesting mix of society sitting side-by-side. Not quite a family dinner restaurant, but is a social restaurant concept nonetheless.
I don't even know where the nearest applebees, chilis, etc is to me. I don't need to spend an arm & a leg to eat when dining out.
Sure, sometimes. But honestly I find that this is rarely the case. The same economic pressures exist for the small independent restaurants as well, and they need to use the same 'tricks' to keep costs down. My 'favorite' reasonably price local place in my neighbourhood is a lovely place to go, nice vibe, often has live music and is run by nice people, but I'd be lying if I said the food was fantastic.
Proper restaurants should be small businesses and family owned and grow their client base over generations, then they are pretty much bulletproof against all kinds of economic hardships.
A lot of them have started to directly compete against fast food. Applebees for instance offers a deal that's about the same price as a McDonalds meal.
Certainly you get into a more geuinely rural area and your options of all sorts shrink.
The discussion and the article is US specific, but as general point 'Europe' is a big generalization akin to 'Africa' or 'Asia'.
These places are too heterogenous for blanket statements.
As a point of anecdata between around the 1960's and early 2000's in most mediterranean countries, middle class would indeed sit down for lunch in nearby restaurants for an affordable lunch. Many of these places would serves as cafes during the day and affordable bistro at lunch.
Most either ramped up prices or went bust.
It is either grab a coffee and go or white cloth restaurant prices. The middle ground business model has indeed vanished or really downgraded their offering, in most countries around the mediterranean.
In my opinion it's a drinking culture thing. These places also served alcohol which is more tightly distributed than it would be in Europe. There's less of a reason for them to exist there.
I also think that's the reason for their decline. The day drinking crowd simply aged out of the business lunch segment. It was inevitable. COVID probably accelerated it some but the writing was on the wall.
> Proper restaurants
Yea, which is why I think it's about the drinks, these restaurants all used a common major supplier (Sysco) that makes restaurant ready foods that are mostly just microwave and serve. It was never about the quality of the food.
Is it just simply because they are a lot more neurotic because of all that shit on the internet?
In some parts of Europe. In other parts it is very much frowned upon. Then there is the generational shift, even in countries where it used to be the norm to drink at lunch, people under 30-40 just aren't drinking like that any more, and might very well frown upon people that do.
I remember when the first TGI Fridays opened in my country (early 90s) and it was definitely seen as a pretty fancy 'foreign' restaurant, the sort of place you could definitely fo for special occasions or to celebrate something.
Open 24 hours/day, on El Cajon Blvd, since 1949
It is an americana throwback that I'm happy to have in the neighborhood...
Everyone obviously wants to pay extra so they can be constantly badgered and rushed out the door like cattle, and if you complain about any aspect of this, the white knights come out to drown you as they say it's your fault for not understanding the plight of the woe-is-me restaurant worker and there's absolutely nothing to be done other than shame you into not going out to eat.
I wonder why sit-down restaurants are declining.
But of course GP was deliciously ironic, so take all with a grain of salt and a dash of black humor.
Tipping is not stopping a meaningful amount of people from going out.
Not because of tipping.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/1ju1n53/cn...
I currently live in a suburb outside a small city with a family of 5. I gues when the middle-class restaurant is gone I'm going to be eating exactly where I have been eating the last 10, 15 years: at home.