How TikTok took over the menu.

One more issue we have with restaurant TikTok is that it's created a demand for both presentation and menu items to be extra-showy. Food and beverage consultant Alex Delany tells Grub Street that restaurants such as NYC's Bad Roman actively try to promote a "viral dish," with the one at the time of writing being steak topped with a single super-siz... See more

Demanding that they then add in some type of show-stopping visual element on top of that, strictly so each menu item will "perform," just doesn't sit well. Some of the most amazing dishes ever, like Chez Panisse's goat cheese salad or Cafe du Monde's beignets, might not have had a chance to shine if TikTok was around at the time of creation to dema... See more

In the 2010s many of our public spaces started to be molded, physically and literally, by the market advantage of luring patrons looking for highly Instagrammable shots. Businesses that once paid large sums of money to have photographs taken for advertisements that cost even more to run now had access to an army of free labor, taking pictures for f... See more

“It almost feels like, you must have a social media acumen, you must be savvy in this area that is adjacent to your business, but not directly embedded in your business, in order to be successful and visible,” Walsh continued. That means achieving metrics like plenty of tagged photos on Instagram and positive user reviews on the business’s listing

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“Google results don’t feel authentic, or even written by a real human because the top articles are all in this keyword-loaded language,” said Dmitri Brereton, an engineer who researches search engines and AI. “Social media, especially TikTok, solves that authenticity problem because some experiential things are just better seen. It can’t get more a

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5. Algorithmic feeds are failing: StumbleUpon helped me start to understand, almost at a humanistic level, how vast the internet could be. TikTok often yields a similar result, though with a key difference. On TikTok, almost all videos trend toward a kind of visual consistency and repeatability. Silly voices or bits of speech become ‘sounds’, to be... See more

TikTok’s For You tab serves an endless stream of short videos that algorithmically adapt to your interests, sorting the content most likely to engage you. Using it feels like having your mind read, because all you do is watch or skip, focus or ignore, a decision made too fast to be fully conscious. Individual videos or accounts matter less than cat... See more

But the broader issue that hasn’t garnered much press attention is how the restaurant industry itself is being transformed and what tools a modern restaurant will need to compete. What is the Shopify of the restaurant industry? I have some compelling data that suggests it may just become ChowNow.