What is a restaurant? In today’s omnichannel foodservice system, what exactly does it mean to say something is a “restaurant meal”? Does
it mean a full, formal dining experience with a chef-prepared, customized dish, presented by a waiter to a
guest at a table with a white tablecloth? Or can it be a
handmade burrito delivered straight to your doorstep
by a kid on a bicycle working for a third-party service?
Ultimately, the question comes down to determining
the two main components of a restaurant: food and service. For the food, the questions are: How fresh is it? What
form does it come in? And how close to immediately
edible is the preparation of each meal? For the service,
the main question is: How much supplier-labor intensity
is required, versus how much consumer-labor intensity
is necessary?
THE EVOLUTION OF FORM AND FUNCTION
Decades ago, the restaurant experience was divided into
just two categories: full-service (or “white tablecloth”)
and limited-service (or “counter service”) restaurants.
Both were built on the requirement that food was personally served by someone to the consumer, typically
with a structured menu format, inside a simple square
meter of physical space. The diner was expected to have
a working knowledge of this system: how the food is
handcrafted in the kitchen by a trained chef or a skilled
short-order cook; the nature of the logical flow of the
courses as they were presented; and how to order and
pay (including how to properly leave a tip). For the vast
majority of customers, this was something done only on
special occasions or when dining away from home, and
could be intimidating to master.
The next stage of restaurant evolution is happening right now—and the definition of “dining out”
increasingly depends on whom you ask. By Christopher Muller
