For better or for worse

Restaurant and hospitality tech industry leaders react to *that* New York Times column.

Photo via Unsplash

The outgoing New York Times restaurant critic says tech has contributed to restaurants’ decline. In his last column as the paper’s influential restaurant critic, Pete Wells looks back on the restaurant business after 12 years as a professional diner. The piece is largely a lament over “​​a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants.” Wells attributes many of those changes to technology, and manages to get all the usual gripes in about touch-screen ordering, QR code menus, online reservations, the demise of restaurant phone lines, bots, transactions, delivery apps, and ghost kitchens.

In the before-times, Wells writes, “Being served in a restaurant wasn’t passive. We had to participate.” The connection that once existed between diner and restaurant is weakening, he asserts, leaving diners feeling less fulfilled when they walk out the door. It’s criticism of the act of providing hospitality, which plenty of forward-thinking restaurateurs and technologists would agree has indeed changed because of technology.

Will Guidara, former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park and author of industry tome Unreasonable Hospitality, responded to Wells on Instagram. It’s not fair to lament the end of so-called ‘traditional’ hospitality if you rarely talk about how much it matters in the first place, he says, before criticizing the critic. “I can probably count on one hand how many times I’ve read anything about the service and the hospitality, let alone praise for it,” he says.

Context is important. No business operates in a vacuum, least of all human-centric hospitality. And while Wells’s essay raises a number of valid points and informed observations, it ignores the reality of operating in a dynamic, challenging, evolving economic and technological climate — something that diners nor critics should ignore.

I’ve covered the evolution of restaurant tech for almost as long as Wells has covered and reviewed New York’s restaurants. (Though he’s enjoyed a bigger platform.) Remember: for a third of this time, the industry we cover was deep inside or recovering from a global pandemic and the ensuing fallout that rocked its foundation. 

For this edition of Expedite, I asked leaders in the restaurant and hospitality industries — restaurateurs, CEOs, consultants, what they think about tech’s effect on restaurants. Is technology making restaurants inhospitable?

Sure, plenty of these respondents have an agenda; most of them run a technology business. But by Wells’s own admission, this type of tech is driving today’s restaurant experiences and these leaders are steeped in the realities of providing true hospitality for modern times. Here’s how they responded.

These responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity. Bolded emphasis is mine.