The fake restaurant is our fault

This is exhausting, guys. *Read to the end for a story about a (shockingly real) meat glove.

An AI-generated passably realistic fake restaurant in Austin, TX, courtesy of Substack’s built-in image generator

Perhaps by now you’ve heard of Ethos, Austin, Texas’s so-called “#1 restaurant.” Except it’s not.

Ethos is completely fake. The photos are AI-generated, the menu items are fabricated. The ‘restaurant’ even has its own recent viral hit, a croissant shaped like Moo Deng, the internet-famous pygmy hippo living in a Thailand zoo.

The Ethos story has been covered to death after a San Francisco-based investor posted about it on X earlier this month, but the restaurant was outed as fake over a year ago. (Its creators, laudably, have continued the ruse.) As others have noted, Ethos exposes an unsettling reality: Thousands of (fake) Ethos’s (real) Instagram followers believe its over-the-top, AI-generated food photos might really exist. This includes its (very fake) image of a  a croissant in the startlingly realistic shape of a small hippopotamus. 

That’s because, as journalist Taylor Lorenz reported in a recent edition of her newsletter,

User Mag

, years spent on social media have primed us for these sorts of “absurd,” AI-generated food images. For a very long time we’ve tolerated, even celebrated, ridiculous (but real) viral menu items. 

In other words: This is our doing. Here’s how it happened.

Step one: Plant the seed.

Pictures posted on the internet have for years drawn clout-chasing crowds to unexpected places in search of one, often deeply inauthentic, order.