Dinner Lab – Big Data and the Future of Fine Dining

A recent article in the New York Times* describes a new restaurant model where customer feedback determines not only if a dish remains on the menu, but also the fate of the chef. Created two years ago by Brian Bordainick, Dinner Lab is financed by a group of twenty-five investors who have wagered $2.1 million on the idea that big data represents the future of haute cuisine.

The company operates largely like a club: in exchange for an annual fee of $100-$175 “members” in a given city receive invitations to all of the events programmed there. On top of that they pay from $50 to $80 per person per meal. In larger cities like Los Angeles and New York there are often up to three events per week while smaller cities like Austin or Atlanta host only a single event in the same time frame. Feeding on the popularity (and the logic) of pop-up stores, Restaurant Lab events are itinerant with locations tending toward the industrial chic (the rooftop of a parking garage, a motorcycle dealership). Invitations are issued with relatively little prior notice (2-3 days at the most) and while the whole enterprise seems to run on improvised conviviality, behind the scenes, things are much more regimented.

Participating chefs compete against one another. Recruited from top restaurants, many candidates already hold sous-chef positions. Young and ambitions they clearly have the talent to command an important kitchen, but lack the finances to make the leap to chef-proprietor. Dinner lab functions as a sort of reality show without the TV. Diners – foodies, bon-vivants and other aspiring chefs – receive questionnaires with their menus and responding in detail is their one duty. Perfectly cognizant that they’ve been cast in the role of judges, they evaluate chefs who are, in turn, well aware that they are performing. The theatrical feeling is further enforced by a pre-dinner monologue which affords the chef the opportunity to provide background information on his training and experience as well as the ethos behind the menu about to be sampled. Encouraged to visit tables and receive customer feedback in person, chefs are further judged on their ability to evaluate the data received and act on it, tweaking their dishes for the next round of competition.

The winning chef is assured the command of his own kitchen in a traditional brick and mortar restaurant funded by the Lab group. Diners rack up a series of pleasant convivial experiences and may find gratification in belonging to a sort of club of cognoscenti that wields a certain influence. Then, of course, there is the data. Dinner Lab currently operates in twenty cities and with up to 120 guests per event so the data is aggregating fairly quickly. They’ve essentially formed have excellent focus groups, they know the preferences of thousands of restaurant goers down to their reactions to the price/quality ratio.

Bordainick admits that the original concept was that of selling the data, but that the restaurant community in the United States was not receptive. Preferring to operate based on personal front-line experience, major hospitality groups declined the possibility to ‘contaminate’ their findings with data from an outside source. It is logical that savvy entrepreneurs remained diffident in the face of data compiled outside a strict scientific framework, but that doesn’t mean that the idea was a bad one.

Every day we discover to what extent we are guided (to use a euphemism) by companies like Google and Amazon capable of processing big data regarding consumer preferences and as much as we may like to think that we are not influenced, studies continue to demonstrate that that is a delusion.

Dinner Lab can guarantee clear advantages to the restaurants under its tutelage. From the moment they open they have access to a pre-constituted client base populated by what social media likes to term “influencers”. They’ve got a great mailing list and are hyper aware of what people in a certain income bracket like to find when they dine out. With respect to other start-ups in the same market, they’re ahead from get-go. This can only make us reflect about how the restaurant industry is changing. A good location, a talented chef and a great waitstaff may no longer be enough to remain competitive.

The question remains as to who is leading whom. Fortified by big data, the savvy restaurant owner (with the chef as accomplice) will be able hone his business model in ways previously unimaginable. Is it only a matter of time before the chef’s whites morph into a lab coat with the public assuming the role of laboratory rats?

* Segal, David – Dinner Lab Brings the Wisdom of Crowds to Haute Cuisine – 30/8/2014.