The Pleasures And Pitfalls Of Hype Restaurants

In Ruby Tandoh’s new book, she discusses the power of trending restaurants and peoples’ innate love of queuing …

Being into food – following and making it, queuing for it and discussing it – is no longer a subculture. It’s become mass culture, and a national obsession. Our food culture is more expansive and chaotic by the day. Recipes aren’t passed from hand to hand; they’re on TV and in newspaper supplements, flooding YouTube and social media. Our tastes are painstakingly engineered in food factories, shaped by supermarket shelves and hacked by craveable Instagram recipes.

Ruby Tandoh’s startlingly original analysis of today’s food landscape traces the roots of this extraordinary transformation over the past seventy-five years, examining the social, economic, demographic and technological forces shaping the foods that we consumed and hunger for today. As she explores the evolution of the cookbook and light-speed growth of bubble tea, the advent of TikTok critics and qualities of the perfect dinner party, Tandoh’s investigation leaves her and us questioning her tastes and ours and if they are, in fact, our own? Ruby Tandoh is a food writer who has written for, among others, the New Yorker, Guardian, Vittles and Vice. She has published Eat Up! about the pleasures of eating, as well as three cookery books: Crumb, Flavour and Cook As You Are.

Anatomy Of A Queue

As soon as I saw the TikTok videos of the chocolate-covered strawberries, I knew two things: that I was going to buy them, and that it would be a mistake. They’d shown up on my feed while I was busy avoiding writing this book: effusive videos about completely average strawberries half-drowned in chocolate fondue. The videos were all pretty much the same. ‘People travel all over the world to get these chocolate-covered strawberries,’ a disembodied voice would say over a pan shot of London’s crowded Borough Market. And then the camera would sweep across a queue – an ultra-concentrated throng of bodies, the line bunching up and coiling round. ‘This vendor uses milk chocolate to cover the freshest strawberries you’ll ever try,’ the voice would go on. And then you saw the rows of clear plastic pint cups filled with strawberries, and there’d be a close-up as the cup went under the fondue tap, and the milk chocolate cloaked and pooled.

The money shot was the twist – rotating the cup for the camera, showing the cross-sections of chocolate and strawberry, something like the swivel and glance-back of a runway model. ‘The result,’ the voice would say, ‘is ooey, gooey, delicious warm chocolate over cold strawberries, which is why’ – and this is where TikTok loops the video – ‘people travel all over the world to get these chocolate-covered strawberries.’ It was an obvious thing to do, a time-tested combination of ingredients, executed without any particular flair. In a food culture of almost mandated novelty, maybe this is why it worked, even though it costs – and I need to stress this – nearly £10.

The viral strawberries, people were calling them. Some people made videos like game walkthroughs – routes, menu hacks, prices and ways to beat the queue. Others gave hard data: twenty minutes to find the stall, forty people ahead of them in the queue, no more than a few minutes before reaching the front, overall 9/10 rating. The videos were mostly American or Australian, but there were splinter factions from Germany and the Netherlands. Some had voiceovers in Arabic and prices converted to UAE dirham. The wilder the ratio of effort to payoff, the better. ‘I flew eight hours to try the most viral strawberries in the world,’ they said. Or ‘pov: u saw the tiktok so you came from Australia for the strawbs’. Depending on the whims of the algorithm that day, a video like this could get anywhere between just ten and ten million views. Have I mentioned that the strawberries looked, at best … fine?

In the olden days, you needed a newspaper critic to pull a crowd like this. How else, except through a write-up in a paper with a few hundred thousand daily readers, could you create a scrum for something like fruit in a cup? And then, demagogues like Keith Lee perfected a different kind of hype that was more relatable and tapped into appetites of the novelty-seeking internet. The foods and the style were radically different, but both ways of talking about restaurants ultimately relied on the cultural heft of whoever was doing the talking. It could be Lee, or Claiborne, or the general seriousness of a masthead like that of The New York Times. In any case, somebody has authority – innate or bestowed, soft or absolute – and this is all that counts.

But the strawberries were different. There were no reviews or write-ups in the Best Of lists or Time Out clippings to tape up in a shop window. Restaurant critics weren’t writing about the strawberries – and why would they? This was unserious food for unserious people and tourists and suckers and kids. When I talked to friends who are food writers and semi-pro opinion-havers on the London food circuit, none of them had tried the strawberries and some didn’t even know they existed. I had heard about the strawberries, but only through the splintered channels of my social media algorithms – random videos from people I didn’t necessarily trust and usually didn’t even know. Hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of strawberries, tens of millions of video views – the strawberries were an internationally famous, runaway success of the London food scene for about two years – and not one authorised tastemaker was involved.

Each video was the impetus for more pilgrimages, many of which ended up on social media themselves. Who knows what inspired it, or who exactly it inspired. It doesn’t matter. Things here proliferate in a non-linear way, spreading exponentially and beyond the facts. ‘After seeing these viral chocolate strawberries, I had to see if they were worth the hype,’ someone will post. This is it – the surge, the quantum mechanics of hype.

I thought this was insane. But I had a book about modern food to write, so I joined the other hundreds of people going to Borough Market that day with the strawberries in mind. I did this while feeling superior, and then I worked my way through the same congested market as everyone else, and went through the democratic embarrassment of queueing for a TikTok-viral food. I paid with the same pounds sterling. Then I found a spot next to a bin, where a few other strawberry people had come with their cups and their wooden sporks. It was hard to tell who was there for real and who was a hater stress-testing the hype. People took a few videos, which I’m sure they ended up posting online. We ate, and spilled chocolate down ourselves, and rubbed the chocolate deeper into our clothes with ineffective paper napkins. I probably don’t need to tell you that the strawberries were average, but what difference would it make anyway? At the time of writing, the strawberries have been viewed over 150 million times on TikTok alone.

It should be obvious by now that appetite is social – that we rely on the judgement of people who’ve been there and eaten that before us. Maybe what’s less obvious, or at least what we’re less willing to admit, is how often these people whom we trust are … just some guys, people who know as little as us and sometimes even less. People like our parents. And if it wasn’t your parents, it was your friends, or the ambient pressure to eat the same things as the other kids at school. As an adult with disposable income and an intense interest in food, a lot of my decisions come down to nothing more complicated than – what are they having over there?

This is the paradox of queues: the longer they are, the more people want to join them. You have to factor in the number of people in the line, how fast the line is moving, and how sensible, on average, the people in line seem to be. You may want to adjust to account for the unaccountable taste of Americans, or based on location or time of day. The calculations are delicate, but the basic principles are simple: if all those people are doing it, then it must be good; and if it’s good, then I should be doing it too.

A queue, in its most basic form, is an expression of supply and demand. But recently queues have mutated. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to restaurants in the last thirty years, you’ll know that there are now two main characters in every hit restaurant story: the chef, and the queue, and often the queue has the more personality of the two. In London, in just the last couple of years, people have talked about the strawberry queue, the Toad Bakery queue, the Knoops hot chocolate queue, the queue for loaded chips at Camden Market, the Dishoom queue. These queues aren’t just collections of people – they seem to have acquired sentience. They are organic entities, with a will and a way of moving. Forget critics or influencers or PRs – the best representation a restaurant can dream of is a line.

Hype hasn’t always been this visible. In the eighties, say, chances are that you’d have to call to make a booking for a buzzy restaurant. Whether or not you got the table, that was your business, but you certainly never had to do anything as conspicuous as standing in a line. But in the nineties, an emerging genre of restaurant pivoted towards a more casual way of doing things with no-frills service and, crucially, no reservations. Taste seemed to settle on an egalitarian-feeling type of casual, middlebrow restaurant – even if the prices weren’t. Everyone is equally welcome here, they said, by which they meant that everybody is welcome to join the queue. But it was fun, feeling a part of the buzz. One of the first of this type of line in London was for Wagamama, a noodle bar which opened in 1992 and which people mainly remembered for the casual, no-reservations communal tables. Before the reviews or the write-ups in the guidebooks, the first big advert was the line trailing down the street.

Still, it’s New York that does this best. Manhattan in particular – a borough built on over-concentrated human ambition – has produced some of the most hated but popular queues since Depression-era breadlines. In 2001, Shake Shack opened as a summertime hotdog cart in Madison Square Park, and gradually built the kind of queues that would have you thinking, if you didn’t know better, that it was hard to find a hotdog in New York. In 2004, the business settled into a small purpose-built kiosk in the shade of an old elm tree, and expanded the menu to serve burgers and shakes and crinkle-cut fries. Over the next couple of summers, the queue started to develop a personality of its own. People were queueing from 11am, hovering near the kiosk, pretending to read a paper or wait for friends. It had energy. It was the rare line that people were happy, even eager, to be in.

By 2006, the word about Shake Shack had spread and the queues – for what was still just a summertime, lunchtime burger place in a small public park – could stretch a hundred people deep. Management was required, with A lines, B lines and signs directing people through the route. The queue no longer just had a personality, it had a reputation – and a crew of minders and managers and a cult following of its own. A fan site, Shackwatchers, was set up to monitor the line. You could, in the most mid-noughties internet transaction imaginable, take a blurry photo of the line with your BlackBerry phone and upload it to Flickr with the tag ‘shakeshackline’. These photos were shared on the site, the most recent first, making it a kind of manual webcam.

And then the actual webcam happened, on the official Shake Shack website: a feed that refreshed every five to fifteen seconds, showing the line in real time. At first, Shake Shack management thought it was a horrible idea. If they see a line, they said, people won’t go there. But the cam got tens of thousands of hits each week. ‘It was meant to be a service,’ Pete Wells, until recently the restaurant critic for The New York Times, told me. You could check the webcam – presumably on your office computer, because realistically who had a phone that could handle this much data – and then go when the line was short. ‘But it was also,’ he added, ‘the beginning of the celebration of the line.’

It’s strange to think that the blueprint for the Borough Market strawberries was set way back in 2006, a year before the first iPhone. But this was it. A simple food, marketably unpretentious, just doing a basic thing reasonably well. The burgers were good, but of course they could never be a ninety-minute- wait good. The point was that there was this line, and you probably wanted to be in it, and you probably didn’t want to be seen in it, and so you tried to game it. ‘West Coast casual’, they were calling the burgers. But here Manhattanites were, sweaty-palmed, refreshing a webcam feed at their desktop Apple Mac for a burger halfway across town.

‘Lines are so central to the Shake Shack experience that they have symbolic overtones,’ Wells wrote, a few years into the Shake Shack era. ‘The line is democratic . . . It is a signal of freshness: everybody waits, because the food is cooked to order. It is the people’s endorsement: everybody waits, so it must be worth it.’ This mattered, for a vernacular American food that couldn’t bank on receiving a serious New York Times review – until Wells did it himself. Things like this got mentioned in diary pieces sometimes and burger round-ups, but they were never given the critical close-read of, say, a midtown, sit-down restaurant. And so the queue became the critic, and the internet spread the word.

There was one more thing. In the mid to late noughties, food blogs started to grow. These bloggers – who nobody was really paying, by the way – did the combined job of newspaper gossip columnist, restaurant critic, local reporter and opinion writer, and at breakneck pace. At the same time, online food publications were having a miniature golden age, and there was also the piecemeal user-generated content of sites like Flickr or the message boards on Chowhound. Where once you’d have to buy the newspaper and search for the microprint restaurant review, now you had a constant stream of food media content and, naturally, everyone was writing about the line. By the end of the noughties, there was the line, and there were people writing about the line, and people writing about people writing about the line.

By 2013, these feedback loops had been expertly calibrated to create hype. When Dominique Ansel developed his recipe for the cronut – a deep-fried doughnut ring, but made of croissant dough – people were reporting on it, and anticipating the appetite for it, before it even launched. It wasn’t just the line, which started forming from 6am, two hours before the bakery even opened, or the scalpers, who queued for hours and resold the cronuts for profit to ‘I’m not a morning person’ people. It was the media – Grub Street, Eater, The New York Times, the Village Voice, the Week, Huffington Post, the Atlantic, all of them feeding the ego of the queue, and all of them, in a weird way, dependent on it.

Cronuts became, in the end, the most famous hype food of the 2010s. A lot of it was timing: they came at the height of super-intense restaurant coverage, but also at the dawn of a new, more adaptive, more instinctive kind of media. Instagram was launched in 2010 and had expanded to Android phones in 2012, and by the cronut inception event it had around 100 million users. On Instagram, you shared a photo of the food with an explanatory caption, rather than a blog post about the food with an illustrative photo. This allowed you to bypass thinking altogether and just look: burgers, hotdogs, fries, pizza, ice cream, cake, bubble tea – all those foods that instantly register as delicious.

‘What we’re talking about,’ Pete Wells explained to me, ‘is a shift from talking about places, venues, establishments and addresses, to a single experience.’ Nobody was talking about Dominique Ansel’s bakery, which would have involved thinking about what kind of place it was and how it dovetailed into the New York scene. People just shared the cronut, a platonic torus of golden dough with a sugar-salt-fat ratio to please the gods. The cronut – a singularity. Instead of spreading person to person through word of mouth, it spread exponentially, like a contagion, and the template was laid for the next fifteen years of viral restaurant trends.

Since the cronut, we’ve been living through an age of serial virality. We find ourselves now surrounded by lines, usually for inexpensive, seemingly democratic foods in the Shake Shack kind of mould. I say in the Shake Shack mould, but maybe that’s talking around the point. In the last decade in London, nearly all of the runaway, social-media enabled success stories have been for some version of the meat-in-bread format. Burger vans; deep-fill sandwich places; a pop-up of the hugely successful West Coast burger chain In-N-Out, but for reasons unclear to anybody at all, in Hendon. In the last year alone, two new smashburger places have opened. Both have a knockoff, Shake Shack-style burger-modernist vibe. And I’ve been to both, spending cumulative hours waiting for the archetypal fast food.

In the last few years, TikTok in particular has become the platform for viral food. It’s all in the details: the way that the app knows how long you linger on something, how many times you let a mac and cheese video loop before you swipe away; the way that before you even see the name of the uploader or the caption of the video, you see how many tens of thousands of views and likes it has.

Traditionally, social media platforms emphasised the social. This meant following friends or family or celebrities, and mainly being shown their content. Restaurant influencers became a thing, and people trusted in their authority the same way as they used to trust the critics. TikTok, and the apps that have followed its lead, is different. The beat falls on the media, not the social. The For You page is an algorithmically curated scroll of videos. It doesn’t matter who posted something or how many followers they have or whether you even know them. The important thing is the content – does it make people linger? Do people send it on? Does it do its job? Its job, by the way, is to keep people scrolling the app, not necessarily to lead them to good food. This recommendation algorithm accounts for over 90 per cent of everything you see on the app. It is the first thing you see when you open TikTok, and maybe the most powerful tastemaker in the world right now.

Philippe Conticini

Some of the most viral foods in London in the last couple of years include a foot-long croissant, a brick of honey butter toast and cookies thicker than the average burger. A more-is-more principle is in effect. It has led to mash-ups like birria ramen, cheeseburger tacos, cruffins, crookies, brookies and cereal milk ice cream. When something goes viral on here, it reveals something about the things we really want. And what people want, it turns out, are easily digestible food ideas – things they already know, like the burger, hybrids that they double know but that are also novel, like the ‘Yorkshire pudding burrito’ I got last year, on TikTok’s recommendation, which was exactly how you would imagine it would be.

We have got to a point now where even restaurant critics follow the queues, following the lines of people, who themselves are following the online hype. Influence is being broken, or it’s being fixed. The balance of power is moving towards the simple rubric of likes, sends, hearts, forwards, views, head counts in a queue.

But, I can’t help myself. As much as I like to complain about queueing and viral mash-ups and circular hype, the truth is that a person can’t ironically queue. I had to admit this to myself a few months ago, voluntarily in line for the worst sandwich I have ever had, designed by a man I don’t trust, for which I paid £16. You’re either in line, or you’re not. Mild humiliation kink is one of the big drivers of restaurant culture right now.

A while ago, inspired by a slew of TikTok videos, I went to another place that I knew I’d hate. In Camden Market, which used to be a semi-countercultural punk ghetto and is now the visiting French teenager’s Winter Wonderland, there is a stall where you can buy loaded chips. The people in front of me were there thanks to TikTok. The people behind were too. And then, after what felt like a week, I got the chips, which had been tossed with mayonnaise, grated cheese, a spice and herb mixture, chilli sauce and jalapeños. They were terrible, but then you already know that. I complained about the chips and the line to anybody who would listen, including my dry-cleaner – and as it happened, he had gone there too. Never again, I said. Never again, he agreed.

Author’s note: As I was finishing the edits on this book, something happened. In the online food media crossover event of the century, Keith Lee – the Keith Lee – came to London and got the Borough Market strawberries, having seen them go viral on TikTok. His conclusion? ‘It’s a strawberry.’

All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, by Ruby Tandoh (Profile Books Ltd.) €25.50, is out now. 

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