The Restaurant With No Menu, No Chef, No Point

The restaurant has no menu, no chef, and — its founders will tell you, with the serenity of people who have raised a great deal of money — no point in the old sense of the word. There is a counter. There is a screen. There is an algorithm that has read everything you've eaten this month and has opinions. You eat what it decides, when it decides, and you leave having had, the marketing promises, your needs met before you knew you had them.

It is the logical endpoint of a decade of food becoming content, and content becoming data, and data becoming the actual meal.

I went, because that is the job. The food was fine. The food was, in fact, almost aggressively fine — engineered to the exact midpoint of everyone's preferences, a flavour with the corners sanded off. I left full and faintly insulted, the way you feel when a stranger guesses your age correctly.

"People don't want choice, they want to have chosen," a co-founder tells me over a coffee the machine selected for both of us. "We give them the having-chosen and we skip the choosing. It tests incredibly well."

What the no-menu restaurant has actually abolished is the small, specific risk of ordering the wrong thing — and with it, the chance of ordering the right thing by accident, the dish you'd never have picked that becomes the one you tell people about. Optimised appetite is appetite with the surprises removed. It turns out the surprises were the part worth paying for.