A Column With Regret

 Pete Wells has been such a fixture in the New York Times Wednesday Food sectio,He has been reviewing restaurants throughout the world, especially in his home town of New York City for the last twelve years. yet nothing lasts forever. It;s time for him to move on to other Times writing assignments.

Yesterday he wrote one of his last columns all about the new attitude of restaurants.In over  a decade he feels they have changed. One point is that people are ordering on screens as opposed to looking at a real  menu. This seems to be true all over as we scan a QR code and the restaurant's menu instantly pops up on our phones' screens. There were people to guide ours through our meals from the hosts to the waitstaff. There were also bartenders, runners,,captains and bussers to talk with. They gave insights about dishes and the restaurant along with contributing to the place's ambiance. Now it happens on a screen. Go into any Shake Shack and order on a screen. Food and drink is then paid on the same screen. Basically Mr. Wells, States restaurants have become vending machines with chairs. Yet he forgets about the Automat, a piece of New York history where diners could insert money into a machine and receive everything from chicken pot pies to  slices of cakes and a variety of hot and cold drinks. The first one Quisisana opened in Berlin in 1895. There's nothing new about this concept.

ANother thing Mr Wells raises is the rise of food on Instagram along with the decrease of paper menus. Most neighborhood eateries now are on delivery apps, Their entire menus are listed. Some of the restaurants aren't even real. They're what's known as ghost kitchens, kitchens that are just that kitchens. They're without any place to sit. The food  could be prepared in a professional kitchen at some placee.In others it could be in someone's house or apartment.As for the whole Instagram phenomenon, now restaurants don't want to serve anything that could go viral because they don't want their business to burn out.Diners go to places solely to put a picture of the latest trend on a social media platform. Whether the dish tastes good is irrelevant. They just want the world to know they had eggs prepared a certain way or they finally had a rainbow bagel.Then there are the tasting menu places where they 've become so impersonal, that they don;t care if people return or don;t. You sit there and get served.If there's a birthday -and there usually is - they they;re given a cupcake with a candle. That's it.

It sounds like the restaurant industry has jaded Pete Wells. There are hidden gems throughout the city, throwback to a time when dining was a fun and satisfying experience. They may be hard to find, but they're there.