Best Of: Why fine dining isn’t fine
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2023
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The announcement last winter that the world’s top restaurant, Noma, will close in 2024, has spawned dozens of think pieces asking whether this is the end of fine dining. So this weekend, we went to the FT’s renowned food critic Tim Hayward to learn about the state of the industry. Running a restaurant has never been more expensive in cities such as New York and London. And now, in the middle of a cost of living crisis, Tim says a bloodbath is coming: in order to stay afloat restauranteurs must ditch a corporate business model and return to more nimble roots. Tim tells Lilah that the good news is that he’s seeing it happen.
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Want to say hi? We love hearing from you. Email us at [email protected]. We’re on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and Lilah is on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap.
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Links and mentions from the episode:
– ‘The restaurant industry faces a bloodbath. But there are ways to survive’, by Tim Hayward: https://on.ft.com/3lfo2u6
–The column Tim mentions on The North Circular’s Ace Cafe, which has perfect hospitality: https://on.ft.com/3Yl3dMr
–Tim’s piece ‘A 14-course tasting menu? Don’t. Just don’t’: https://on.ft.com/40GuBGq
– Our previous episode on Noma is here: https://www.ft.com/content/04bd9722-1d17-496d-aefc-fdae46d5d3b2
– Tim Hayward is on Twitter and Instagram @timhayward.
Clips from The Menu, copyright Searchlight Pictures
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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you've been watching TV and movies lately, you might be getting a sense that the restaurant industry sends some trouble. |
| 0:08.2 | Or at least it's in kind of a slump. |
| 0:11.3 | First there was the film Boiling Point, then there was the FX show The Bear. |
| 0:16.5 | But the one that really stands out to me is the recent film The Menu. |
| 0:20.7 | It brings us to a fictional world's best restaurant that's located on a private island. |
| 0:26.4 | The menu is really a satire of the world's real best restaurants, and that means it has everything |
| 0:31.1 | you would expect. |
| 0:32.0 | It has very wealthy diners. |
| 0:34.3 | It has a chef that's revered as a king. |
| 0:37.3 | Welcome to Hawthorne. |
| 0:39.5 | Here we are family. |
| 0:41.2 | We harvest, we ferment, we gel. |
| 0:45.7 | We gel. |
| 0:47.6 | But in this one, diners very quickly realize that their death is also on the tasting menu. |
| 0:54.3 | We now offer you a 45 second head start. |
| 0:59.0 | Okay, 45 seconds starts now. |
| 1:03.3 | I watched the menu because this big news broke, and I was trying to understand it. |
| 1:08.7 | The news was that Noma, the world's actual top restaurant, is closing. |
| 1:13.8 | But why would a place like Noma close? |
| 1:16.6 | It's world famous. |
| 1:18.1 | It costs up to $1,500 a seat. |
| 1:20.8 | It's not like they can't afford to stay open. |
... |
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