Category: Food and Drink

The review is here, by Will Dean, the summary is here:

If you’re interested in how the food and restaurant industries work – and how to exploit those factors for your own good – then Cowen’s work is indispensable.

And:

All good advice. It has no recipes, few restaurant recommendations and no famous chef names, but An Economist Gets Lunch might be the most interesting book about food you read all year.

Cowen fears the effects of gentrification, which tends to drive up real estate rates and drive out ethnic restaurants. It can also lead to blander food. But if defense funding is cut, and the impact is felt locally, that would be a good thing for ethnic restaurants, if not for the populace in general, Cowen said.

And finally, some more helpful tips for ethnic restaurant exploration: ”It’s all about the ordering,” Cowen said. The best places have smaller menus, so they aren’t trying to please everyone, and likely do several things very well. Don’t ask the waiter what’s good, “that will only confuse them.” Instead, ask, “What dish do you have here which is special?” or “What are your regional specialties.”

That is from Tom Jackman, here is more.  Also from the Post today, Tim Carman adds further discussion.

For instance, what if you are yourself a beautiful woman? What if you are a beautiful woman who wants to dine out with a number of your beautiful friends? According to Mr. Cowen, you shouldn’t go to whatever restaurant you happen to go to.

Here is more, from the Toledo Blade.

Matt writes:

Imagine some diners are, by temperament, venturesome while others are regulars. Over the long term, the best business strategy is to appeal to regulars since they offer a stable client base. But when a restaurant is new, it by definition lacks regulars and needs to appeal to venturesome diners both to get an initial wave of customers and also to attract “buzz” and get the temperamental regulars in the door. Over time, a successful restaurant will attempt to switch and become more a place for regulars, which means that venturesome diners will come to like it less. At the same time, alienating venturesome foodies is very low cost because being venturesome they would perceive their own growing familiarity with the food as declining quality one way or the other.

This is not at all far from my basic theory, though Matt seems to imply it is.  In An Economist Gets Lunch I stress how the cycle of “ceasing to appeal to the informed diners” has very much accelerated with the internet.  Good reviews arrive rapidly, perhaps too rapidly.  If there is a new place you quite like — especially if it is trendy — go many times now, because it will decline in quality more rapidly than such places used to.  Once the place is established, it can get by more on momentum and on its value as a focal venue for socializing.  You can take the presence of a lot of beautiful women as one sign that a place has crossed into this territory.

Don’t think of the model as “what happens to a restaurant when there is an exogenous increase in the beauty of its women” (recall Scott Sumner — “don’t reason from a beautiful women [price] change!” ).  Think of the model as “what does lots of beautiful women predict about the place of a restaurant in its product life cycle?”

Restaurants with beautiful women are still better than average, relative to the population of restaurants as a whole, for obvious reasons related to wealth and demographics.  They’re just not likely to be the very best of the good restaurants, especially for the price.

Arguably it is a different case when a restaurant has beautiful women, but most mainstream male patrons would regard those women as “ineligible,” or “unapproachable,” perhaps for reason of a different religion or ethnicity.  At those restaurants you can enjoy both great food for the price and beautiful women, though perhaps your enjoyment of the latter will remain at some distance.

You will find it here.  Here is one quotation:

“Vegetarians are more virtuous than the rest of us; they should be admired.”

The interview is here, with Arin Greenwood, here is one excerpt:

For the world as a whole the main thing we need to do is invest more in increasing agricultural productivity. It’s really slowed down since the 1990s. It’s a major problem for at least one billion people. I think it’s much more important than what people like Michael Pollan usually talk about. For the U.S., I think we should have a carbon tax, for environmental reasons.

I think as individuals, people overrate the virtues of local food. Most of the energy consumption in our food system is not caused by transportation. Sometimes local food is more energy efficient. But often it’s not. The strongest case for locavorism is to eat less that’s flown on planes, and not to worry about boats.

And this:

This will sound a little strange coming from me. The two dynamic sectors now are hamburgers and pizza.

And this:

There are any number of places with good decor and great food, they just cost a very high price. Most people don’t want to eat at those places on a regular basis for reasons of money or time, or just the sheer oppression of having to dress up and go to a nice place all the time.

You can order the book on Amazon here.  For Barnes & Noble here.  For Indiebound.org here.

Recently he noted a jump in the quality of pizza and hamburger restaurants after his daughter dragged him to a Shake Shack restaurant.

“It took me a while to actually believe it. I had a bias,” Cowen said.

From Kristina Peterson, here is more.  Here is the coverage from three days ago.