The foundation to success
Notes on hospitality
A five course prix-fixe menu of Asian fusion flavors in an dimly-lit, intimate setting. 10% review rate, all five stars. A waiting list for reservations. A brand that has expanded into consumer products with bold, colorful packaging…
Welcome to The Lincoln Experience, Georgetown’s hottest restaurant popup… in the living room of a few undergraduate students. Sorry, David Chang — you don’t have to stamp Momofuku’s name over everything or chase Michelin stars to achieve this exceptionalism. The popup is curated by senior Lincoln Le, who turned his COVID-19 hobby into a passion project / business venture of sorts this past fall semester. Given that other Georgetown publications have already covered its origin story and the dining experience, I’ve chosen to focus on the lure of popups.
Lincoln served 200 guests this school year. Members of the campus can’t stop raving about his black sesame tiramisu and his packaged goods consistently sell out. Certainly, the Hoya community turns up for each other, and from Sweetgreen to Phil’s Finest, we’re proud of the food businesses that have emerged from the Hilltop. But a national fast casual chain or consumer packaged good doesn’t capture the allure of The Lincoln Experience.
When I spoke to Lincoln, he attributed his success to “exclusivity.” Yet, this word doesn’t quite sit right with me. Exclusivity conjures notions of high price tags, but given Georgetown’s wealthy student profile, Michelin meals aren’t exactly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Rather, I think what people are chasing is the magic. Interesting, inspiring, and nourishing social experiences. Love folded into every dish, the craft in the plating, the sweet aroma of humble dreams. It’s a little raw, a little imperfect. With every serendipitous bite, we want to taste something special before it blows up into corporate grandeur.
The rise of popups & food halls
Popups in DC food halls like Kiyomi Sushi by Uchi in The Square and Moon Rabbit by Kevin Tien in Bryant St Market are beloved by many for its:
Innovation: many of these popups are testing a concept before it becomes a brick-and-mortar store, which is appealing for both consumers and the chefs.
Exclusivity (temporality & capacity): the equivalent of a “hidden gem” in a somewhat gentrified, corporatized area, as they’re more lowkey and temporary.
Price: they offer a better deal for a unique experience with high quality food. For instance, Kiyomi Sushi is $40pp (pre-tax) for a 9-course lunch and $100pp for a 15-course dinner, compared to $190 for a 20-course dinner at Sushi Nakazawa. This is partly due to the lower operational costs of setting up a popup.
Employment opportunity: turnover rates for restaurants are high, but popups allow chefs to keep themselves and their staff employed while searching for their next venue.
Emergent cities
I’m overtaken by a similar thrill running through the vibrant vendors of food halls and farmers markets as I do foraging the narrow, winding alleyways of downtown Tokyo. These “yokocho” alleyways take it to a whole different level of palpable energy—an underground mysticism, fingertips itching to uncover buried treasures and stories.
According to Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, these small businesses are the backbone of Tokyo’s thriving city life:
Since the shops are small and run independently, they naturally tend to attract and incubate young restauranteurs and thus serve as a base for innovation in the sector.
Another example is walkability. Chains have name recognition and marketing budgets; small independent restaurants and stores in urban areas depend more on serendipitous foot traffic. So it’s in the interests of small businesspeople to have great trains, walkable spaces, and residential density, in order to get them more customers. When people ask why Japan has the world’s best train system, the political power of small business is rarely mentioned, but it seems like a factor worth exploring.
Emergent Tokyo (bottom-up) stands in contrast to the corporate top-down development of mixed-use business districts like Roppongi Hills, a master plan of 17 years by Mori Building Co. While the latter is far superior to American shopping centers, it lacks the spark of independence. Likewise, roaming Hong Kong, where Michelin restaurants are sandwiched between fresh fish markets and one-man pasta joints, is far more fun than the state-led grid-like streets of Shenzhen.
American strip malls & drive-throughs
The ultimate dead zone is American strip malls. Small mom and pop shops are being replaced with ginormous, one-dimensional Chipotle and Shake Shack drive-throughs that plaster the horizon. Sometimes, I wish America wasn’t so obsessed with scale. In such a service economy, “small business” is increasingly associated with startups and B2B businesses.
I can’t help but question, what does this landscape of America say about our supposed title as the “land of dreams and opportunity?” At least when it comes to individual brick and mortar stores, it’s not so easy to just set up your own establishment and let passion and skill reign.
Then, there’s the chicken and egg question: Does urban planning drive consumer taste? Or does consumer taste drive urban planning? A recent Vox article on America’s mega drive-throughs argues that it starts with the latter. The problem is “the system that allows and even encourages developers and big business to waste so much precious land on economically unproductive sprawl.” Drive-throughs are popular because American cities are built for cars rather than humans.
In other words, urban planning —> consumer preferences/urban economics —> urban design.
However, urban planner Alain Bertaud argues in Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities that it ought to be the latter—urban economics should drive urban planning. Bertaud believes the sprawl of American suburbs should be seen as a natural consequence of the income growth of American cities, not as some sort of sadistic plan by American businesses. (However, one critique I have about Bertaud is his assumption that a primary motivator for where one chooses to live is accessibility to jobs. This is less true with the rise of WFM and remote jobs, and also less true of more advanced economies than developing ones.)
Personally, I’ve only been to a drive-through a handful of times, so it’s easy to consider them heinous. I couldn’t help gape when a friend of mine (a very typical white American living in the suburbs of North Carolina) went past three of them on a 20-minute call. Meanwhile, he was shocked at my lack of drive-through experience.
Who should be the arbiter of taste? Should it be the cosmopolitan, college-educated, high-earning individual who craves French-Korean fusion and continent hopping? Or should it be the typical middle-class American who never intends to leave the country and would have a Chipotle burrito bowl with a tortilla on the side as their death-row meal?1
Enlightened Hospitality
I have to concede that drive-throughs are economically efficient, especially for the typical American suburban resident… at least on the surface. But there are other intangible, unquantifiable costs associated with them in the long-run—namely, their isolating, anti-community effect. It’s the lack of humanity, whether that be a chance for social interaction, or a story and a purpose behind an establishment. It’s missing the love that popups like The Lincoln’s Experience brings to the table.
At first, I struggled to come up with a word to describe the “fuzzy” aspect of restaurants. But then, I read Danny Meyer’s Enlightened Hospitality and it seemed obvious:
Understanding the distinction between service and hospitality has been at the foundation of our success. Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. Service is a monologue—we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards for service. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on a guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response.
Although my parents aren’t real estate developers or hotel managers, the instinct toward hospitality runs in how I was raised. Whenever friends and family come from out of town, even if they can afford a hotel, my parents offer our home as a place for them to stay. We’ve created 2 extra bedrooms downstairs to accommodate the guests who come and go. Part of the reason my family does this comes from Asian culture more broadly. The other part comes from my parents’ familiarity with feeling like an outsider in an unfamiliar environment. Having grown up in rural China, they left their homes for high schools in the city, and later became the first in our extended families to fly across the world with a one-way ticket to 美国, the beautiful land.
Although Meyer is infamous for having opened up Eleven Madison Park and several other Michelin restaurants, he shares the same philosophy as my parents: hospitality is embodied in the small gestures that show humility and intimacy. From hosting a Friendsgiving dinner for the international students still on campus at Georgetown, to connecting my friends from various contexts over dim sum, I also hope to extend the feeling of “home” beyond the four walls that define a house.
Food is one of the only contexts where I’m risk seeking (somewhat) in terms of the cuisine and ingredients used. I still value predictability and consistency of high quality food by checking reviews, but I don’t rely on chain restaurants. However, when I do want something familiar, I look for poke bowls or Korean tofu stew.