Post by mdorman

Today, in an article titled The Most Annoying Restaurant in New York, the author mentioned Dorsia, which I learned:

is the global hospitality platform and technology company unlocking access to the world’s most coveted reservations, events, and experiences.

The VC-marketing-speak makes my eyes roll so hard it hurts, but if I am being extremely honest, I'm at least adjacent to the type of person they're probably targeting—I have money and time, and am willing to use them to have interesting experiences—except perhaps for my age (old), lack of social media clout, presence or interest (insta-what?), and the fact that I don't live in one of the places they serve (though I do visit).

In the end, the thing that repulses me is the name—"Dorsia" is the restaurant that Patrick Bateman can never get into in American Psycho. I could appreciate it as a joke, but to follow through—to create a service with that name and that objective—strikes me as a bleak expression of cynicism.

I also wonder about what I perceive as the desire to cede your ability to choose—you can get in to the "hot" places, but someone else is picking them for you—and some of the interesting incentives that could arise for the company—it is, after all, also an investor in the (putative) Most Annoying Restaurant in New York. Are they effectively front-running popularity? Are you paying for the privilege of having them provide you entree into places whose success they benefit from?

Still, I recognize that this may all be deeply hypocritical of me. I mean, I like a good restaurant. I follow a few different YouTube channels that clue me in to new and potentially hot restaurants in NYC. I watch the GrubStreet RSS feed. I troll Eater or Bon Appetit before going places looking for recommendations. I've got a list in Apple Maps that's simple "places we might go our next time in NYC", and it gets updated pretty regularly.

Hell, my favorite restaurant in Rome is one I went to because of Tony Bourdain! But somehow this seems different to me. For one thing, I've been going to Roma Sparita when I've been in Rome for more than a decade now—it's somewhere I choose to patronize not because it was "hot", but because I had reason to believe it was good. I could do a lot worse than their cacio e pepe to start and steak with green peppercorns as a last meal. Well, I guess I would try to pack in some weirdo gelato from Fatamorgana afterward.

I also wonder how durable it is for these hot spots; I think there's already some backlash in NYC over this sort of influencer-led plague-of-locusts problem—a business can't magically scale up and then back down, so they risk either staying over-busy (which can be off-putting to people who might become regulars and truly sustain them), or they can try to scale up and then find themselves out over their skis when the hordes move on to something else. Hell, the little cafe & patisserie near my house had a sign posted for a while about availability of something-or-other (macarons?) because they had a viral moment a couple of years ago. I think that's settled down, but who knows how many locals quit going because it was such chaos for a while—and now that the crowds are gone, are they worse off?