Why Does Every "Cool" Restaurant Look the Same?
How AI is flattening taste, identity, and leaving everything tasting bland.
I booked Bar Alimentar during prime time: 7PM on a Saturday. I’d found the place through deep, intensive research on TikTok, between day-in-the-lifes and hauls of the best Portuguese shops. When we walk in, my boyfriend and I glance at one another with a distinctive, silent nod.
Yes, we were going to rate this place.
My boyfriend and I play this game each time we go to a restaurant. It’s based on the once popular Italian TV program ‘Quattro Ristoranti’ where four restaurant owners go around rating restaurants by four categories: location, food, service, and price.
We’ve played this game for the last year of dating, meaning we’ve amalgamated a good number of restaurants around the world, from big city classics in London, Paris and New York to hidden gems in Gjirokastër and Rimini.
If you’d look over at our table, you’d think ‘what a beautiful couple with so much to say!’ when in fact we are simply in a heated debate as to why we believe that service should be granted two decimal points more due to the way the waiter undid our napkins.
Ranking is fun, but one thing I’ve noticed is the undeniable similarities between restaurants that are deemed ‘cool’ by the general public. The concept of taste comes up a lot, a concept I’ve previously written about, but it truly makes me question whether our tastes are becoming homogenised.
Bar Alimentar, if I’m honest, could have been anywhere. It ranked well because it was cool. We’d seen it a thousand times before and we’ll see it a thousand times again. Strip the Portuguese off the menu, and it could have sat just as comfortably in Shoreditch, or the 11th arrondissement, or a corner of Brooklyn. Same font, same candles, same low hum of a playlist that’s been A/B tested into inoffensiveness. Nothing about it told you where you were. It had no identity because it had given up its identity in exchange for being liked everywhere at once.
What is cool and what is good taste aren’t the same thing, but their Venn Diagrams often overlap, or have blurred lines, or all of the above. ‘Good taste’ is perhaps simply the agreed taste that one acquires through going to places that are deemed cool by enough people. In the case of restaurants, this comes to life as a hand-drawn font with a doodle-like logo, a menu that changes daily, candles dripping wax just enough to look careless, low lights, a strong colour palette, wood accents. The list goes on.
But so often I find these elements in the latest restaurants and find them so, insufferably, yawn-worthingly boring.
In my last piece about taste, I discussed how algorithms are claiming to acquire taste, how taste is on everyone’s tongue. If the aesthetic above is what we’ve collectively tagged as tasteful, and that’s what’s training the next round of recommendations, won’t taste keep narrowing into itself?
Someone with no taste may ask a simple prompt, “make this more tasteful,” and out comes all of these elements, assembled and ready.
A tick box, an ask, and suddenly what was utterly lame becomes undeniably cool.
Cool means fashionable and fashionable means changeable. Trends go in and out with the seasons (quite literally) and while millennial beige was once the rave, accent walls and low lights is now what is craved.
But I wonder whether, now with this increase in information and access to data from all over the world, we are ever going to find something truly unique that simultaneously lives online.
Maybe online means accessible means global means everywhere.
Maybe offline means hard to access means limited means precious. Unique. Unbeknownst to the world of prying language models.
One of the best places that my boyfriend and I visited was a tiny restaurant on our first day in Lisbon. The (wonderfully affordable) Uber dropped us in a cobbled side street, and with an hour to spare before Rui dropped the keys off, we went looking for food. Not too far to carry the luggage, though far enough to struggle with them.
We found a place with a recognisable Portuguese name.
We went in, and eight workmen were sat at the table closest to the door, bawling over sardines and beer, quite a few of them already finished, speaking in loud Portuguese and calling the empregado by his first name. I felt almost embarrassed to have suitcases in tow, to not quite fit into the scene unfolding around us.
Upstairs, the menus were in Portuguese with no English translations nor photos to point to, so we communicated through smiles and gestures, and when the waiter brought me the wrong dish I ate it anyway, because this wasn’t the kind of place where you’d speak to the manager, you simply had what you were given and scraped the plate clean to show appreciation.
The fish soup was two euros, my arms stuck to the table, and there were still Christmas decorations up.
It was, without question, the highest-rated restaurant of the entire trip.
Why? Because nothing there was engineered to be cool, nothing was performing for anyone. There were actually quite a few things wrong with it, but that’s exactly what makes a place so charming. It sparked joy in me because of its differences.
When we receive the same information over and over, our brains grow used to it, go dull, stop noticing. I could go into a hundred ‘cool-cool’ ‘same-same’ restaurants and know what to expect. It’s the imperfect, the unexpected, the slightly wrong, that sparks joy and interest. That’s what makes something truly beautiful.
It’s the same flattening, I think, that happens when you feed a great idea into an LLM and watch it come back smaller. The model has no memory of an idea like yours succeeding, so it assumes it can’t, and respectfully nudges you back toward what it’s already seen work. A founding idea gets proofread into a safer one. An original thought gets workshopped until it resembles every other thought it’s been trained on. The model isn’t being malicious, it’s being statistical, which is somehow worse. There’s no villain to blame, only an average winning by default. Maybe that’s where ideas go to die: not in rejection, but in revision, the same slow consensus that gave us hand-drawn fonts on every menu in London.
This restaurant never asked to be tasteful. It had no notion of what cool was supposed to look like, no aesthetic to maintain, no algorithm whispering what worked elsewhere in the world. It simply was what it was, which is precisely why it had so much identity, why I can still picture the Christmas decorations gathering dust in the wrong month, the workmen who came there day in day out, the recipes that stayed in the family for years. Identity isn’t built from what’s agreed upon by others. It’s built from what’s left over when nobody’s optimising.
We’ve ranked enough restaurants now to notice a pattern that has nothing to do with the categories at all. The ones that score highest are never the ones doing what’s currently cool. They’re the ones that aren’t doing anything in particular, except being unmistakably, stubbornly themselves.