Free Best Food Writing 2015 by Holly Hughes Page A

Begun in 2012 and now in cities all over the country, Dinner Lab holds up to 19 events weekly, from L.A. to Atlanta to Chicago. It’s much like any pop-up experience—odd spaces, prix fixe offerings, chefs trying out new ideas that perhaps wouldn’t make it onto a restaurant menu . . . not quite yet, at least.
    The difference with Dinner Lab, aside from the sheer scope of the operation, is the feedback component. Each guest is asked to fill out a comment card addressing almost everything about the meal: each course, the wine pairing with that course, the taste and creativity of each plate of food. And that’s only what you’re asked at an actual dinner. When you sign up for Dinner Lab, many more questions are part of the process, including your relationship status, your drink of preference and how you “rate yourself as a foodie.” (I choose “Early Adopter: I tell people where to eat” from five potential choices.)
    This mountain of feedback and personal information from thousands of diners over hundreds of dinners adds up to what Brian Bordainick, Dinner Lab’s founder and CEO, believes to be a gold mine. And he plans to use it to open the world’s first data-driven restaurant.
    â€œWe’re going to reverse-engineer a restaurant,” Bordainick explains. “We’re going to use our data to open the world’s first entirely open-sourced restaurant. A programmable restaurant, if you will.”
    How does he plan to do this? Over the course of the summer, Dinner Lab has nine chefs traveling throughout the country. Each chef is cooking at least one dinner in 10 different cities—that’s 90 dinners, minimum. At the end, Dinner Lab will gather the data collected, select a chef and pick a city, mainly based on customer feedback. Then they’ll open a restaurant. The who, where and how of this, supposedly, will be based almost entirely on data.
    All of this poses a number of questions, the most obvious of which—will it work?—is perhaps the least important. But the questions that spring from that initial “will it work?” conundrum are integral to the way we eat and the business of restaurants going forward.
    Can you use data to determine trends that have yet to fully emerge? Can you use data to outsmart the restaurant gods and build a business that’s less likely to fail?
    Are the people who go to pop-ups inclined to have insight that leads to a successful brick-and-mortar restaurant? What’s the difference between this and trying to build a restaurant based on an overview of Yelp reviews?
    Do people even know what they want? And, in an era in which diners are increasingly opting for unique food events and pop-ups, isn’t Dinner Lab’s undertaking akin to using the information gathered from a successful personal-computer business to start a typewriter company?
    Dinner Lab began as a New Orleans experiment, one driven by the fact that there isn’t much to eat late at night in that city, apart from bad pizza sold out of the all-night daiquiri houses on Bourbon Street. While New Orleans is a food city, that food has been mainly limited to just a few genres. “New Orleans has a lot of Creole and Southern contemporary cuisine,” Bordainick says, “but there’s a huge dearth of variety.” So in August 2012, he began setting up pop-up dinners with different chefs. The dinners started at midnight.
    â€œIt was a terrible idea,” Bordainick says. “People showed up already hammered. It was not a very good decision-making process on our behalf.” But the foundation had been laid for a pop-up business, with Bordainick’s startup collaborating with different chefs for one-off events.
    After figuring out that regular pop-ups were “a pain in the ass, and don’t make very much money,” Bordainick came up with the model Dinner Lab has been using ever since: a subscription-based, membership