Fine dining restaurants researching guests to make their dinner unforgettable

The title seems ominous but the article itself is about how a fancy restaurant will go out of it's way to make you feel special. They're perusing your social media for clues.

In the past your spouse or kid would call and let the maitre'd know it was special; now I guess it's a job for someone on staff.

Privacy concerns aside, I would be mortified if a restaurant did something special for me. I don't want extra attention. I don't want to have to pretend to be excited about a beverage I don't really care for or a gift I will just throw away.

Now if you will excuse, I see some clouds at which I need to shake my cane.

So this is basically a modern approach to Danny Meyer's (Union Square Hospitality Group [1]) "collecting the dots" he described in his book Setting the Table [2].

His suggestion was to have staff listen to conversations (and have conversations with guests) and then record any interesting "dots" like a child having a graduation coming up or an anniversary just around the corner. That way on their next visit the staff could be well-prepared.

Click-bait headline makes you think otherwise, but this is just standard hospitality stuff.

[1] https://www.ushg.com/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Table-Transforming-Hospitalit...

It must be emphasised that they're doing this with public information and presumably whatever else you've implicitly consented to giving them, so I don't see a problem with that. Nonetheless this isn't the experience I'd want from a restaurant, and fortunately there are plenty of others to choose from.

It's funny to read these comments, of course HN would react this way but since the vast majority of restaurant patrons are so-called normies, it doesn't make much sense to cater to HNers. In fact, most normal people actually prefer that restaurants know their interests and cater to them, it leads to their higher satisfaction and makes the restaurant experience (which includes more than just the taste of the food, for most people at least) more memorable overall.

Good opportunity to learn about SingleThread, which is a 90s-style throwback to when it was impossible to learn anything about Japan so people just made things up. Like, they call their customers "chairman of the board" because they just heard a random word somewhere?

Japanese customer service ("omotenashi") is mostly about not listening to your customers. You get exactly what they want to give you and that's it. If you have a dietary restriction they may just kick you out because they won't/can't change the menu.

These comments are such a great pointer to the way outrage is engineered.

It is expected that filtering based on digital content will become a thing for a while. It's one of those obvious, but misguided, uses of recent technologies.

I don't know about restaurants, but in regards to other kinds of silos, it is likely that those filters will go down once quality data availability becomes a problem.

In the restaurant analogy, you can say that if the salloon is empty, they'll let people in because they can't survive without them.

Seems like the potential start of a dystopian nightmare to me.

Wouldn't be better for all concerned if a 2 star restaurant worked at providing better food and service instead of privacy invasion and exploitation of the vain?

I gotta say, I don't have the right personality traits to enjoy this kind of personal attention a lot of the time.

I've had experiences where the counter staff at my daily breakfast place started to recognize me and know what "usual" my order was going to be without my having to say it... and it really weirded me out more than anything else.

Sometimes I just want to be a faceless nobody, forgotten day after day by the businesses I visit and the public spaces I navigate.

Social Credit Score, but privatized

Maybe I’ll start taking pictures of the owners kids playing in the yard so I can establish a better relationship with the business and get better service.

Honestly, this just seems like really creative and earnest hospitality. To summarize the somewhat fluffy piece -

> Kirk also has a gigantic database of each guest — about 115,000 people — and knows how many times they’ve dined at Lazy Bear since it first opened as a supper club in 2009. She then dives into social media and finds extra information that is publicly available to get a sense of who the guests are before they come in. Finally, she puts all the data she’s gathered into a color-coded Google document that every member of the team, front and back of house, studies.

“We get hundreds of emails a day, and the intimate details that some people are willing to share, sometimes we’re like ‘Holy crap. I can’t believe you told us that,’” Booth said. “But then there’s the fun, the literal joy, our team feels when they get to make these special touches with those details.”

--

That sounds great to me! I think some commenters are imagining a kind of Black Mirror meets Berghain meets social credit scenario, but it seems like really none of those things. Cynically, one could perhaps paint it as another clever way for Bay Area folks to convert capital into emotionally emulated human experiences, though even amongst that list I'd consider it one of the more wholesome.

Good luck with that.

Pretty much the only social media I participate in, is ... here. I guess the Bay Area might take HN seriously, but I live in NY.

Haha this is fantastic. I suppose we must have been uninteresting guests to these places because we didn't get this degree of personalization but the food was great. A lot of these 3 Mich experiences are experiences and not just a dining alone thing so I totally get it. Fun stuff!

Just like China's social credit system.

I would never eat at a restaurant that would let people like me in.

(Thanks, Groucho)

Like many here, before I read the article I assumed this was intended to be some sort of filtering mechanism... which is a bit dystopian, but IMO the truth is much MUCH more bizarre.

We're talking about a fancy restaurant that researches you and your social media to better cater to you and make you feel "special". I think I'd prefer that this just be an extension of the velvet rope, bouncers have been around for ages, but this feels genuinely creepy.

> “The information is used as a precursor to gain more of an understanding of who our guests are,” general manager Akeel Shah explained to SFGATE. “We may not even use the information, but it gives us a better way to tailor the experience and make it memorable.”

Eewwww, no. Just no. It really feels like someone watched 'The Menu', missed the entire point of the movie, and just thought "Hey wouldn't it be neat if WE knew everything about our customers before they arrived?"