What if food? A mild defence of that terrible tasting menu
This post started life as a fidgety little grumble I probably wasn’t going to post about why Batman movies are so disappointing. Then I saw the nightmare soup mouth, and had to exorcise it from my brain.
Onwards.
So if like me you’re both interested in food and Terminally Online, you’ll have seen the article “Bros., Lecce: We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever”. If not, it’s well worth a look.
This morning, the icing on the cake came in the form of a response from the chef Floriano Pellegrino (scroll down). It’s been widely mocked, not least for its Reddit-edgelord chaos energy. But honestly, the dude makes kind of a good point. Reading it, I find myself hoping (as I do with “Salt Bae” and conspicuous consumption) that he is not merely in on, but is actively creating the joke of his persona.
Still sounds like a shitty meal, mind you.
I’m not going to defend the confrontational service, allergen stuff, or the skeevy next-day DM slide. I’m a B2B product guy. Glibly: these are fixable operational problems in service delivery, rather than structural issues with the core offer. But I am interested in what it means to take an aesthetic experience and put it into the marketplace as a product.
Because that does super weird things to people’s expectations, and not meeting people’s expectations when you’re asking for two hundred quid is an exciting place to be in.
I feel like avant-garde cuisine (or theatre, or sculpture or whatever) is going to stand or fall commercially on how it’s positioned. I may or may not enjoy watching someone knit yoghurt for an hour. I will be fucking furious if you ask me to watch that after charging me thirty pounds to see a production of Twelfth Night.
The rest of this piece is pretty much just that observation in more words.
One of the key ideas in April Dunford’s brilliant book Obviously Awesome is that positioning does two important things, and one of them helps you, while the other constrains. Positioning gives people a framework for understanding what the thing you’re selling actually is, but comes at the expense of saddling it with the expectations for that category.
She gives the example of calling cake pops “cake pops” (small, casual, confectionery nibbles) rather than “cake on a stick” (a large, messy wedge of gateau with a twig up it and an aura of state fairs). The cake pops positioning makes the category intelligible, and picks its competitors. It also generates assumptions about sizes, flavours, retail outlets, and contexts of consumption. That could be good or bad.
Like it or not, tasting menu fine dining is a product category. Its expectations include - but are not limited to - seven courses that take about four hours, one or two bits of ostentatious bullshit, and me leaving the table too full for the petit fors, which I absolutely ate anyway.
When a B2B product departs from expectations it has problems in the market. Slithering out of category norms, it either fails (Google Wave), or it changes its positioning (SQL Source Control), or it educates the market (Hubspot).
From the “Declaration by Chef Floriano Pellegrino”, on today.com
But what if - as Pellegrino either asks or typos - food?
Loving a forced dichotomy, there's a couple of ways people make both art and products:
Here, I made this, would you like it?
Hey, I heard you liked this, so I made it!
Superman in the thirties, Batman in the now-ish. Early Picasso, most Georges Braque. Innovation-led startups, mature managed products. Bros., Burger King.
One isn't necessarily better than the other, or if it is then that's pretty situational. Innovation-led startups and iconoclastic art are massively more exciting to watch than chain pizza restaurants and marketing automation platforms. Duchamp's fountain was not well received in 1917. In the boardroom, excitement is risk.
A tasting menu is a product, but it isn’t only a product. It’s also art*. It’s an “I made this, would you like it?” product, and there is always, always a risk that the market will look at it and say “no”.
Quite possibly they will also add “and what’s with the creepy soup mouth? What is wrong with you?”
Product management, at is blandest, most dishwater-coloured and bloodless, is about managing that risk. Uncertainty is delivery risk, and raising certainty reduces it. If you understand your market, you know what to build, so you build closer to the right thing closer to first time, and you get more of your investment back earlier.
But does that mean it's all and always adding email notifications to the enterprise tier, or making sure the man in the rubber suit does extrajudicial violence rather than build social programmes?
Obviously not, no. We balance risk, we can’t eliminate it. If you’re planning to serve stuffed olives in a silicone replica of your maître d’s ringpiece, you don’t have to hedge by flipping burgers. But you might want to have a gastropub in your back pocket.
The tasting menu at Lake Road Kitchen (probably my favourite restaurant) may stop short of the boisterous avant-garde, but it's innovative and interesting with some of the most welcoming service I’ve ever experienced. You can also have a single course and a glass of water. Their hedge is choosing both. That’s cool too.
Anyway, what I think I'm trying to say was said better by drag queen Sharon Needles:
"I have 'dignity looks' and 'paycheck looks'. Dignity is when I will not bend, for anyone. I don't care if I make a dollar, I'm doin' what I'm doin'. Then there's times the electric's about to shut off so I dress up like Lady Gaga."
Sharon Needles, Ru Paul’s Drag Race S4
In technology businesses, we try to make sure our paycheck looks cover the risk of our dignity looks. If we’re absolute fucking wizards, we make sure we’ve got a rising star ready to shine, just as an old favourite starts to fade.
Pellegrino is offering us his dignity look, take it or go home. From the sounds of it, I would go home, but it doesn’t have to be for me. Salt Bae is saying “Come and look at the latter days of capitalism. Give me £1,400 to be able to say you ate steak at the last party before the birth of Slaanesh”. It is not how I would spend fourteen hundred quid.
These are perfectly fine observations. “Innovative products should be as safe and dependable as mature and managed ones” is… less so?
Bros. sounds terrible. “Who cares, I’m doing art” sounds like a perfectly reasonable reply. Aesthetic products have the caveat emptor of artistic license baked into the EULA. Nobody reads the EULA, and the ensuing disappointment is your business risk.
The Bros. website consists of vanishingly little information, presented over the top of what looks like the commercial for the most wankerish skate-wear brand imaginable. From reading that review, I’d say their positioning works just fine.
I’m not trying to say “If you didn’t like it, you didn’t get it” - this isn’t a Doctor Who message board. I suspect most people would neither like nor get Bros. I’m confident I wouldn’t. No, I think what I’m trying to say is that as an art product, that’s fine provided both sides of the transaction walk in with their eyes open. And maybe if they sort their service out a bit.
All of which said, I still do not wish to lick foam out of a tiny fleshlight for golems.
*I will not be entertaining any “no it isn’t” gate-keep-y essentialism. It’s art if someone tells me it is, now let’s talk about whether it’s interesting.