The Aughts-Era “Foodie” Is Dead

A reprint of a piece I just wrote in a new blog on what we’ve gained and lost in 30 years of dining.

When I began my professional reviewing career at the Village Voice in 1993, it seemed like nobody wanted the job. Eating out all the time when you might rather have stayed home or hung with friends didn’t seem so glamorous then, and constantly keeping track of what you’d eaten and then describing it could turn tedious. At any rate, the position certainly entailed a skill set that few then possessed. I had no experience, apart from having written the bimonthly food fanzine Down the Hatch for the previous three years. Yet, I sailed right into the job and fell in love with it.

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This essay was originally published on Best Food Blog, a writer-run publication by Ali Francis, Anikah Shaokat, Anna Hezel, and Antara Sinha. For a limited time, Best Food Blog is offering my readers a complimentary 30-day subscription. To grab yours, click here.

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It’s hard to believe, but there were not as many restaurants back then, or as many critics, either. There was no Yelp, Instagram, or TikTok. Professional reviewers mainly covered expensive French and Italian restaurants. Expensive meant you might pay $100 for a meal, including tax, tip, and even wine.

They preferred places that hadn’t been touted before, rather than lining up in front of restaurants that influencers had told them were hot.

What happened? Well, in the late ’90s, a new era began — let’s call it the Age of Foodism. In the ensuing years the general populace became obsessed with food to the exclusion of other activities, and eating in restaurants, reading about restaurants, and talking about restaurants became a preoccupation, as celebrity chefs were minted like shiny coins. Most importantly, compared to the diners of today, they had a curiosity about food, and adventuresomeness that caused them to avidly seek their own discoveries. They preferred places that hadn’t been touted before, rather than lining up in front of restaurants that influencers had told them were hot.

Before the late ’90s, a night out had meant drinks, a movie or concert, and a restaurant meal. But that same night out soon became only the meal, as other activities were abandoned. And the number of restaurants burgeoned to meet the demand.

Wearing many disguises like this one, Robert remained anonymous throughout his career.

But the interests of newly christened “foodies” were not limited to expensive and well-known restaurants. In the previous decades, waves of immigrants had brought the food of an estimated 140 nationalities and cultural groups to the city. At the Village Voice (1993 to 2013), and later at Eater NY, I was covering the broadest range of restaurants the city had yet seen, and diners were lapping it up.

My food-obsessed readers and I feasted on Indian dosas, Senegalese cheb, fiery Thai larbs, Syrian lamb tartare, sweet Korean fried chicken, Ukrainian borscht bobbing with beets, and tart Peruvian ceviches. As our knowledge of food from around the world grew, so did our taste for it, and an appreciation of the immigrant restaurateurs who had brought it to us. With the coming of the web, sites devoted to food multiplied, and print publications kept pace — until they began disappearing.

Nowadays, foodism is quite different than it was at the turn of the century. Food from many of these immigrant communities has gone upscale, and the purveyors of it are not necessarily immigrants or their descendants. The price of a meal in a restaurant has zoomed, so that even an obscure French bistro may charge $75 or more for a modest meal, while fancier restaurants charge $200-plus per person. Yes, there are all sorts of justifications for this — the soaring price of ingredients, scarcity of trained labor, cost of real estate — but it doesn’t make the high prices any less painful to diners who can’t afford to eat in hyped-up restaurants very often.

Moreover, food journalism has been largely supplanted by social media, and the public increasingly tends to look at pictures of food, rather than read about it or eat it — constituting a completely different experience than scanning a menu and selecting a dish. I would argue that modern social media often strips food of its cultural context and a very small proportion of followers ever end up tasting the food that they watch on screen. Seeing is not eating, with its attendant tastes and smells. Could it be that the Age of Foodism is coming to a close, or at least so transformed that its original proponents wouldn’t recognize it? Here are some further signs that this may be the case.

Rather than settling in for a full meal at a small business, or chatting with a restaurant’s owners about the menu, we are buying the newfangled pastry, unusual sandwich, or amped-up pizza slice of the moment.

The outdoor dining sheds that sustained many restaurants during the pandemic, and became wildly popular with customers, have been shut down by the city. Goodbye free square footage. Increasingly, new restaurants employ a counter-service model, with the jobs of waiter and busboy eliminated; sometimes even counter staff are replaced by kiosks. A meal in a restaurant with no service and an “eat and get out of here” attitude often comes to $25 or more with a 20% tip.

Rather than settling in for a full meal at a small business, or chatting with a restaurant’s owners about the menu, we are buying the newfangled pastry, unusual sandwich, or amped-up pizza slice of the moment. Being a “foodie” now means standing in a long line at an ever-changing roster of places set on fire by IG, YouTube, or TikTok for the next “viral hot cocoa” or “riceless burrito”. Call it the food lemming phenomenon.

Even the term “foodie” has fallen into disrepute and is now used disparagingly. Will future generations come to see the 30-year Age of Foodism as a cultural phenomenon that came and went? I hope, at the very least, we can return to a simple enjoyment of food, based mainly on what it tastes like and whether it’s a good value or not.