THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Master of Global Media Communication

Researching Audiences and Reception

[100-
[100-416]

To Feel Like Paying

A Visit to the Anomaly of Happiness

Nicolás Mendoza
347170
“Of course the death of Capitalism needn't entail the Godzilla-like destruction of all human culture;
this scenario is merely a terror- image propagated by Capitalism itself.”

Hakim Bey -Permanent TAZs, 1993

1 Dining with the Stars

“In Chicago, the Chef Grant Achatz1 Is Selling Tickets to His New Restaurant” reads the headline
published by the New York Times on May 4, 20102. The article describes several factors at play in
this redefinition of the restaurant into a media experience. “By this point, nearly everyone agrees
that dining out has replaced going to the theatre and that chefs are rock stars. So why don’t
restaurants sell tickets?” Cuisine (rather than mere 'food') as an entertaining activity and the arrival
of chefs to the realm of celebrity culture seem like proper prelude to this radical proposal of edible
media. One could argue that this is nothing really new, that going to McDonald's is also more about
the ingestion of a message than about nutrition (for the fun of the analogy, one could say that 'dining
out' compares to theatre just as well as fast food compares to the Disney movie of the moment).
Achatz's diner, however, seems to have overcome the stage of analogy. The move to the ticket
system is central: an operation that consciously strips the patron of its remaining agency in the
relationship.

But Mr. Achatz (...) hopes that people won’t be irritated once they enjoy the convenience of a
meal with no decisions to be made and no check to be signed. “There’s no transactions in
the restaurant at all,” he said. “So you can literally come in, sit down, start your experience,
and when you’re done, you just get up and leave.” (emphases mine) (Wells 2010)

1
Mr. Achatz is a prominent figure in the gastronomic field, winner in 2008 of the USA Chef of the year award.
2
The name of the restaurant is NextRestaurant (See Appendix 1)
This operation results in the actual transformation of the restaurant into a mediated experience that
clearly fits the conventional understanding of media; it is just logic that a visit to the restaurant's
website3 allows you to see the 'trailer' for the coming restaurant. Curiously, a restaurant like this
cannot even be said to be a form of what we call 'New Media', but merely 'media', due to its clear
delineation of the moments of encoding and decoding; to the forceful distance created between
producer and what is now, properly, an audience.

This research project is concerned with Lentil as Anything, a restaurant with a similarly, if
diametrically opposite, radical premise. Here you 'pay-as-you-feel', the patron is granted absolute
agency; as we will see, Lentil makes it work by going well beyond the mere voluntary payment
system, granting agency in practically all conceivable levels. If the operation performed in our
opening example, stripping the customers of agency, results in the uber-mediatisation of the
restaurant, then we must concede that the opposite operation gives the opposite result. The question,
then, that I am confronted with as a media researcher is: if it is not through a sort of mediation then
what are the active ingredients that make Lentil's radical premise work? How, then, is the
communication necessary for the diametrical change in behaviour that effectively takes place
achieved? How, in short, does Lentil as Anything make you feel like paying?

2 The ANT Inside Media

One of the initial premises of this study was that we could define restaurants as media. At a certain
level the idea seems reasonable (while maybe innovative) because one could speculate a sequence
of processes of encoding and decoding which match essential media structures (Hall 1993). This
fundamentally binary conceptualisation therefore clearly delineates a whole range of binary subsets,
like producer-audience, or proposing-reacting, that in a restaurant translate easily if we accordingly
'binarise' the phenomenon of restaurants by thinking of the patron as the decoder of messages that
have been encoded in the form of food, architecture, service, price, etc.

This binary model, however, crumbles as we will see through the analysis of the research material
recollected at Lentil as Anything; this analysis brings us to realise that 1) The place is really not a
noun but a verb, a process (therefore there is no 'encoding moment' but continuous dynamic
relationships that must be continually 'produced')4, and 2) Each person involved plays an active part

3
www.nextrestaurant.com
4
I'm drawing from ANT here for the first time in this report, with more detailed referencing in
in that 'verb that is the place', and hence in the 'production' itself (therefore there is no 'decoding
moment' but a flow where actions and reactions are rendered indistinguishable from each other).

The problematically named5 Actor-Network Theory (ANT) informs this line of thinking. A key
concept at this stage is 'punctualization' (Law 1992), which refers to the intellectual process of
simplifying the heterogeneous network that result in any phenomena into a point (hence,
'punctualizing' the network into a point). Much like understanding a baseball bat as a single thing
rather than as the result of the relationships of trillions of infinitely small quantities of subatomic
energy entangled in negotiating their inexorable transition towards universal entropy. Similarly, to
defend the notion that the restaurant is media, at least in a traditional conception, would require a
punctualization process that would reduce the complexity of the place to fit the encoding/decoding
model and its questionable implication that said processes are “relatively autonomous” (Hall 1993,
p. 46).

Following the ANT, we can say that the payment system, the system of voluntary payments, is just
another actor in a wider system, or network, rather than the result of some sort of masterful
encoding operation. I would like to restate one last time this central observation in the following
terms: to say that Lentil as Anything is a medium that transmits a message about voluntary payment
is to put the payment as the objective of an operation while our observation suggest that, on the
contrary, it is one more actor in a stage where each member of the cast in equally necessary. Imagine
what would a rendition of Hamlet be like if the actress that played Ofelia were to suddenly
disappear and the rest of the actors continued to speak into the void she left and reacted not to her
words but to a silence of duration proportional to the lines she would have uttered. The whole
ensemble just falls apart. In the same way, the complex network that is Lentil would not exist
without the constant flow of all and each of its processes and exchanges, the constant evolution of
the relationships between all the actors. When looking at these processes and exchanges carefully,
we realise that they are all ultimately symbolic, or rather, that the material, the human and the
symbolic are indistinguishable.

From a methodological point of view, it is important to make some precisions regarding ANT.
Latour says “A good ANT account is a narrative or a description or a proposition where all the

5
Latour himself once suggested to abandon “what was wrong with ANT, that is, 'actor', 'network', 'theory' without
forgetting the hyphen”
actors do something and don't just sit there (…) as soon as actors are treated not as intermediaries
but as mediators, they render the movement of the social visible” (Latour 2005, p. 128). From a
methodological point of view, what we are saying here is not that Actor Network Theory is a better
tool to understand this specific restaurant. To understand Achatz's 'NextRestaurant', for example, it
is essential to highlight the enormous agency of the ticket. However, what we do think is a major
idea that results from this approach is that by allowing us to overcome the passive implications of
the word 'audience', a whole new theory of what is media needs to emerge. In a passage of
'Reassembling the Social' where Latour is struggling with the overwhelming misunderstandings that
the word 'network' brings to the whole concept, he says “...we need something to designate the flow
of translations” (Latour 2005, p. 132). I think that this ‘flow of translations' would be the central
concept in an alternative version of what media is, especially 'new media'. Because Lentil as
Anything provides a rare example where the notion of agency has been taken to its ultimate
consequences, it is a unique place to see agency happen.

Food, architecture and money, to state the ones that are more easily understood as material or
materialistic become active nodes (or, in ANT lingo, actors) with full agency in a network that only
exists because all of the actors are constantly exercising that agency. The challenge then is to
understand the network, its essence, its currencies, and its shape. How does it produce and
reproduce itself? John Law states that “to the extent that a society reproduces itself it does so
because it is materially heterogeneous. And sociologies that do not take machines and architectures
as seriously as they do people will never solve the problem of reproduction.” (Law 1992, p.7). With
that in mind, it is now time to dive into Lentil as Anything.

Abbotsford Convent Sunday Market

3 Gypsy Invasion
It is a beautiful autumn afternoon. A Sunday. The sun shines effortlessly and as I approach the
Abbotsford Convent, where Lentil is located, it becomes evident that it holds a rather significant
amount of activity. Upon crossing the convent walls a handicraft and artsy goods market is revealed.
Sunday is market day at Abbotsford convent: the time, place and ritual to bring the community
together. What community? Well, several different communities; going from centre to periphery, the
community of the inhabitants of the convent itself, where studio spaces are available for artists to
rent; then the community at a suburb level, and in lesser intensity a sense of the greater Melbourne
community is present. After all, the convent is a rather significant landmark of the city. But not to be
overlooked, and of major importance, is the sense of an even wider presence that is almost lazily
humming in the background, the presence of the global. The crowd, their fashion, the food, and the
goods convey a subtle cosmopolitanism.

The ephemeral generic architecture of the market clashes with the robustness and determination of
the convent. The market is almost a profanation, like a gypsy invasion in a sacred space that used to
be reserved to secluded nuns. The Architectural mass of the older buildings has been reprogrammed
to allocate new uses, new users. A library, a gallery, a bakery, a coffee shop, an antique store,
meeting rooms; the list seems endless. New uses are more affected by the convent's immanent
sacredness, than the convent seems disturbed by the new uses. In my conversations with staff and
customers the convent was never to be overlooked: “I think that it’s an old monastery or convent,
that particular thing stands out for me. I think that the nuns and the monks probably gave food to
the poor too.” said one of my interviewees. The now distant presence of the nuns remains. While the
convent can always accommodate something else, whatever that something else is will be
perpendicularly informed, and maybe invariably elevated, by the convent's dignity. Past the market,
the agglutination of food locales faintly mirrors those of contemporary malls. After a brief sequence
of culinary offer, one reaches Lentil.

For this study I visited Lentil as Anything several times and recollected data through different
means; pictures, notes, mental notes, informal conversations and also recorded interviews. The latter
were conducted with two members of the staff and one patron. They were Aditya Bajpai (India, 24
years), Samrat K.C. (Nepal, 22 years) and Sean Frost (Australia 35 years). Slowly, the main themes
through which one can construct a theory of Lentil as Anything began to take shape. I have called
them the Dissolution of the Audience, the Happiness of Agency, and the Global Rendezvous.
Staggeringly, as I reread the previous line I realise that these are, arguably, (the?) three core
principles of the brave new world of the new commons in the digital global media age.
 > > >
V

Getting there: a sequence

4 Dissolution of the Audience

Sean, a patron at the restaurant, takes a minute to tell me the story of the extra coffee cup:

“this is nice as well: somebody had left, and so they walked by with the coffee and said 'oh
would you like it', and as a matter of fact, I did, but it wasn't my coffee. So, it was nice to get
a free coffee, so I paid a little bit more for that. Like thirteen dollars or something, ummm...
coffee and cake, which is nice”

This tiny story is significant precisely because of its accidental quality. I like the 'oh' in 'oh would
you like it'. It shows how the premise in which Lentil runs is perpendicular to all its activity, even in
the accident. In a conventional restaurant, the extra coffee cup would have made a round trip to the
preparation area where it would have been probably discarded. The main reason for this is not, I
think, deliberate pettiness of the kind “we'd rather throw it away than give it for free” but rather a
forceful semiotic (or social) delimitation of what a patron is. Of course, such delimitation implies
that what the ‘other side’ (the staff) can be is equally assumed without room for deviance. So why
does the waiter offer the extra cup to an unsuspecting actor? There are two reasons that, in tandem,
allow for this to happen. First, here the patron is not symbolically bubbled as an other. By this I
mean that in Lentil the waiter essentially sees the patron a member of the team. Second, the waiter
is not an other himself; by this I mean that he, rather than taking the conventional approach, shows
autonomy on the face of the unexpected. The oppositions between staff and 'audience' begin to melt
as an unforeseen event is dealt with by an act halfway between creativity and teamwork. “We [the
staff] are from the community, and we welcome them [the customers] to the community and so both
the customer and the people who work here, they are together, there's no difference”.

Upon being asked to draw comparisons with other restaurants Aditya (better known as 'Eddie',
member of the staff), says “if you go to a big restaurant where you find like, big chandeliers, but
you feel very (makes stiff pose), while here you are free. You are free. You enjoy, and, if you want to
play drums, you play drums with us, that's the beauty of the place”. Tracing a direct relation
between 'chandeliers' and the body (a stiffened body), is the first step. As if it were a conscious
materialisation of Latour's 'translation flows' what hangs from the ceiling of Lentil instead of
chandeliers is a giant paper fish. Stiffness and chandeliers transform into flow, and into 'here you are
free', where freedom is synonymous with agency: as a staff member Eddie's next step is to articulate
the value of agency: “what I gain from this restaurant is the freedom to work, the choice of being
creative, the choice of being youself, is not to be working for somebody who stops your ideas, here if
I feel like doing something that I think is good for the restaurant, I do it”. To 'play drums with us' in
this context is another manifestation of the dissolution of the audience; as 'you' join the performance
it ceases to be a performance; as everyone is incorporated it becomes a ritual, there is no 'who' to
play to, but only 'whom' to play with.

Newcomers must endure moments of disorientation. It was not rare to see someone doubtfully
bringing their plate back to the counter, regardless of the abundance of staff members6. This is
another revealing faux pas that provides a view into the 'flow of translations' halfway through the
process of communicating Lentil's radical ideology. The patron who has eaten for the first time has
by then realised that something is deeply different here, and intuitively (or, better, as a result of a
lifetime of the opposite), wonders if all the unexpected agency means that he has to do the dishes.
The other side of this observation is that it is among family or friends that one chips in with the
cleaning by taking dishes to the kitchen. The semiotics of voluntary payment are homologous to the
semiotics of plate retrieval: “Its a good thing [the voluntary payment system], we are welcoming
you to the lentil family, in another sense, because only family members are allowed to choose what
you should pay isn't it? So that means that you are not a costumer but that you are family. And, we

6
To use the word 'waiter' would be a monumental imprecision; in Lentil no one 'waits', and the roles seem to be
very loosely defined: the manager can bring your dessert, and the person who served your drink can be seen at any
moment writing announcements on the whiteboard.
never think how much someone is going to pay”. Again, agency in the form of dissolution of the
audience; only that this time it comes from the patron when wondering (plate in hand) whether to
adopt functions usually reserved to those in the role of staff7.

These moments of confusion are the result of the consistence with the basic principle of the
dissolution of the audience, or to use the same words as the restaurant, 'community' and 'family'.
Sometimes orientation needs to be denied: “even some people ask us, 'ok, how much should I pay,
would be the average' we say ‘it’s up to you, just, what you have experienced, you pay as you feel'
so...”’Community' and 'family' do not mean that attending lentil provides the spectacle of a
community, but that by going you become part of it. Therefore, there is no orientation whatsoever;
everyone is assumed to belong at all times. In this sense, disorientation is a sign that something
good is going on; in 'The Media City', Scott McQuire articulates disorientation as a necessary stage
of social transformation: “disorientation as the gateway to a new society in which urban
development would no longer be driven by capital and bureaucracy, but by widespread participation
in shaping the urban environment” (MCQuire 2008)8

The only gesture that explicitly states the new rules is a sign near the entrance. The full text of this
sign can be found in the appendix section, but I would like to highlight here the closing sentence:
“We have many generous volunteers working in our restaurant, and welcome anyone who is
interested in becoming part of the Lentil family in any way”. Agency goes all the way, from
deciding how much to pay to deciding how to become part.

5 Happiness of Agency
In one of the walls there is a series of tiny watercolour drawings. Underneath the drawings there is a
note the name of the artist, a phone number, and a price, $15 per drawing. Finally, the 'ad' says: 'all
sales are donated to Lentil as Anything'. To think of this operation is helpful to understand the
fundamental value that flows through the Lentil economy, happiness.

7
In case someone objects by pointing how fast food chains make you clean your tray, I will make the observation
that in that case the only real reason to do so is out of a brotherhood too, only that it is not a brotherhood towards the
eatery, but towards the next user of the table. Rather than sharing agency, it is misfortune what is being shared in fast
food spaces, a misfortune that one attempts to minimise out of sheer compassion to the next customer.
8
There are a number of parallels with our discussion that spring to mind when reading McQuire's chapter on
'Liquid Cities'. We have been using images of 'dissolution' and 'melting'; could we maybe perhaps talk of a 'liquid
audience'? And, how then would the idea of the 'wet grid' play with the Actor-Network of 'Liquid Audiences' play?
After a drawing is made and the proceedings have been donated the result can be summed as
collaboration between the artist and his subject to help the continuity of the community. The
donation is made secretly through the unsupervised 'magic box' where money is deposited. No
gesture of recognition is made nor expected. The resulting drawing has some of both, and it is also
the sum of both agencies being exercised; the agency of the artist who invented the scheme, and the
individual who in choosing to call has become an active participant in the creation of the art piece.
Such a call kick starts a happy, independent conspiracy to help. In the same way as Eddie found
value in being able to exercise his creativity, Sean articulates the exercise of agency as a creative
experience that produces the feeling of happiness:

“You know there's something negative, when you feel like have to pay, you feel like you are
losing something, in a way, now that’s not true either because you not always have that
feeling, like I like to tip money. I lived in London and a lot of people I knew from America or
from Canada, they used to tip and I got used to tip as well, and so I felt happy to pay a little
bit of extra. So there’s also that positive sort of feeling when you pay well, (…).
I think that I have a more positive feeling, definitively, in a place like this than normally
where you know it’s just a contract it’s just a contract, that's what it says, that's what you
must pay. Where, no, I think it's a much nicer way the overall experience to... yes, to pay...I
only give you ten dollars, fifteen dollars or whatever, and I know that it’s a fairly decent
number and I feel good to pay it and I feel like, you know, it’s being positive on both sides,
that’s what I would feel whereas with a normal contract there's no... Sort of, creativity or no
room to expression.” Sean, Customer at Lentil as Anything

What kind of architecture does this ‘room for expression’ have? By removing the norm, ‘the
contract’, the actor is left on his own, without knowledge of what he has to do, the only knowledge
is that he has to do something. It is then that he suddenly finds itself in the room; a room that, due to
the unchallenged logic of Capitalism that dictates and regulates all meaningful social activity, is a
vastly forgotten area of our cognitive architecture. In that room one thinks about one’s own
particular life, hopes, and fears; and comes out with a decision that expresses the outcome of this
personal experience. What Derrida puts in terms of time, ‘a moment of decision’, Sean (our
customer) has articulated in terms of space, ‘room to expression’; the essential thing to both is to get
rid of the norm:
 “if I know, for example, what the causes and effects of what I am doing are, what the
program is for what I am doing, then there is no decision; it is a question, at the moment of
judgement, of applying a particular causality. (...) If I know what is to be done (...) then
there is no moment of decision, simply the application of a body of knowledge, or at the very
least a rule or a norm. For there to be a decision, the decision must be heterogeneous to
knowledge as such”
(Derrida 2002, as quoted by Sean Cubitt in History of Philosophy lecture at The University
of Melbourne, 2010)

It is a central argument of this report that the ‘moment of decision’ and the ‘room to expression’ are
the space and time where human happiness is produced. We have also called them by other names
throughout this text: trust, agency, independence, autonomy, participation. In a society where these
have disappeared, mediated behind incessant commodification, culture is omnipresent regulation
and the rest is only decoration. A fundamentally sad culture that confuses random utterances with
self expression and hysteria with happiness.

6 Global Rendezvous
The term 'rendezvous' is a noun as much as a verb. It designates the act of meeting as much as the
place of the meeting. As a noun it can even refer to the meeting itself. I would like to make a
rendezvous (a reunion) of all the three meanings of the term as integral to the notion of 'Global
Rendezvous', in the same way as ANT thinks of the place as a verb. The notion of 'rendezvous' is
useful to stress the difference between the global being represented and the global coming together.
The common sense way to escape from the naïve clichés of the benettonian 'united colours' dystopia
(a globe 'united' by neutralizing fashion) is not other than to bring together real people and see how
it goes.

The instances where Lentil reveals itself as a Global Rendezvous are endless; one could think about
the food, for example, a self serve buffet that might randomly offer 'Gnocci Mixed Curry', 'Mexican
Filled Peppers', or 'Vegan Poppy Cake'. These contraptions are prepared by “Our chef (…) he has
served for kings, in Sri Lanka, in big hotels in Dubai, and for big big people all over the world”, in
a kitchen staffed by a global crew. “Last time we counted in our restaurant we have like people from
seventeen different countries”. Patrons (or, as Samrat called them, Lentilists), are perhaps just as
diverse. The ambient music is a randomized sample of personal histories. My guess is that they
switch between the mp3 players of the staff members in no particular order. A vintage salsa classic
can be followed by european electronica, indian pop, or african rhythms. As the night sets in, the
light conditions allow for video projection. A Chaplin silent movie is played on the wall while the
room reaches its full capacity. As personal histories from around the world literally come together to
the table, through every dish and every object in the room, the sign in the wall announcing 'free wi-
fi' starts to become redundant. The global rendezvous exists not only in the space (through the
myriad of elements brought by the individuals) and in the body (through the eclectic food), but it is
reproduced in time through a periodic reproduction of the world:

“And also like, every week, what we have is Monday always a Latin night, so concerts mixed
Friday we try sometimes the Latin food, Tuesdays we gather everyone and there's like open
mic people come together. If they want to play the drums or if they want to sing or dance,
like, everything. Wednesdays we have African nights so African drummies, not only Africans,
like everyone doing African food, dancing, Friday we also have a band, Latin band, but
Friday is like intercontinental food so we have international food, western food, and on the
weekend is like special food.”

7 The Great Escape

In the famous lecture 'Of Other Places' (1967), Foucault proposes the playful notion of heterotopias,
a sort of methodology consisting in understanding societies by looking at the places where rules are
broken9. It is clear that our restaurant is heterotopic. With the ideas of Global Rendezvous and the
Happiness of Agency in mind, Foucault's analysis of oriental gardens as space-juxtaposing
heterotopias resounds: “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of
the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalising heterotopia since the beginnings of
antiquity.” (Foucault 1967, p. 6). Is it thus reasonable to hope that, contrary to the impossibility of
utopia, a heterotopia can sometimes be the way in which reality rehearses the future? The more
explicit way in which Lentil breaks the rules is by choosing not to participate in the discourses of
currency. As a place of intense de-commodification, where the current rule, capitalism, has been
suspended, it should be more studied than Wall Street. In this sense we could say that Lentil is the
heterotopia of money; if we understand money as mediated trust, then Lentil is just a heterotopia

9
The term 'Heterotopias' is used to designate the actual places, but to use it is arguably to start thinking in terms
of the semiotic functions those places have in relationship with the whole society “In civilisations without boats, dreams
dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates” (Foucault 1967, p. 6)).
where trust is no longer mediated but experienced and exercised.

Quoting again the sign near the entrance, the restaurant defines itself as having a “philosophy based
around trust, generosity and social inclusion”. Because Lentil is a place where trust no longer needs
to be mediated though money, the actual coming together of real humans seeing and trusting each
other is essential.10 Social inclusion is therefore not ornamental but an essential principle. What this
means is that by including people in meaningful ways, trusting them with the agency not only to
pursue but to provide happiness, groups can reclaim autonomy and therefore escape from the
moebian claustrophobia of capitalism. What Lentil as Anything ultimately has to teach us is the
power of the technology of a distributed network; here we must remember that technology is not
necessarily computers11, here the technology is literally a reassembly of the social, a reassembly that
replaces money with trust to produce happiness.

Bibliography

Bey, H (1993) Permanent TAZs D R E A M T I M E, A U G U ST 1 9 93

http://hermetic.com/bey/paz.html Accessed May 28, 2010

Derrida, Jacques (2002), Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, trans

Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press.: 231-2

Foucault, M. (1984). Of Other Spaces Initially published in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite,

October 1984
http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html

Hall, S. (1993) 'Encoding/Decoding' in S. During (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader. London:
Routledge

Law, J. (1992) Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity
Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN

Latour, B (2005) Reassembling the Social Oxford University Press, Oxford New York

10
In “The Future of the Internet”, chapter 6 “The Lessons of Wikipedia”, Jonathan Zittrain articulates the
pitfalls of regulation as a form of media that ultimately removes autonomy. (Zittrain 2008)
11
This is one of the assumptions of the authors of 'Collaborative Futures' (Various Authors 2010, p. 25)
McQuire, S. (2008). The Media City : media, architecture and urban space / Scott McQuire. Los
Angeles ; London :, SAGE.

Various Authors (2010) Collaborative Futures in http://en.flossmanuals.net/CollaborativeFutures

Wells, P (2010) In Chicago, the Chef Grant Achatz Is Selling Tickets to His New Restaurant, The
New York Times, in http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/dining/05achatz.html

Zittrain, J., - (2008). The future of the Internet and how to stop it / Jonathan Zittrain. New Haven
[Conn.] :, Yale University Press.
Appendix 1

In Chicago, the Chef Grant Achatz Is Selling Tickets to His

New Restaurant
By PETE WELLS
Published: May 4, 2010

BY this point, nearly everyone agrees that dining out has replaced going to the theater and that
chefs are rock stars. So why don’t restaurants sell tickets?
Grant Achatz, the highly praised chef of Alinea in Chicago, has asked himself the same question.
Now, he says that with his next restaurant (called, naturally, Next Restaurant), that’s just what
he’ll do.
Anyone wishing to eat at Next after its scheduled opening in the fall will pay in advance on its Web
site. Like airlines, Next will offer cheaper tickets for off-peak hours. A table at 9:30 on a Tuesday
night, say, would cost less than one for Saturday at 8. Ticket prices will also vary based on the
menu, but will run from $45 to $75 for a five- or six-course meal, according to the
site,nextrestaurant.com. (Wine and beverage pairings, bought with the ticket, will begin at $25.)
The menu will change four times a year, with each new edition featuring the cuisine of a particular
place and time. When the restaurant opens, Mr. Achatz said, the theme will be Paris in 1912, with
painstakingly researched evocations of Escoffier-era cuisine. Three months later, the kitchen will
turn out a fresh set of recipes — evoking, say, postwar Sicily, or Hong Kong 25 years from now,
with modern techniques employed to imagine the future of Chinese cuisine.
Subscriptions to a year’s worth of space-and-time coordinates will also be sold.
“We now pay three or four reservationists all day long to basically tell people they can’t come to the
restaurant,” Mr. Achatz said of Alinea. With Next, he intends to strip away those and other hidden
costs of dining out. “It allows us to give an experience that is actually great value,” he said. “That’s
the theory.”
But the plan would also have value for Mr. Achatz and his main partner in Next and Alinea, Nick
Kokonas. By law, restaurants may distribute tips only to those employees who work in service. But
the service charge included in the ticket price “gives him control over the money,” said Bill
Guilfoyle, an associate professor of business management at theCulinary Institute of America in
Hyde Park, N.Y. “He can give it to whomever he sees fit.”
Mr. Achatz could pay cooks more than members of the wait staff, a reversal of the usual pecking
order that could allow him to recruit shining kitchen talent. Mr. Guilfoyle also said that the 150 or
so tickets that Next sells each night could mean a cash-flow bonanza like the one Starbucks enjoys
on its cash cards. Starbucks had a multimillion-dollar “float of products the customers had paid for
but hadn’t collected yet,” he said. “If Achatz is smart, he’ll invest this in the futures market.”
Much of the work of taking reservations has already migrated to the Internet. Customers who book
seatings at unpopular hours on Open Table earn points that add up to cash vouchers accepted by
all restaurants that the service represents.
The restaurateur David Chang has an online reservation system at his Momofuku Ko, although
checks are settled at meal’s end. He said that the savings in payroll and staff time have been
tremendous. He had considered off-peak pricing, too, but was afraid it would turn off customers.
“It’s going to irritate very many people,” Mr. Chang said of the ticket plan. “But I think it’s
liberating, and a lot of restaurants are going to follow suit.”
But Mr. Achatz, who is also working on concurrent plans to open a bar called Aviary, hopes that
people won’t be irritated once they enjoy the convenience of a meal with no decisions to be made
and no check to be signed. “There’s no transactions in the restaurant at all,” he said. “So you can
literally come in, sit down, start your experience, and when you’re done, you just get up and leave.”

Appendix 2

The Lentil Statement