Word: nationality
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...Francese of Ogilvy & Mather tells the trade publication what every other business is finding out: "In terms of marketing, there is no average American." This shouldn't really come as a shock to the industry; it's not like it happened overnight. There is no racial majority in the nation's 10 biggest cities, married couples account for less than half of households, and customers of every age and clime are increasingly unpredictable. This was a hard lesson for the restaurant business, which assumed customers would fit into certain broad categories: harried homemakers, say, or squeamish Midwesterners who would recoil...
...This jaw dropper may not rank up there with TIME's famous "Is God Dead?" cover in 1966, but from a restaurant owner's point of view, it's close. Nation's Restaurant News recently ran a special report on "feeding the needs of a new America," in which the long-running trade publication pronounces the average diner a piece of history, vanished to the same eternal twilight as the powdered wig, the liberal consensus and mounted cavalry. (See pictures of what the world eats...
...These facts are so hard that the nation's grubmongers are being advised to give up on pleasing a broad swath of society and instead concentrate on small, specific segments of the market. It's narrowcasting for the stomach and makes perfect cultural sense, but it's still a great loss. I, for one, am sad to see the Average Diner go. I related to him; he took me out of myself; I measured my appetites against his. Sometimes I gloried in my conformity, as when writing hosannas to the universal white-bun hamburger of old. At other times...
...caves" requiring zero participation in public life. But these ever narrowing areas of interest, however great they may be - and things like all-Latin fried-chicken chain Pollo Campero or Bacon of the Month Club are really, really great - point out that we are no longer a single nation. And when you lose that, you lose the foods that go with it, like the old standards of roast beef and twice-baked potatoes and lobsters served with melted butter and a nutcracker. Globalists and gastronomes may be heartened at the thought of a universal fusion cuisine or a thousand ethnic...
...special report contains a somewhat sinister revelation as well. "The divide between haves and have-nots is growing," Nation's Restaurant News comments, stating the obvious. Francese didn't really have an answer for how this plays out in the kitchen, or at least not one he was willing to share. (He hems and haws about more customer questionnaires being needed.) But the answer's there in the article, in one of the responses the paper got to its survey about changing tastes. The owner of a Boston gastropub takes note of its guests' "increasingly open desire for more stimulation...