> You see this A LOT in food spend in US especially in rich urban areas. This won't resonate withh you unless you are or were ever a cook, I fear we had so mu

> You see this A LOT in food spend in US especially in rich urban areas. This won't resonate withh you unless you are or were ever a cook, I fear we had so much more left to capture and were forced to leave on the table that was taken away because of COVID, but this transition in the US food culture was paid with lots of hard work and countless sacrifices that most will never get beyond watching an episode of The Bear. Two big blows came in hard after Bourdain's death (so many concepts and projects were abandoned that never came back) and then followed with COVID destroying the Industry in such a way that I'm doubting will ever get much further than this in my Lifetime any more: food culture in the US still has so much left to catch up with Asia and Europe but we were making massive progress towards that, but I'm staring to accept this will probably be the high-water mark that the next generation of tech workers and cooks alike will need to build off of. And no, ghost kitchens and burning VC money from Softbank on DD is not a solution. So far, outside of small boutique restaurants and kitchens, all I've seen is a race to the bottom profit seeking with almost no motivation other than to capture what marketshare remains from corps who benefited from PPP and ZIRP at whatever cost it takes and cutting corners until they got bought out by a large Restaurant group. This may seem like hyperbole but ~60% of all restaurants shutdown forever [0] after covid in what was already I high-failure sector with incredibly costly CAPEX/OPEX business models and low profit margins even during the best of times. My last encounter with a delivery driver from a large vendor (think Shamrock or Sysco type corp) brought it all home: they had essentially succumb to the same exploitative delivery and monitoring systems that an Amazon delivery driver has, which was a stark contrast to getting deliveries from local farmers for produce/protein ha were the highlight of the menu and accompanied with items from small artisans and purveyors for cheeses, deserts breads etc... We've lost something very vital coming out of COVID, and I'm not sure what can be done to not undo the progress that was made since the culture-shift has swung so hard to this Amazonification of this Industry.