[Note: I’m not happy with how this essay turned out, but this space is meant to be my scratch pad. I promised myself I’d publish everything here, unfiltered—so here it is, even though the blog’s quality makes me feel ugh.]

When I lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, there was one block I always found eerie to walk through, like it was telling me what the future of America looked like. On North 4th street between Bedford and Driggs Ave. There’s a Sweetgreen, a Dig, a Levain Bakery, a Cava, a Just Salad and a Glaze. When you walk by, you see the street empty, except in the middle, you will see 10+ Black and South Asian people, parking their e-bikes, as they do delivery of the artisanal slop bowls, from the empty restaurants inside.

Artisanal slop bowls are bowls served in fast-casual chains like Cava, Naya, Taim, Chipotle etc. What makes these restaurants unique is the amount of abstractions and optimization that goes into them. Artisanal slop bowls unlike most restaurant meals don’t originate from culture; they originate from capitalism. In my mind, they represent the next level in capitalism’s abstraction.

I’ve always been a big advocate of economic growth, further optimization, increases in productivity, giving the people more of what they want etc, but the artisanal slop bowl, despite checking all of these boxes, makes me feel uneasy about what I view to be the next level of abstraction in capitalism’s future.

I’ve been fortunate to travel a lot. What’s striking is how societies that embrace higher abstractions of capitalism—those that can coordinate complex systems based on trust and positive-sum thinking—consistently achieve better material outcomes. In low-trust societies, economic interactions are viewed as zero-sum games. People resist specialization and investment, fearing they’ll be exploited. But when a society collectively puts faith in capitalism’s longer-term mechanics, it unlocks positive-sum surpluses through coordination, specialization, and scale.

Most restaurant chains started with a simple story. Someone realized that dishes they made at home could be prepared better by an expert chef and served to many people, leading to the creation of their first restaurant. As that restaurant gained popularity and word spread, they gradually expanded to multiple locations.

While it’s true all restaurants and businesses are products of resource optimization, artisanal slop bowl restaurants represent a new frontier. They are not restaurants that start at one location, but rather, are created from a resource problem at scale – if we were to have 500 locations of this chain, could these resource costs/demand curve work. They begin in spreadsheets and only later materialize in the real world.

What’s unique about artisanal slop bowls is that the level of optimization goes both ways. Few people who eat at these restaurants are going because they love the food itself, but rather, they want to optimize for eating some number of calories, positive nutrients and vitamins and protein, all for one low cost. The transaction is essentially metabolic, not culinary or social.

This follows something like Baudrillard’s simulacrum levels, where there is: 

• Level 1: actual food you cook at home (ie a hamburger) 
• Level 2: restaurants that serve the same food that you cook at home (ie a hamburger that is cooked on a grill) 
• Level 3: restaurants that serve food that is symbolically like the food you eat at home, but made completely differently (ie McDonald’s hamburger) 
• Level 4: and finally, restaurant food that doesn’t resemble anything you would eat at home – food optimized to be a perfect calorie delivery vehicle

There are many common critiques of chains and other large businesses. As time progresses more and more of the economic value generated gets extracted and sent out of the community, and similarly, the jobs of respect evolve from ie ten local movie theatre owners/managers to one product manager or growth enablement manager based in NYC. It makes each city, with the same chains, indistinguishable from each other.

But there are also a few other things that bother me. 

Nobody who works there in the kitchen will learn how to even cook a single meal — they merely execute standardized protocols designed elsewhere — three squirts of hummus here, two scoops of protein there.

These places, staffed with short-term workers who have no investment in the restaurant or its place in the community, won’t care if things are trashed or become gross. And because these restaurants emerge out of nowhere, funded by large marketing spends rather than organic slow word-of-mouth growth, they’re designed to grow fast and decline equally fast, becoming ephemeral points in our memory.

Most critically, there is no soul in these restaurants. While someone could go with their friends for a social meal, or on a date, to a local taco place – nobody would ever choose to go on a date at Chipotle, even though it in theory, is the same. This intuition reveals something profound: we implicitly understand that these places are not really restaurants in the traditional sense – they’re food-dispensing locations optimized for transactions, not experiences.

There is a reason why the local restaurant near me doesn’t have a security guard in it but the Chipotle does. And you can say that the need for a security guard in Chipotle is because crime rates are too high, but more correctly, crime is also a product of individuals who are invested in some space, being defiant against crime. Pride and skin in the game produces both vibes and safety in ways that corporate optimization cannot replicate.

A friend from high school’s father built a billion-dollar business I think about a lot. The company buys brands that people like (ie Sports Illustrated, Reebok, Volcom, DC Shoes), and then finds the cheapest way to produce goods that can be sold under that brand, realizing that people don’t notice or even care about the quality of a good, just how it’s labelled. Of course, these brands only became relevant because they were once a small operation, built with care and quality and established its reputation over time, but in the current time, that doesn’t matter anymore, it’s just a name to be exploited until people realize they were foolish enough to ever trust it.

This brand-hollowing approach feels like the corporate version of what artisanal slop bowls do to food. Both start with something authentic that people genuinely connected with, then systematically extract all the soul from it while keeping just enough of the outward appearance to fool consumers. In both cases, we’re left with the empty shell of something that once had meaning.

It’s hard for me to truly object to artisanal slop bowls because clearly they provide an enormous amount of positive value. After all, people wouldn’t be patronizing these restaurants if they didn’t get value from them. The value proposition, of taste + amount of food + protein, vegetables etc. is very high. Similarly, just because these restaurants can be soulless, maybe it’s good that our neighborhoods also specialize, focusing on the restaurants that are pure utility, while leaving other restaurants to be about the experience, and the taste, served at a much higher price point. After all, there is a reason why not all stores are part of chains, despite the obvious efficiency benefit.

But with that said, as much as I ‘enjoy’ eating Cava, a future filled with more and more artisanal slop bowl places makes me feel sad about the state of society. We pretend these chains are just efficient versions of the local spots they replace, without realizing how much is being lost.