Field Notes
I asked the owner of a café in Bangkok how many of her customers were regulars. Her answer was almost word for word what a bartender at a place I go to often had told me a few weeks earlier.
Not surprising, seeing how this city has more cafés and bars than anyone could reasonably get through in a lifetime. It’s also a city where Instagram is (still) the shopfront window for your personal and professional life. Being seen somewhere new each week is its own currency (points in a game where you watch old friends you thought you knew slowly turn into content).
Bangkok isn’t unusual in this. Most big cities are running some version of the same experiment, with new places opening every few weeks, mostly doing the same thing with small variations, while people hop from one queue to the next hoping to be first in their social group to post about it..
People like trying new things. Human nature, I guess.
At the same time, we like returning to the same places too. Being a regular somewhere, sitting in the same corner seat, chatting with the same staff, ordering “the usual” without looking at the menu. We’re creatures of comfort, at least until something new opens up and shows up on our feed and comfort suddenly starts looking a lot like missing out.
The idea was to open a restaurant for 12 months only, with a different guest chef every month, each designing a set menu for a room with just twelve seats. After twelve months, the whole thing packs up and moves to another city. Twelve new chefs, twelve new months.
The plan was to invite up-and-coming chefs who didn’t have restaurants of their own, really good home cooks, or visiting chefs from other countries. Basically we were taking the museum format of rotating exhibitions or artists in residency, and turning it into a restaurant.
Why open for just 12 months, you might ask. Well, a restaurant that’s always there eventually gets taken for granted. Twelve months builds scarcity and a deadline into the idea from the start. It also means moving to a new city every year, working with local architects to design a new space, and collaborating with local chefs using local ingredients, so every 12 ends up different too. (By now you’ve probably figured out the name was going to be 12. It worked as a name understood almost anywhere, and doubled as a design constraint.)
In each city, the space and the seats would stay the same. The only thing that changes is the chef and the menu. You get to become a regular without eating the same meal twice.
We didn’t end up doing it. Short version of a longer story: we found a space, paid three months’ deposit and a month upfront, then the landlord decided she didn’t want to give us a receipt because a receipt means declaring the income, and declaring the income means tax. (Not an uncommon practice here.)
I still like the idea. Writing about it is partly catharsis, partly the faint hope that someone reads this, decides it’s worth a lot of money, and gives me a call.
Anyway... I digressed.
We want places that surprise us, and places that remember us. Maybe that’s what every business is trying to figure out. Or maybe the best time to close is when people start ordering “the usual”.
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous