Food Delivery, Now Brought to You By AI

Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of the news, gossip, and stories that have stayed open in my tabs all week. Last time we covered the lesbian bar mask mandate implosion.When did we stop throwing dinner parties? According to some recent polls surfaced by The Atlantic, rates have been declining for years. The larger context, with which you may already be familiar, is the loneliness epidemic; the slow tightening of our social circles, the dissolving of our web of relationships both casual and intimate. Fewer gatherings like dinner parties offer less opportunities to nurture these relationships. Fewer close relationships make corralling friends for a dinner party all the more difficult.But it’s not all doom and gloom. As I reported a couple years ago, some Gen Zers are throwing friend-making dinner parties in their own homes. Be the change you want to see in the world. Bake a cake and invite your friends over to eat it with you!Also in today’s Open Tab: DoorDash unveils new programming, we dip a toe into the $60 rye discourse, more restaurant critics bring back stars, and the psychiatrists prescribing GLP-1s for mental health.DoorDash Leans in to the AI Rat RaceLast week, delivery platform DoorDash paid out an historic $131.5 million settlement to New York City delivery workers. This week, it debuted a new text-based AI platform through which you can order groceries and restaurant delivery. The platform builds on the recent uptick of other text-based AI-agents like Instinct and Meta’s Muse. You can sign up for the waitlist to test it in beta, but when I reached out to DoorDash to ask how many people were on the waitlist, all a spokesperson would tell me is that the company is “excited by the early interest we’re seeing.”Also notable: DoorDash announced a pilot program for autonomous delivery drones in Northern California, partnering with restaurants like Chipotle and Popeyes. Will this program expand to eventually take the jobs of human delivery workers? According to a spokesperson, these drones will be used for a “specific use case—mid-range, time-sensitive, small payload,” and “drones are adding capacity for a specific slice of orders, not pulling volume away from Dashers.”As the tech evolves, though, it’s hard to imagine the company won’t favor drones and robots, to whom they will never have to worry about paying out a settlement of more than a hundred million dollars over wage issues.I ate the $60 loaf of rye so you don’t have toMuch has been made of the new bakery, Rye by Martin Auer, which opened in New York City’s SoHo almost exactly three weeks ago. It serves just one item: a 3-pound loaf of rye bread made with imported Austrian rye flour. (And, okay, a number of tartines.) The hullabaloo is around the price: $60 per loaf in New York, compared to the mere 14 Euro around Austria, where Auer runs a chain of these bakeries.Auer has received a decent amount of blowback online. Even grocery chain Lidl clowned the shop publicly. Does Auer deserve the hate? I mean, if you don’t want to buy the bread, just don’t buy the bread, right?For what it’s worth, when I went to the bakery to talk to Martin’s son Tim, with whom he runs the bakery, he told me the bread is priced to cover the cost of importing the flour, the labor, the size of the loaf—three pounds!—and, notably, the monthly rent on a space in SoHo which, if comparable store fronts are any measure, would likely measure into the several tens of thousands.The younger Auer also told me the bakery is selling out often, though he wouldn’t specify how many loaves per day are made; he opaquely suggested somewhere between 50 and 300.Was the bread good? Yeah, it was fine. Kind of dense, nutty, and overall pretty mild in flavor. Was it worth 60 American dollars? To me, it seems steep for any loaf of bread, but as we talked about last week, everything is a luxury item now. It’s all priced accordingly.The new (old) rules for restaurant criticsDecades ago, we had a clear picture of who restaurant critics were. Among them, Mimi Sheraton, who donned wigs and other disguises to go unrecognized when reviewing. Jonathan Gold expanded readers’ minds by unearthing small hidden gems serving thrilling food. Sometimes they were Anton Ego, probably the most widely known (though fictitious) food critic from Disney’s Ratatouille, who seemed to love writing cruel reviews solely for sport.In the last few years, newspaper restaurant critics have been rewriting the rules of the game. Though New York magazine’s former critic, Adam Platt, famously dropped anonymity way back in 2013, the first newspaper critic to unmask themself was Alison Cook of The Houston Chronicle in 2012; even Gold unmasked himself in 2015. The major reveals remained quiet for some time, and then since 2019, critics like Soleil Ho (San Francisco Chronicle), Lyndsay C. Green (Detroit Free Press), and Louisa Kung Liu Chu (Chicago Tribune) dropped the performance of anonymity upon taking on the mantle at their respective publications. Only last year, critics at The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post followed suit.This is all to say that restaurant criticism is always adapting with the times.One such policy, the starred review, has been a subject of debate for many papers still publishing restaurant reviews. During the 2020 Covid pandemic, many legacy newspapers paused or retired their starred reviews out of respect for the restaurants and their workers suffering from debilitatingly slow business during the lockdown. Fast forward to today, as publications bring back those same starred ratings. In an era dominated by food and restaurant influencers, the argument the critics (and their editors) make is that star ratings help to give a definitive delineation to restaurant reviews written by true experts in the field.Why psychiatrists are prescribing GLP-1sHilary, a 39-year-old in California, has had depression for about as long as she can remember, which means she’s tried a lot of antidepressants. Mostly, though, the meds left her unimpressed. Then she began taking a GLP-1. A few months in, she felt like her entire outlook had become more positive.Hilary’s case isn’t wholly unique. Growing evidence shows that GLP-1s may relieve some symptoms of depression. That’s led psychiatrists to use it as a tool in conjunction with nutritional therapy on their patients. Read on to see how GLP-1s have made it to the therapy couch.