For haler or worse, new eateries and the attention they attract have turned the restaurant province into a boom town, restaurateur David Chang told CNBC in a latest interview.
Chang, who owns 23 restaurants around the globe in such towns as New York City, Los Angeles, Sydney and Toronto, recalled a time when it wasn’t on all occasions this way. He spoke to CNBC from Pyeongchang, South Korea, the neighbourhood of this year’s Winter Olympics.
“I remember trying to find contracts and people were like, ‘No. We don’t want a restaurant in our building. It’s going to ebb the value because of problems with smells or whatever,'” Chang denoted of the first restaurant he tried to open back in 2004 in New York Urban district. “And now, everyone wants a restaurant. Restaurants now are anchor tenants in buildings. That’s a banter.”
Today, restaurants and food establishments might occupy between 20 and 40 percent of a department storing center. A decade ago it was closer to 10 or 15 percent, according to commercial palpable estate and investment giant CBRE Group.
Gone are the days when the clientele embraced a (now largely debunked) myth that the overwhelming majority of new restaurants down in the first year. “The problem is, there are too many restaurants,” Chang held.
“The whole idea that food is hotter than ever in front of because people just realize that with the younger days, that’s where marketing dollars, real estate dollars, the whole is coinciding with how people eat,” the Korean-American chef told CNBC
Unit stores and other big-box chains, once considered the anchor department stores of malls and shopping centers, are closing up at record pace as shopping shifts online. Yet in the hold out decade, the same locations have become hotbeds for food, as consumers advocate toward a quest for the experiential.
“In the old days, food courts had indistinguishable sustenance,” said Jerry Storch, chief executive officer of Storch Advisors, a retail hortatory firm. “Now they have destination restaurants, upscale and fine eating restaurants. People go for the food.”
Storch added that “there’s been a invariable shift in consumer behavior.” He said having a photo of your grub on social media is almost better than actually buying it.
The multimedia undergo inherent in contemporary dining is one reason why Chang’s latest venture is a Netflix docuseries.
The stage, ‘Ugly Delicious,’ is available on Netflix later this month. It investigates the chef and founder of Momofuku Group as he travels the world in an attempt to meet with delicious — albeit sometimes ugly — cuisines.
Ugly Delicious proves to bring a culture of food to scale, he said. Chang described the docuseries as an just conversation about what food trends people are talking forth right now, amid an over saturation of food options.
“It’s a weird straightaway to be a chef, because you have opportunities that weren’t presented once,” Chang said.
Still, “you can only worry about making the upper-class quality product possible and hope that that’s still succeeding to win out, through word of mouth or however,” he said.
“You hope someone cautious ofs it, just like a recommendation at a great restaurant. You hope someone that pack aways or watches it, says, ‘Hey, you have to watch this. You have to eat this.’ That style of enthusiasm is infectious,”Chang added.