A Restaurant in the Year 2081

It’s “Future Week” at Eater, and our pal Matt Buchanan has brewed up an interview with a chef opening up a new restaurant in the year 2081, when most people subsist off of Soylent and only the very wealthy can afford to eat real meat:

So it sounds like you’re going to do another restaurant that’s more accessible?

At the end of the day, I want to have a restaurant for everybody, including the people on Soylent. Even the middle class deserves to eat solid food at least occasionally. Even if they’d have to really optimize their labor and consumption to save enough to come in for a special occasion, having eighty percent of the population suddenly able to visit a restaurant once or twice a year is a lot of customers.

I don’t think any company or restaurant has offered engineered chicken at the level we’re going to do it, especially not at the price we’re going to offer it. The guys who got their start in the early part of the century, who were the first to really produce optimized protein for the masses, before meat became really unavailable even, are very good at what they do, which is feeding a lot of people with something that is nutritious and tastes reasonably good, especially if you don’t have the context to compare it to, which most people don’t. But those guys just don’t care about the little things like we do — our “chicken” has an essence, a real life to it that nothing else out there does.

It’s a work of fiction, but seems plausible to me!

Photo: Rick Toroczy

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