It’s been a hard four years for the restaurant industry.

When the pandemic hit, restaurants were some of the most impacted businesses. In the US, an estimated 72.7k closed due to covid.

But now, there are signs of regrowth: Yelp listings show that ~53.8k new restaurants opened last year, representing 16.1 new restaurants for every 100k people, per Axios.

Some types of restaurants in particular have been taking off:

• Desserts (up 66% YoY)
• Pop-ups (up 66%)
• Creperies (up 63%)
• Hot pot (up 53%)

Certain cuisines have also experienced upswings, like African and Peruvian restaurants, which are up 65% and 28%, respectively, compared to 2019.

What’s for dinner?

The restaurants themselves aren’t the only things changing — menu offerings are getting revamped as shops compete in a cutthroat market.

And there are some noticeable trends emerging on today’s menus, per The New York Times:

• Certain classics reign supreme — like Caesar salads and fried chicken — with some unexpected new items taking off, like caviar, yuzu, and panna cotta.
• Desserts are becoming more drinkable (hello, espresso martini) and nostalgic.
• Alcohol-free beverages are still on the rise, with more menus dedicating entire sections to zero-proof drinks.

Plus, menus are increasingly colorful and modern, and include more content highlighting restaurant labor, like info on ingredient sourcing or explanations of service fees.

The restaurant renaissance…

… is not without its hardships. In a 2023 poll by Washington, D.C.’s restaurant association, 75% of establishments reported being less profitable than pre-pandemic.

Then, of course, there are the rising costs of labor and ingredients, with the added hurdle of budget-conscious customers dining out less.

Ending with a bit of good news: You’re not just getting older and going blind — smaller font sizes are actually in vogue, with some restaurants dipping down to 5 points.

Nowadays, we scan QR codes to do all sorts of stuff: read restaurant menus, activate washing machines, open doors, launch audio tours, etc.

In 2000, Digital Convergence’s CueCat — a plastic device that looked like a cat — did something similar. It scanned special bar codes on print ads, called “cues,” then took users to a relevant URL.

Yep, sounds like a QR code. So why didn’t it work?

Digital Convergence made its money via technology licensing deals with media and advertising clients, not from selling CueCats, which it gave away for free.

But over seven months, CueCat had generated less than six swipes per device across 3m devices, according to CNET.

The problems:

• CueCats had to be wired to computers, and were thus inconvenient for everyone except this woman from a RadioShack ad, who apparently relaxes by browsing magazines in front of her PC.
• A Wall Street Journal reviewer found it clunky and useless, requiring multiple “swipes” to work.
• Tech partners failed to provide useful or specific URLs.
• There were privacy concerns about the possibility that CueCats compiled databases of anyone who’d scanned a specific cue. It didn’t help that a hack revealed ~140k users’ personal data.

By January 2002, CueCat’s nine lives were all but up, costing investors $185m.

At the time…

… software developer Joel Spolsky, who’d received a free CueCat thanks to his Wired magazine subscription, blogged about its impracticality.

He compared it to a similar, and perhaps even sillier, Wired scheme that required taking a photo of an ad with a digital camera, uploading the photo to a computer, and using special software to convert that image to a URL.

It seems like what the tech really needed was a small internet-enabled box with a camera that we carry around all the time — but the iPhone wouldn’t debut until June 2007.