It's time to roast some boujee shit
Reject modernity, embrace a different modernity.
I have a rule-of-thumb when it comes to eating at Mexican restaurants: If the food looks like it should appear on an Instagram grid, then I don’t care to eat what is likely flavorless whitewashed kayfabe. The best Mexican food comes from dingy hole-in-the-wall joints and the meals should be greasy and remarkably unflashy. This is hardly a unique observation, but it needs to be reiterated that everything now is made for the ‘Gram—not to be enjoyed but to convey the appearance of enjoyment. Because of this dynamic, it seems like a lot of going out to restaurants results in overpaying for mid, to shell out $50+ for a photo-op with a smashburger and a craft beer.
When swaths of selfie-obsessed posers flood a scene or a formerly hidden gem of a restaurant or a bar, they do so with predetermined expectations, and these establishments will eventually pander to them because it’s easy money. And these scenes and neighborhoods and bars and restaurants eventually turn into a neutered and sterile facsimile of itself. Once any amount of “coolness” has been wrung dry, these status-obsessed dweebs will trend-hop onto the next thing to degrade and demean. Eventually, every local spot you love will turn into a tourist trap full of other locals. Hell is other social media addicts. But these people are only secondary to what a person gets accustomed to as a participant in public life in a major city—the hype, the buzz, the noise, the grim gradations of scuzz and cynicism and abstraction making their way down your street, haranguing you endlessly, and to no clear end.
Mostly what this does to someone who cares about or just notices pop culture is establish a palate. There isn’t really much to be done about it, give or take the odd and invariably overdue wide-scale reevaluation of our social media consumption. The culture is still run by stupid machines and dumb money and the various even-dumber forms of servile striving and familiar manias that ride over everything everywhere. A person living in this environment becomes a connoisseur of garbage more or less by default.
All of this is expressed more loudly and overtly than usual every spring at Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods Park. The cherry blossoms are in full bloom in late-April, and on my way home from work, I’ll bike by swaths of clout goblins swarming the trees and waiting an hour to take the same photos with the same poses and the same stupid faces. It’s all pretty uninspired stuff, and the end-product is mostly affective, or just aesthetic. An annually recurring reason to capture something for the grid can generate a great deal of attention alongside all that shrugging what-else-are-you-going-to-do fatalism that belies so much of our public life, and the willingness to degrade yourself just to produce replacement-level content is equally admirable and hilariously oafish. The generally deflated state of things is on full display when you witness such a concentrated dose of signature personal shamelessness along with some residual garden-variety vanity. The gravity should eventually take hold, but these engagement lemmings are too self-absorbed to realize that everything that they think makes their lives unique and enviable actually renders their personalities generic and redundant.
Every major city has a version of a familiar striver doing this kind of piddly shit. The overhead photo of a dish that just arrived at a dining table with the caption, “I wish you could taste this.” Group photos of cheers-ing mimosas or ciders at a well-established basic bitch patio that commanded a 45-minute wait for seating. My entire IG Stories is littered with bacon-wrapped scallops and stately seafood towers, selfies at every European tourist trap imaginable, and dull inconsequential moments. It all begs the questions of how much of our lives are worth documenting, how many people genuinely care, and what tangible positive impact do these rituals add to our well-being.
The various sweaty particulars and protagonists wash away into a ubiquitous algorithm, and these aspiring micro-influencers blather in this distinctive excited-yet-flat affect that comes when someone is trying to engage an audience despite their manifest lack of charisma and passion. These people aren’t naturally engaging speakers, but they will gloat and pound luxury and excess into something rote by repetition. But it’s evident they don’t have any genuine enthusiasm for the lowest-common-denominator topics they have to cover for cheap engagement. So they have to force an upbeat tone into their speech, but the intonation is all off and it just comes off as tense and uncomfortable. They talk like somebody desperately hoping you don’t ask to look in the cellar where they keep all the bodies.
Since these algorithmic retreads are the pied pipers of gentrification, it is incumbent upon everyone with a baseline standard of decent taste to push back on all this standardized Potempkin boujee bullshit and reclaim some semblance of humanity. It’s time to gatekeep and roast.
If a restaurant has a grass wall or exposed brick and rolling garage doors, they will charge you $25 for a burger drowned in garlic aioli that falls apart once you remove the toothpick. And when I see green walls in a restaurant, all I think of is the amount of dust building up over time; in all honesty, who is vacuuming that?
You’ll have to sit on a creaky off-balance metal stool that wobbles smugly while cringing through that intolerable screech as they drag across the concrete floor. And for some reason, any chair without back support feels ageist.
Your food will served by a guy wearing a t-shirt that says “Go cry in the walk-in” and some variation of a flat hat. The burger will arrive on a half-sized baking sheet because they don’t care about what they’re feeding you, they care about their Instagram feed. The waiter server will compliment your choice after you order a Belching Beaver Phantom Bride Chocolate IPA served in a brandy snifter, noting you’re about to embark on a “grassy, Christmassy fermented experience” and your date who comes to that restaurant two times a month is already swiping on Tinder under the white linen tablecloth.
If you’re vegan, you can order a salad that’s just four Brussels sprouts for $16.
Don’t even ask about fries.
Order numbers, iPad cash register, 2011 Stomp Clap HEY! music, and of course, Edison bulbs because it’s impossible to get a food permit in Brooklyn without one.
Yet, these unauthentic attempts at an authentic hipster style are still a thousand times more appealing than restaurants that go for a white wall/steel beam/shotgun-shack open floor plan as part of a minimalist, soulless approach to appear “modern.” These places must be inspired by Chipotle, but they look like a prison cafeteria and they’re an obvious cheap ploy to make cutting costs on interior design seem hip and chic.
And I fucking hate the word gastropub—along with “mouthfeel,” “foodie,” “gooey,” and “foodporn.”
If a coffee shop doesn’t have a chalkboard for a menu and instead has this minimalist wooden spreadsheet, they will milk you dry and charge you extra for the milk. Or you order from your phone, pick up from the counter, pay from your phone, and there’s a 25% minimum suggested tip.
I want my coffee served to me by a dreadlocked 67-year-old Unitarian parishioner named Sylvia.
These types of coffee shops will play Train’s “Hey Soul Sister” and everyone inside, across all backgrounds, will subconsciously lip-sing the chorus and you will feel like you’re trapped in a Bank of America commercial.
If the name of an art exhibit starts with the word “immersive,” that’s code for “We will charge you $50 to look at a screensaver projected onto a wall for 20 minutes.”
If a bar has a neon sign written in cursive, it’s a warning sign to go to a different bar that won’t charge you $30 for a watered-down drink in a Tiki mug.
Espresso martinis are Yuppie 4Lokos.
You will order a vodka martini at the bar and the bartender will give you a look and say, “We don’t serve vodka here.” A late mid-30s dude who is giving off real elder millennial hipster IPA silly bicycle energy is sitting nearby and says to his friend that he’s glad they don’t serve vodka. It will feel like a scene from some sort of noir movie where you’re the detective and they just don’t like you, so they lie about not serving whatever drink you want.
If you walk into a job interview and you see a spiral slide, they will overwork you and send you into a downward spiral before you even use that slide.
If you go into a barber shop and it looks like a mix between the hull of a pirate ship and an abandoned light bulb factory, they will charge you $95 for a buzz cut and a beard trim.
A good stylist will talk nonstop about vaccine conspiracies and crypto investment schemes and you will not have to make any effort to keep up a conversation.
The effect that social media has had on museums with ball pits needs to be studied. If you want to lure any millennial with an Instagram addiction somewhere, add a monochromatic ball pit. The rise of museum ball pits is a result of Disney Adults wanting McDonald’s play place nostalgia in an age-appropriate setting. I want to piss in every one I come across.
There are two types of pet clinics:
Ones that look like backrooms.
Ones that look like showrooms.
Guess which one will overcharge you?
Both of them.
Boutique clothing stores that carry 3 styles of designer shirts and pants, all unisex, in muted grey shades. And of course, no price tags. If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Please, for the bare-light-bulbs-in-Brooklin sake, can we have part 2 of this hybrid listicle? Also, can’t believe those bulbs are still around. As well as many other things mentioned.