By Marco Shalma
There’s something bizarre going on in this city. You feel it every time you step out for lunch. New York, the same place that built its entire reputation on flavor, identity, and late-night chaos, is suddenly obsessed with food that tastes like a mood stabilizer. Beige bowls everywhere. Same chicken. Same grains. Same branding. It’s like the city woke up one morning and decided we should all eat like retired athletes whose doctors told them to “take it easy.”
The shift didn’t happen because New Yorkers suddenly wanted to live on quinoa. It happened because running a restaurant in this city is a competitive sport with no warm-ups and no water breaks. Beige bowls survive because they’re efficient, predictable, and engineered to work in a city where the numbers hit harder than the spices. Investors like them. Office workers grab them. Operators lean on them because they scale and don’t require a magician in the kitchen to keep margins alive. None of this makes anyone the enemy. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does: rewarding what can survive the pressure.
But the cultural cost is real. The city that once bragged about its flavor is slowly eating itself into neutrality. Neighborhoods are starting to feel interchangeable. Menus are blending into each other. You can walk into five different places in five different boroughs and get the exact same “build-your-own wellness bowl” with the same three sauces. This isn’t evolution. It’s flattening. New York is losing its palate because everyone is playing it safe.
