Normcore, Illegibility, and the Fear of Mid
The internet made the world more crowded - or does it just feel that way?
Whenever I read an article about restaurant reservations in New York City—a perennial discussion topic in recent years—I remember this 2015 essay by Alexis Swerdloff in praise of normcore dining, a category of restaurants she characterizes as good but no longer exciting to the general public—“restaurants that were once super-fashionable and have since faded slightly.” Swerdloff contends that a great normcore restaurant is “blotted out by the sun”—you might pass by it on a daily basis without noticing it or thinking to eat there, despite knowing it’s at least alright. She writes,
“As the city I grew up in has become both too fancy and too self-consciously cool for my liking, I’ve found myself seeking out restaurants that remind me of the New York of my childhood—or, even better, have actually been around since my childhood—that serve yummy, if not spectacular, food in settings that are nice, if not too nice. It’s just too exhausting to get all excited by a hyperfetishization and irritating self-consciousness and meticulousness surrounding everything from the morel mushrooms to the marble bar tops and menu fonts. There is something really great about going to a place that doesn’t have 857 Yelp reviews, where you can actually get in as a party of five without a reservation on a Friday night, and where the food itself isn’t going to be the main topic of conversation—and you can actually have a conversation.”
“Normcore” here does not mean authenticity, although the two concepts overlap—it represents neither the outer borough hole-in-the-wall prospecting of writers like Jonathan Gold and Robert Sietsema, nor the enduring symbols of a bygone New York, like Peter Luger. Those are both ways of being exceptional, and normcore begins where exceptional ends. Swerdloff herself excludes “restaurants like Donohue’s, Gene’s, Lucien, Indochine, or anything owned, or once owned, by Keith McNally” for remaining too popular and beloved over time to qualify as normcore. The normcore restaurant falls just short of being special for any reason but is still a perfectly fine place to eat. Having been novel and exciting one decade prior is a reliable path to normcore status, placing an otherwise good establishment just beyond the fringe of present awareness.
What did 2015 feel like, anyway? I can barely remember, but I think it felt like the tone of the essay I’m describing. It was the twilight of the Obama era. Harambe was still alive, TikTok didn’t exist yet, ZIRP was going to last forever. The notion of normcore dining, as articulated here, captures the now-hazy zeitgeist of that time: slightly more innocent, much more optimistic, and generally less internet-poisoned than today. We were extremely online in 2015, yes, but we hadn’t yet solidified the habit of viewing every topic through the lens of memes and discourse, nor had we been herded into subconscious alignment by the series of mass cultural events that were on the way. The essay is pleasantly lacking in self-consciousness, just like the layer of New York it celebrates, unafraid of missing out and willing to risk saying something obvious rather than compressing it all into a series of IYKYK nods. Swerdloff hints that this lack of FOMO is the true spirit of the city—a democratic sense of abundance, a belief that there’s enough to go around and that even New York’s uncrowded middle would be most other cities’ top tier.
This all stands out more in retrospect, of course. Recall Alex Balk’s Three Laws of the internet:
Everything you hate about the internet is actually everything you hate about people.
The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything.
If you think the internet is terrible now, just wait a while.
Balk first articulated these laws in 2014-2015, about a year before the normcore dining piece, and it’s interesting to observe how even then, people believed the internet had already degraded into a joyless shell of its past self (a timeless pastime, like complaining about New York going downhill). But the Laws are useful for understanding what had already changed in 2015 and what has changed since: We would continue to know more and more what everyone thinks, we would spend more and more time online, and the internet’s most toxic feature—the people using it—would evolve accordingly.
THE CITY AS CONTENT MINE
As an observer of both cities and internet culture, I find restaurants to be a useful index of change: Eating, being inherently physical, is an activity that resists full virtualization—even as it becomes increasingly mediated by digital technology, it remains embodied at its core. This, along with the social nature of eating and our enduring desire to dine in public, ensures the continued prominence of restaurants in the urban environment.
Despite that overall stability, the topography of the dining landscape—in New York and elsewhere—also changes with the technology and media that support it. In the normcore dining excerpt quoted above, the Yelp reference stands out as a detail that dates the piece. Back in 2015, “857 Yelp reviews” could still function as shorthand for a restaurant’s popularity, and for restaurant discovery more broadly.
Today, a different measure of popularity on a different platform would obviously replace the Yelp review count—the restaurant’s presence on Instagram or TikTok, or lack of reservation availability on a platform like Resy (one hallmark of normcore dining is not needing reservations at all). Restaurant discovery, meanwhile, has split into a few parts—Google Maps for the more utilitarian side of location-based search, along with a vast ecosystem of social media influencers and recommendation content, which takes the form of lists, maps, city guides, videos, TV shows, and forum posts.
Yelp, like social media, relied upon user-generated content—the Yelp review became its own minor art form—but the typical user was a consumer of that content, not a producer of it. The platforms that superseded Yelp as sources of restaurant information, particularly Instagram, also changed what it meant to eat at a restaurant, turning any outing into something you could broadcast to an audience. Dining has always been a status symbol but one that was difficult for ordinary people to display at scale before social media. (Foursquare introduced a similar ability slightly earlier, but Foursquare check-ins always felt more like telling your friends what you were up to than generating restaurant content for an audience.) With Instagram, the places where a person ate and drank (and traveled) could accrue to their personal brand, giving those experiences value beyond the immediate pleasure of the meal and social company—making restaurants more like clothes or other possessions that one could similarly collect and “wear” for an online audience.
The feedback loop of learning about restaurants via social media content and then creating one’s own content to add to the stream—on Instagram and then TikTok—was more powerful than Yelp’s one-way flow of information. Even if you weren’t an influencer you could pretend you were (there’s no minimum threshold—everyone is a microinfluencer, etc). An army of content creators now trawl the streets of New York and other cities like the Google Street View photography vehicles, searching endlessly for anything interesting enough to capture and post.
NORMCORE AND MID
“The punishment for being authentic is becoming someone else’s content,” I wrote last year, responding to Kyle Chayka’s prediction that “the last desperate search for shreds of authentic local culture will convulse the globe as the internet consumes every interesting quirk and scales it up to the size of TikTok.” The platforms’ insatiable demand for content, channeled through the users themselves, has ratcheted up this hunt for new material—for whatever hasn’t yet been cashed in via digital arbitrage. The normcore dining essay anticipates this condition, referencing Carbone, a restaurant that came to epitomize Instagram-age popularity: “It’s suddenly fashionable for chefs to reinterpret old New York restaurant tropes—Carbone has taken on the red-sauce joint, Mission Chinese has taken on the white-tablecloth Chinese restaurant—but why not just go to the originals?” The success of those high-profile trope-revivals encouraged more, of course, creating a sense that New York’s vernacular landscape (or any city’s) was still a relatively untapped resource, or at least one containing plenty more value that could still be squeezed out.