It sells burgers and beer, and it is famous for a milkshake with an entire cake on top of it
Black Tap holds a 4.7 from nine hundred and ninety people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and it sells burgers and craft beer.
And it is famous, worldwide, for a milkshake.
The shake
It is a milkshake with an entire slice of cake on the top of it. Or a doughnut. Or a wall of sweets stuck to the glass with icing.
It is enormous, it is structurally implausible, and it is not really food.
It is a photograph.
And it was, when it launched around 2016, one of the first and most complete examples of a menu item designed primarily to be posted – and it worked so spectacularly that the queues outside the New York original became a news story in themselves.
What it actually is
A marketing instrument with a straw in it, and everybody involved knows it, and the honesty of that is the reason we are not going to be pompous.
The dish exists to be seen. The customer is not buying a drink – they are buying an object that will do something for them after they have left, and the drink is the delivery mechanism.
And it is not new. It is only newly efficient.
The swan, at a medieval feast, was roasted, re-dressed in its own feathers, wired upright, and carried to the table with burning camphor in its beak so that it appeared to breathe fire – and we wrote about that at the Swan Tavern, and noted that it tasted appalling and that nobody cared, because the point was never the eating.
Four-and-twenty blackbirds were baked in a pie so that they could fly out of it. Nobody ate the birds.
The medieval feast was theatre and the food was the set, and the milkshake is the same instinct with a better distribution network.
The burgers
Which are, infuriatingly, very good – and the 4.7 across nine hundred and ninety people is a serious number that a milkshake could not produce on its own.
People come for the photograph. They come back for the burger. That is the whole business model and it is considerably more intelligent than it looks.
The lesson
Six hundred and nine articles, and the finding holds even here.
The gimmick gets them through the door. It does not produce a 4.7. Nothing has ever produced a 4.7 except a room where somebody is doing the job properly.
Verdict
Excellent burgers. Order the shake. Photograph it. Everybody does and nobody admits it.
What the phone did to food
It changed what gets cooked, and the change is not small.
A dish that photographs badly is now, in commercial terms, disadvantaged – regardless of how it tastes. Brown food photographs badly. Stews photograph badly. A pie photographs badly.
Colour photographs well. Height photographs well. Anything with a runny yolk photographs extremely well, which is why there is an egg on a startling proportion of London brunch menus that does not need to be there.
The Prat’s culinary desk regards this as the single largest influence on restaurant menus of the last fifteen years and notes that no chef will admit to it and that all of them are doing it.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Withnail and I understood despair as character flaw. This understands despair as organizational framework. That’s institutional evolution.