Restaurants, Food and the Olympics

The World's Largest Catering Event

Our second episode of Frequently Thoughtful, Occasionally Brilliant is out and it’s about the food program from the Paris Olympics and the impact of the games on Parisian restaurants.

Here is the episode link. Please give it a listen. Our first episode about reservations is also up. Later this week we’ll post a very interesting conversation about restaurant wages and economics with Ara Kharazian, economic research lead at Square.

There’s some fascinating stuff that comes from the podcast research that can’t be on the pod but I am trying to share in other ways. This is a first attempt at that. As always, I’d LOVE to hear any feedback- eli@shybird.com.

This headline is basically the TL;DR on the Olympics food effort. Driven by well intended, ambitious sustainability & culinary diversity goals, the Paris Olympics aimed high but missed the mark in a number of ways.

There were 175 tons of food waste at the Tokyo Games. Paris was right to take a very different approach but it’s never easy being the first.

Some restaurants reported being down as much as 50-80% from last year through June & July, pointing to Olympic security and planning as the cause. The French Prime Minister responded by forming a commission to explore potential recompense for those most affected.

Aaron Rosenthal, a Paris based chef friend and colleague, confirmed that for many restaurants the Olympic were a disappointment business-wise but that this did not dampen the pride they felt in hosting in their city.

The table on the left shows that, excluding NFL games, the Olympics accounted for 12 of the 19 most watched primetime shows of the year. People really dug them in New Orleans, West Palm Beach and Tulsa!

This is from Scott Galloway’s No Mercy, No Malice newsletter. It’ll be very interesting to see where these number land for Paris. It felt like the TikTok Olympics and was Peacock’s day in the sun for sure.

@henrikchristians1Olympic Village food review! A little surprise at the end too! Smash like and subscribe for part 2✌🏻 #fyp #olympics #paris2024 #olympictiktok #olympicvillage #foodreview @Olympics @paris2024 @Mr.Nicho

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Henrik Christiansen did not medal in his distance swimming events but he definitely earned a podium spot in muffin reviewing.

Snoop ought to win a gold medal, Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Grammy, Pulitzer, etc. for his performance at the Olympics. Dining at Georges Cinq with Martha Stewart he was all in on bacon lardons but 86 on escargot.