Hospitality’s Addiction to Trends: How Copycat Concepts Hollow Out the Industry

Avocado toast, Espresso Martinis, butter boards: once a trend pops up in some influencer’s feed it will spread like wildfire through the hospitality world. One day it’s an ironic or outlandish dish on a menu in Brooklyn or Los Angeles. The next, it’s everywhere — the same drinks, the same fonts, the same ‘elevated’ bar snacks that each chef and operator swears is different, but is almost exactly the same and, most likely, not as good. And every time the industry chases the next shiny thing, it gives up another piece of its soul.

“I can do that better” or “I thought of that before they did” is a phrase that has been uttered in restaurants for years, but over the past decade it’s turned into something more dangerous: a race to replicate. A restaurant blows up on social media for a single dish, a design aspect, or a piece of branding, and within weeks, copycats start popping up. It’s not innovation, it’s mimicry. Instead of defining who they are, too many operators build their identity around what they’ve seen someone else do.

It’s everywhere. Cocktail bars that look like they all have the same designer. “Bespoke” menus that are identical down to the garnish. Food halls filled with carbon copies of the same three concepts. The minute something works for someone, it gets copy and pasted onto the next place in another town with no context, no story, no reason to exist other than “people like that right now.”

But for all the hype that goes along with it, they are all missing the most important thing: a point of view. The iconic places, the institutions, have something to say. You may not like what it is, but they still say it. They have vision, not a vibe. Copycats, on the other hand, are like a sound stage set: amazing from the TV, but when you’re on them, cheap and fake. These places may open strong, but they rarely age well.