As a disclaimer, there is no redeeming lesson in this post. Just some Sunday humor and observations about the world. If you are looking for deep insight, stop here, if you want a chuckle–and an investment opportunity, read further.
About a year ago, Kookie and I were visiting Manhattan. Kookie was raised there (well, the Bronx), and we lived there for about 15 years.
Our usual custom, on Sunday’s, is to get together at a favorite restaurant, usually on the West Side, with friends. Conversations wander all over the place. Since Kookie is a professional chef, that morning’s brunch included several chef’s. And as chef’s are prone to do, we started talking about restaurants and potentially opening one.
For those of you unfamiliar with Manhattan, it’s loaded with “theme” restaurants. So the conversation shifted to be, “What’s the theme?” What catchy, fashionable thing could we do that would create great buzz and have people standing in line to get a table?
The food wasn’t an issue. In our group, we had outstanding chef’s, many working in some of Manhattan’s best restaurants. But we needed something to draw people to the restaurant.
The conversation drifted in other directions, we started talking about social media and the rampant narcissism that tends to dominate social media. It seems we are deluged with shouts of, “look at me,” “see what I am doing now,” “see how interesting I am…..”
And then the nugget of an idea started to form….. We would open a restaurant, “Me, Myself, And I.”
Tables would seat one person only. After all, no one is more important than ourselves. Why would we need anyone else at the table?
A couple of our group recalled some old movies, where there were phones at the tables in the table of a restaurant. If someone was interested in a person at another table, they would phone the table number and engage that person in conversation.
We thought, we could put phones at each of the tables in a similar fashion. But we hit a stumbling block. After all, if the focus is on “me,” why would I ever be interested in phoning anyone else? It turns out, the idea works for inbound only.
We have to work that out, how do we provoke inbound calls? We considered maybe having a few tables of “You’s.” They are interested in others. But then, they would want tables for two or more, because they are interested in other people.
We’ll figure something out……
We, also. struggled with how we might handle peak loads, and demands for tables–after all with the rampant narcissism we see every day, we might not be able to handle the demand.
As we looked around the restaurant we were sitting in, we suddenly realized we could set up tables for two. It seemed most people around us, weren’t engaging in conversations, they were more occupied by their devices…… While this is a strategy was workable, we decided we would use it only in the most dire circumstances. We wanted to maintain the purity of tables for, who else, “me!”
We moved on to background music–that’s pretty easy, top of the list would be the narcissists’ anthem, Cheap Trick’s, “I Want You To Want Me. We realized the playlist of songs focused on narcissism would be easy: “I’m too sexy….” “I gotta be me…” “Under my thumb…” “Applause” “You belong with me…” and so forth. We were unanimous in our view that “What Kind Of Fool Am I,” would never appear.
With the basics solved, we are moving on to thinking of the gala opening event, and our guest list. With so many candidates, our minds started drifting to Washington and Hollywood……, possibly even a few web influencers.
In any case, we figure Me, Myself, And I will be an outrageous success. We are looking for investors. We want to be true to our values with this opportunity. Naturally, we won’t accept investor groups, VC’s and such, it can only be solo/angel investors. In addition to equity, you will always have a table for yourself.
Afterword: Just before publishing this, I did a quick search. I discovered there is already a restaurant in the Netherlands, called Eenmaal, I guess we have lost first mover advantage, though they seem more focused on loneliness. We’re focused on narcissists–they never lack their own good company.
