My biggest fear for after COVID19 lockdown

My biggest fear for after COVID19 is to walk on a street where all the shops are of well-known brands, standardised, sanitised and, providing near-identical experiences. My biggest fear for after COVID19 is a loss of originality and choice.

My favourite restaurants are the ones where you enter, you are seated, and there is no menu. You do not have a choice, everyone eats the same, and it changes every day, and it is always amazing. Such restaurants are born and die with their cook (the owner) staying and keeping a very high quality of the food. Rarely expanding. They are like a Michelin star restaurant, providing a unique experience, for everyone that cross their doors.

The natural course of such places is to die when food is not as tasty as it was, often due to retirement or death of the cook. But closing is a rare event! There is always a successor, someone that is both considered family, that was in the kitchen at all time, someone with the knowledge, ready to be the new new and replace the old. I use to search for such a place, while in Rome, by merely smelling around at lunchtime.

Such beautiful restaurants cannot afford to be closed for an extended period, and my fear is that COVID19 lockdown is changing the natural lifecycle of such places. At the end of the lockdown, fewer such restaurants will exist. Before they can be rebuilt (a slow process), a fast-food chain will buy the shop and transform a magical place into, yet another, Starbucks.

ps: I have nothing against Starbucks, but yes they are all identical and it is by design

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