Part 1: Are You a Consumer, Customer or Guest?
Plus, two Central Ohio artisans are finalists for the 2026 Good Food Awards and other food news.
Are You a Consumer, Customer or Guest?
By Andy Dehus
In the corners of the internet I frequent, there have been some interesting discussions about the differences between the customer and the consumer. Though the rabbit hole for this thought experiment is deep, the gist of the discussion is pretty straightforward. It goes something like this: Some businesses seek to extract as much from you while providing as little as possible. In this case, you’re seen as a consumer in their eyes, while others provide a transaction that leads to you to feel as though you’ve been treated reasonably—and therefore given a customer experience.
In this framing, consumers feel exploited. Think of a subscription that’s easy to start but near impossible to cancel or a service that exists primarily to sell your personal data without your consent—while customers generally feel content with their transaction. Costco and Zappos are often raised as examples of a fair-to-exceptional customer experience.
Unsurprisingly, the majority sentiment seems to be that the consumer experience is on the rise.
Doing what I do at Columbus Food Adventures, it was natural to think about how this dynamic overlays onto the restaurant world, and it’s not hard to find suitable examples for each.
Food delivery—via DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc.—is a peak consumer experience, one in which you’ll pay dearly to get tepid food within a largely unknown time frame and with no practical recourse for addressing mistakes or tardiness. I think it’s fair to say that the only reason it continues to exist is because the middleman delivery service has analyzed the data it collects from users to figure out the maximum degree of unpleasantness-by-cost-cutting that their consumer will endure in exchange for the convenience provided.
By contrast, ordering your favorite pizza or Chinese takeout, and picking up exactly what you asked for, at the time when you expected it to be ready, for a price you can understand and accept, well, that’s a solid customer experience.
Of course, neither of those examples refer to the traditional purpose of a restaurant: the dine-in experience. And though a dining room’s intended function is sometimes said to be in decline—nipped away at by the trending impulse to eat at home—I’d argue that it’s still the heart and soul of a restaurant.
Though you could trace restaurant dining back to its French roots and point to the momentum of tradition to explain its continued importance, it’s probably more useful to understand the nature of the restaurant person—the owner, cook, server and on down the line. While some of them may have initially taken their job out of plain financial necessity, those who endure never stay solely because of it. The skills and hustle required to survive in a restaurant are highly valued elsewhere, and often for nontrivially higher compensation. This is never more true than when it comes to restaurant owners; the food world is littered with restaurateurs who dropped out of med school or left a sure thing in finance to pursue a life in food.
Why make that choice? Clearly, money isn’t the primary factor. So what drives them? If my decades of interacting with people in the food world are anything to go by, it’s the simple desire to make people happy, and to work with people who share a similar outlook. These people want to connect with humanity in all of its forms, while it engages in one of its most essential and satisfying rituals. They want you in their dining room so that they can be your host.
And you and I can be their guest. After having the good fortune of experiencing untold thousands of restaurant meals, this never fails to strike me as an extraordinary unearned privilege. In the vast majority of my experiences, I’m not being taken for a ride like a consumer and I’m not given some predetermined satisfactory outcome like a customer. I’m cared for like a guest, and everyone involved is sacrificing all alternative livelihoods because they want me to be happy.
But it’s not quite that simple, is it?
Coming soon, part II: More on the guest, and what businesses serve them best.
News & Happenings
Around the Columbus Food & Drink Scene
A pair of Central Ohio artisans, Black Cap Hot Sauce and Black Radish Creamery were named finalists for the 2026 Good Food Awards. Winners will be announced this summer. It’s the first Good Food Awards nomination for Black Cap founders Jack and Nicki Moore, whose fermented hot sauce is a contender in the Pantry category. Meanwhile, four of Black Radish’s cheeses were named 2026 finalists, including: Golda, Pimento, Pious Eddy and Raclette. Black Radish is a veteran of the Good Food Awards, having won for its Raclette and Bandit Red cheeses in 2023. Black Radish was also a three-time winner for its fruit preserves from 2014-2016.
Starting next month, The Hungarian Butcher will be hosting a supper club series featuring the talents of resident butcher Kyle Cardwell. Dubbed “Kyle’s Supper Club Series” these “elevated head-to-tail” dinners will take place Feb. 8, March 8 and March 22. Find the tickets at hungarianbutcher.com.
Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and Sweet Ghost has rolled out a special lineup of confections for the occasion. You can order your heart-shaped chocolates, strawberry marshmallows, chocolate bars and more at sweetghost.com/shop. You can read our interview with Sweet Ghost’s Gabby Corpus here.
Dublin’s rooftop restaurant Vaso is offering a series of Valentine’s events. Limited tickets are still available for Vaso’s Death by Chocolate Dinner on Feb. 10 and a Galentine’s Dinner on Feb. 16. Seats are also still available for Vaso’s Valentine’s Day Igloo Experience for Feb. 13-14. Reserve your seats here.
Really smart framing on the consumer/customer/guest distinction. The insight that hospitality workers choose this field despite better pay elswhere specifically because they want to make people happy is spot on. I remember working a restaurant job briefly and the regulars were genuinely the best part, not the paycheck.
Had to come back to this post after the CEO of Chipotle just referred to their customers as “users” which, to me, is even more removed/dystopian than consumers. It is so special to experience true hospitality.