London has over fifteen thousand restaurants. That number is absurd. It means that on any given evening, there are fifteen thousand businesses competing for your appetite, your wallet, and your Instagram story. Most of them will fail. The statistics are brutal - the majority close within their first three years. And yet, new ones open every week. Somebody always believes they can do it better.
I love the London food scene. It's one of the things I love most about this city. The variety, the ambition, the way a tiny place in a Brixton railway arch can serve you something that changes how you think about food. But recently I've started seeing restaurants differently. Not just as places to eat, but as products. Physical products, designed and iterated and branded and shipped, with onboarding flows and retention mechanics and user experience considerations that most tech companies would kill for.
The best London restaurants are, genuinely, better products than most apps I have used. And the reasons why are worth thinking about.
The menu is the product roadmap
A menu is the most underrated piece of product design in existence. Think about what a good menu does. It presents a constrained set of options. It groups them logically. It guides you through a sequence - starters, mains, desserts - without making you feel like you're being forced through a funnel. It uses language that makes you want things you didn't know you wanted. And, crucially, it leaves things out. What isn't on the menu is as important as what is.
The best restaurants in London have short menus. Five or six starters, seven or eight mains, three desserts. That is it. This isn't laziness. This is confidence. It's the restaurant saying: we know what we're good at, and we aren't going to dilute it by trying to be everything to everyone. It's the same principle that makes the best apps feel effortless - they do fewer things, but they do them brilliantly.
Compare that to the restaurants with menus the length of a novel. Fifteen pages of options, from Thai to Italian to Mexican, with a sushi section thrown in for good measure. These places are terrifying. Not because any single dish is necessarily bad, but because the breadth signals a lack of identity. If you can make everything, you're probably not making anything particularly well. It's the restaurant equivalent of feature bloat.
Onboarding is everything
Being seated at a restaurant is an onboarding flow. I mean that literally. You walk in the door - that's your first impression, your landing page. Someone greets you, takes your coat, leads you to a table. They explain how the menu works (sharing plates? tasting menu? order at the bar?). They recommend a drink. Within three minutes, you've been oriented, made comfortable, and given your first small win: a drink in your hand.
The best restaurants do this so smoothly you barely notice it happening. The worst ones leave you standing awkwardly by the door, wondering if anyone has seen you, trying to catch the eye of a waiter who's looking everywhere except at you. That's a failed onboarding flow. That's the digital equivalent of landing on an app and having no idea what to do first.
I think about this constantly when I'm building products. Oishii London is, in a way, an attempt to capture the feeling of being seated at a place that knows exactly what it is doing. The first thing you see should tell you what this is, what it's for, and what to do next. No confusion. No friction. Just: welcome, here's what's good, let us get started.
The restaurants that get onboarding right also get something else right: they make you feel like a regular even on your first visit. There's a warmth, an ease, a sense that you belong here. The best digital products do the same thing - they make new users feel like they're already part of something, not outsiders being asked to prove themselves.
Retention is the vibe
Why do you go back to a restaurant? The food, obviously. But also: the feeling. The noise level. The lighting. The music. The way the staff remember you, or at least pretend to convincingly. The way the room makes you feel like a slightly better version of yourself. That is retention. That's the restaurant's equivalent of daily active users.
The restaurants I go back to aren't always the ones with the best food. They're the ones with the best vibe. The ones where I feel something when I walk in. An energy, an atmosphere, a sense that whoever designed this space thought about every detail - the glassware, the playlist, the way the light falls on the table. These are product decisions. Every single one of them.
Tech products obsess over retention metrics but often miss the thing that actually drives retention: feeling. Nobody opens an app because of its retention mechanics. They open it because using it makes them feel something - productive, creative, informed, entertained, connected. The restaurants that survive in London understand this intuitively. The vibe isn't decoration. The vibe is the product.
Identity beats everything
The restaurants that fail in London are almost always the ones trying to be everything to everyone. The ones that serve a bit of everything, that try to appeal to families and couples and groups and solo diners and corporate lunches and date nights simultaneously. They end up appealing to nobody, because they stand for nothing.
The restaurants that thrive have a point of view. They know who they're. They know who they're for. They're willing to alienate some people in order to delight others. That is brand. That is identity. And it's the hardest thing to get right, in restaurants and in products.
I think about this when I look at my own projects. Each one has a different personality, a different vibe, a different audience. That is deliberate. A restaurant guide should feel different from a culture aggregator, which should feel different from a quiz app. They're different products for different moments, just like a ramen bar is a different product from a tasting-menu restaurant, even though they both serve food.
The lesson from London's restaurant scene is clear: constraints are generous. A short menu feels generous because it says "we've chosen the best things for you." A clear identity feels generous because it removes the burden of decision-making. A considered atmosphere feels generous because it shows that someone cared about your experience, not just your transaction.
Most apps don't feel generous. They feel anxious. They feel like they're trying to retain you, convert you, monetise you. The best restaurants don't feel like they're trying to do anything to you. They feel like they're doing something for you. That distinction - to you versus for you - is the difference between a product that survives and a product that thrives.
Next time you sit down at a great restaurant, pay attention. Not just to the food, but to the product design. The onboarding. The navigation. The information architecture of the menu. The retention mechanics of the vibe. The brand identity of the space. It's all there, executed with more craft and consideration than most billion-pound tech companies manage. And nobody had to write a product requirements document to make it happen.
