We might be about to find out.

Over the last two decades, restaurants (great ones, of every kind, and lots of them) have been the deciding factor in the revitalization of cities—and the obvious advantage over life in the ‘burbs. Which is why what’s happening to everything from culinary institutions to humble local eateries in cities across the country could have huge consequences for where people want to live today — and for years to come.

• Close to 80,000 restaurants have closed since 2020, a fact that won’t surprise any city dweller who’s witnessed them going dark en masse firsthand. But it’s not over: The National Restaurant Association estimates that 85% of all independent restaurants could ultimately go out of business before the pandemic is over. And hopes that restaurants will eventually return may be dashed—Doordash’d, to be exact—as consumer behavior shifts to at-home dining.

• Many of those shuttered restaurants are being replaced or displaced by “ghost kitchens”, which cater exclusively to delivery platforms like Doordash and Uber Eats. Expected to be a trillion dollar business by 2030, ghost kitchens are being called “The Future of Food” — and they’re eating up space in cities in order to be able to get food to customers quickly. Just one, a start-up called Ghost Kitchens, has spent $130 million on real estate since 2020.

• It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much restaurants contribute to the value of life (and property) in urban environments. But we do know that the number of people who want to live in cities continued to decline in favor of life in the suburbs through 2021, and that drift should continue if the top cultural draw of cities is no longer reliably and widely available to most residents.

Of course, restaurants will return. The question is, when? Because most people agree that a city without restaurants, glowing and full, is not much of a city at all. That means that for now, and the foreseeable future, the cul-de-sacs will be savoring a renaissance. In fact, that’s where a lot of the most exciting new restaurants are opening.

Read at the NYT: America’s Next Great Restaurants Are in the Suburbs