The Novelty Food Pattern
Four repeatable manipulations that turn an ordinary food into a business people photograph.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 75%
Across a run of food-business breakdowns, Shaan Puri had noticed a recurring structure that Sam names explicitly — 'you're like the rain man of figuring out this food trick... I see the pattern.' The pattern is a short menu of manipulations applied to an ordinary food to make it photographable: change its shape, size or colour; put it in an unexpected container; mash together two things that are related but not entirely related; or take something that is normally a side or a topping and make it the entire product. Each manipulation converts the food from something you eat into something you post, which substitutes free social distribution for paid acquisition. Shaan pairs this with the operating economics he learned running a restaurant, using the Benihana case study: constraining the menu drives food waste down, and rethinking the format can convert kitchen space into revenue-generating floor space. His 'Instagramahanas' pitch applies both halves at once — photo-worthy food, a fixed group format at roughly $100 a head, cheap non-protein ingredients, and no per-person plating waste because one spectacle item serves the whole table.
Origin
Shaan and Sam had done breakdowns on novelty food companies — cronuts, fondue-only stores, the Museum of Ice Cream — and Sam noticed Shaan was the one seeing the shared structure rather than treating each as a one-off oddity.
Core principles
- 01A photographable dish buys distribution that an ad budget would otherwise have to.
- 02The product is the content, not the meal.
- 03A constrained menu is an operating advantage, not a limitation.
- 04Format changes can convert cost centres into revenue space.
- 05Novelty concepts monetise the first visit, so price and format accordingly.
How to run it
- 1
Choose a familiar base
Start from a food people already recognise instantly. Recognition is what makes the manipulation read as surprising rather than merely unfamiliar.
- 2
Apply one of the four manipulations
Alter shape, size or colour; change the container; mash two related-but-not-identical foods; or make a side or topping the entire offering. One manipulation is usually enough.
- 3
Verify it reads in a single photo
The concept has to be legible without caption or explanation. If the surprise needs describing, it will not travel.
- 4
Constrain the menu
Limit the offering the way Benihana does. Shaan notes this cuts food waste sharply and simplifies labour, which is where restaurant margins usually die.
- 5
Redesign the format around the economics
Benihana moved the stove to the table, eliminating kitchen space and converting the whole footprint to dining. Ask what your format equivalent is.
- 6
Price the experience, not the plate
Shaan models roughly $100 a head plus tips, tables of eight, 20-30 tables, two to three turns a night — economics driven by the group experience rather than food value.
In the wild
Shaan enumerates the manipulations behind concepts he and Sam had already broken down: cronuts (mashing two related foods), fondue-only stores and cookie-dough-in-an-ice-cream-tin (promoting a side to the main event), and oversized or oddly-coloured items.
→ A reusable menu of moves rather than a collection of unrelated food fads.
Shaan's pitch: a Benihana-format restaurant where the point is content, not food. Photo-worthy items — a giant pile of sour gummy worms, an oversized doughnut, a 36-ounce beer — arrive omakase-style, a drone films the table, and outsourced editors return the best reaction shots.
→ Modelled at roughly $100 per person, tables of eight, 20-30 tables, two-three turns a night, with food cost and waste far below a normal restaurant because the items are cheap non-proteins served one-per-table.
Sam and Shaan discuss the room-to-room photo experience that barely serves ice cream, raised roughly $50M at a $250M valuation, and drew lines around the block in Manhattan.
→ Evidence the content-over-food thesis scales to venture size — though Shaan notes the San Francisco location closed, showing the format is location-dependent.
Common mistakes
Stacking too many novelties at once
Sam's critique of Instagramahanas is precisely this — 'one food would be enough'. Multiple gimmicks dilute the single legible hook and complicate operations.
Letting the food actually matter
Shaan is explicit that the five-pound burger doesn't need to taste good. Investing in culinary quality on a novelty concept raises cost without improving the thing customers came for.
Believing the hype equals the experience
Sam ordered the viral pandemic cookies and found them unremarkable — 'the expectations get way out of whack'. Novelty concepts should be priced and modelled for trial, not loyalty.
Is it for you?
Best for
Operators launching a consumer food or experience concept who need organic distribution rather than an ad budget.
Not ideal for
Businesses competing on genuine culinary quality or repeat daily consumption, where novelty actively works against you.
From the transcript
“you got to take a food and put it in a weird shape or a weird size or a weird color ... or you match…”
“or you take something that's typically a side or a topping and you make that the only thing like a cookie dough only place that…”
“it's a restaurant that's not about the food it's a restaurant about the content”
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