Simon Kim knows exactly how many beats per minute are in each song played in his restaurants.
During dinner service’s peak — around 10:30 p.m. at Cote, a Korean steakhouse in Manhattan, and 9:30 p.m. at Coqodaq, his Korean fried chicken restaurant just down the block — the songs range from 105 to 120 b.p.m.
“It’s like an orchestra session,” he said. You might hear “I’m Every Woman” by Chaka Khan (114 b.p.m.) or “Okay” by DJ Island (120 b.p.m.).
“We bring the crowd up, and then there is a crescendo, and then we peak, climax, and then we start to bring it down a little bit. There is a science behind it.”
Tempo has the power to make or break a dining experience. Slower music can encourage lingering, said Rita Aiello, a music psychologist and professor at New York University. “If they play fast music that is more energetic, it can get people out the door.”
Mr. Kim’s strategy is essential to establishing the vibe for customers. “When they are having a relaxed dinner early in the evening, if they have a really fast b.p.m., it will interrupt them,” he said. “They will have indigestion.”
Restaurant owners and chefs across the United States, whether they run a neighborhood pizza joint or a tasting-menu counter, are putting more thought than ever into what’s playing through their speakers — and in some cases outsourcing the responsibility entirely to professionals.
“They put so much attention to detail in the design and the menu and the space that they don’t want to shortchange their customers by playing music that feels awful,” said Alec DeRuggiero, the head music supervisor of Gray V, a company based in New York City that makes playlists for restaurants worldwide.
Chris Williams, who owns three restaurants in Houston, dedicates long hours to music curation on the patio with his wife, playing song after song.
At Lucille’s, where he makes Southern dishes inspired by his great-grandmother’s recipes, there are separate playlists for brunch, lunch and dinner.
His current playlists include soul, Motown and a little ’90s hip-hop. “Anything I do is going to have Prince in it,” he said. Mr. Williams used to make his playlists on Spotify, but he recently switched to Djay, a music service that aims to give users more mixing control.
On Spotify, there are more than 330,000 restaurant-themed playlists made by Spotify users in the United States, according to a company spokesman. The songs that most commonly appear on them? Billy Joel’s “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant”; Harry Styles’s “Music for a Sushi Restaurant”; and Count Basie and Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.” Elton John and Ed Sheeran are also among the top artists on Spotify’s user-generated restaurant playlists.
The popularity of streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify have only added pressure to build the perfect playlist. But they did make the process of finding music easier.
It wasn’t always like that. Two decades ago, companies that could provide music services were synonymous with elevator music. “Cool restaurants wouldn’t be caught dead using one of these services, which left them to go the D.I.Y. route or hire a D.J.,” Mr. DeRuggiero said.
Now there are about a dozen companies globally that create playlists for restaurants, either using algorithms or by tapping music professionals.
Kristie Sibley, the senior director of food and beverage for Kennebunkport Resort Collection in Maine, uses Gray V to create playlists for all eight of the group’s restaurants, which range from high-end tasting menus to family-friendly beach spots.
“We tell them we are looking for songs that sound like a particular song,” she said. “I’ve called them many times and said, ‘This sounds blah and vanilla,’” she said.
Music can also bias diners’ food perception, and even background noise can change how people taste food, according to a study conducted in 2019 by Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford.
“Play classical music, and people are likely to spend more,” Mr. Spence said. “Play ethnically congruent music, and the dishes may taste more authentic.”
At SingleThread, a three Michelin-starred restaurant in Healdsburg, Calif., every table has its own speaker to create a sound bubble. In that cocoon, the music needs to add to the experience, not distract from it.
That is why Kyle Connaughton, the chef and owner, plays only instrumental music. Lyrics can intrude, taking you “from a subconscious experience to a conscious experience,” he said.
For help curating, Mr. Connaughton turned to another sort of professional: musicians like Scott Hansen, known professionally as Tycho, who is a frequent diner at SingleThread.
Dean Poll, who owns Gallaghers Steakhouse in New York City and Boca Raton, Fla., said his restaurants try to transport guests to a previous time and place. “But it isn’t as easy as just playing old songs,” said Mr. Poll, who outsourced curation to RX Music, a music collective out of Toronto. “You have to have the right tempo. You can’t have loud horns because that interrupts people. Sometimes too much piano is monotonous.”
The Rendezvous, a casual barbecue joint in downtown Memphis, prefers to outsource its music selection directly to customers.
The restaurant turned to jukeboxes, which they loaded with songs mostly by Memphis artists like Justin Timberlake or Otis Redding, or about Memphis. Anna Vergos Blair, an owner, hopes the music can teach guests about the city.
Other chefs have an even simpler formula: Playing what they like.
“People are either opinionated about music, or they aren’t,” said Brian Dunsmoor, the chef and owner of Dunsmoor in Los Angeles. “I am very, very opinionated.”
At his restaurant, they play albums from start to finish. No song-skipping, no radio edits. Every day before service begins, he, and occasionally other managers, will pick one; some favorite artists include the American rappers Benny the Butcher and Westside Gunn.
The music selection is one of the reasons Jonathan Castelli, a mix engineer who lives nearby, is a regular.
“Dunsmoor has a very powerful menu,” said Mr. Castelli, 38. “It’s high acid, charred. So the high energy of the hip-hop-focused playlist adds to the energy of the food.”
Mr. Dunsmoor believes the music naturally curates the crowd, and views his dining room like a house party.
“You can go or not,” he said. “The people who don’t want to hear this music, it’s probably not the right restaurant for them.”
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