THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN ARCH DELUXE IS THE END OF ANY KIND OF DELUXE.

New York Times restaurant reviewer Pete Wells calls it a career, and his valedictory is an E-T-T-S moment.  "I Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed, and Not for the Better."

No, it's not about zebra mussels with a dollop of special sauce on a bed of swamp grass.  "Mr Lapham and P. J. O'Rourke might find common ground making mock of overpriced starvation-chic eateries, although they'd likely disagree on whether plenitude as symbolized by food is a good thing."  Rather, its another manifestation of the transactional crowding out the experiental.  And here I thought Starbucks epitomized neglecting the customer.  "Perhaps that was an improvement over the sort of studied indolence that used to greet walk-in customers."  That "inclusive and welcoming space" decal they post by the drive-through sounds more like a mainstream Protestant church than a coffeehouse, but I digress.

Rather, it's the virtual presence that is putting the transactional first.

Last week, the restaurant-loyalty app Blackbird introduced a new way to pay for dinner. Customers check in on the app on arrival, pick a payment source and tip percentage, and then eat. Ben Leventhal, one of the app’s founders, explained what he called the “best part” in an Instagram video shot at the Italian cafe Lodi.

“When you’re done, you just get up and go,” he said. Then he demonstrated how it’s done, high-fiving Lodi’s host on his way to the door without breaking stride.

I’m at the end of 12 years as a critic who ate in and reviewed restaurants constantly. Of those years, I probably spent two solid months just waiting for the check. I ought to be in favor of anything that speeds up the end of the meal, but Blackbird’s new checkless exit gives me the creeps. It is just the latest in a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants. Each of these changes was small, but together they’ve made going out to eat much less personal. Meals are different now, and our sense of who we are is different, too.

Yes, and it's in character for businesses these days, spinning a degradation of service as an improvement in service.  Now it has come for dining out, by which, presumably Mr Wells means dining out among the nomenklatura.

In my first few years on the job, I thought of restaurants as one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human. We might work silently in our cubicles, rearranging and transmitting zeros and ones. We might walk around with speakers in our ears that played digital music files chosen by an algorithm. We might buy our books and sweaters and toothpaste with a click and wait until they showed up at our door. We might flirt, fight and make up by text. But when we went out to eat, we were people again.

No machine could drink rosé for us, or chew lamb chops, or flirt, fight and make up. And at every critical point in the meal, there were people there to guide us. From the moment we walked in, we talked with hosts, bartenders, captains, runners and bussers. Being served in a restaurant wasn’t passive. We had to participate.

Many of the little routines of dining that we used to handle by talking to a person now happen on a screen. When we go to Shake Shack, we order and pay for our burger and frozen custard on a screen. In some places, we enter our names on the waiting list for tables on a screen. We scan QR codes so we can read the menu on a screen. Restaurants are turning into vending machines with chairs.

Before we walk in the door, we’ve usually made a reservation on a screen. You could still make reservations by phone in 2012. Many places were on OpenTable by then, but if you didn’t feel like using it or couldn’t find a time you wanted, you picked up the phone, and your call would usually be answered by a human. Pleasantries were exchanged. Polite phrases were used: Please. Thank you. I’m sorry. We look forward to seeing you.

Now restaurants hardly ever pay someone to pick up the phone, if they have one; few newer places bother getting a number because so few calls come in.

Exchanging pleasantries?  That's so 2012.  These days, a restaurant might as well be a chat room with vending machines and chairs.  How often, dear reader, might you see a gaggle of acquaintances be seated, and, rather than engage with each other in conversation, they break out their devices.  Maybe they're engaging with each other that way, but maybe they're posting where they are and what they're drinking and eating to brag to others.  And now, my lament over the end of the classical music experience generalizes further.  "Repudiating your cultural patrimony will have the same effect at the concert hall that it has had at the church."  And now, dear reader, at the restaurant, whether it's before the concert, after church, or simply hanging out with your texting buddies.