The ‘No. 1’ Restaurant in Austin Is Actually AI Slop

This croissant isn’t real… yet. Photo: @ethos_atx via Instagram

The hottest restaurant in Austin isn’t on some “Best New Restaurant” list or in a garage where the mechanic’s cousin makes the most soulful carnitas this side of the Rio Grande. It’s a place called Ethos, which has racked up 73,000 followers on Instagram for innovative and of-the-moment cuisine such as a croissant that looks like Moo Deng, shrimp doughnuts, and “tiki Marsala.” The only thing is, you can’t actually eat there, because the restaurant isn’t real. Everything on Ethos’s Instagram page is AI slop, and not even the kind of slop you can eat.

Over the weekend, a Twitter user named Justine Moore posted about Ethos, writing “that it seems normal until you realize” it’s all, in fact, AI. Does it seem normal, though? Plenty of the photos aren’t, and they have that too-bright, benzoed-out sheen characteristic of AI image generators, which some people seem to enjoy. (“Great photos. Wish you were a real restaurant,” one real person wrote in the comments of a post about the fake restaurant’s fake “Fighting Foie with Foie” event.) The restaurant has also featured a buffalo chicken wing that looks roughly as big as a motorcycle, chicken-fried ice cream, and a prehistoric-size langoustine, plus celebrity-bartender appearances by an off-looking Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Jason Momoa (who, it turns out, is or was actually a full-time employee).

Plenty of comments seem to come from bots that are designed to game Instagram — which is most of the internet in 2024, really — but some actual humans seem genuinely confused. A carousel of Super Mario–themed gummies prompted one fan to remark, “Wow! That is talent! I’m so impressed. How long did they take to make?”

Further muddying the waters is the fact that the people behind Ethos have covered their tracks and hidden their identities, so people are left to speculate about the reasons this project exists in the first place. Is it performance art? An attempt to, as some have speculated, develop a following that can be sold to a real business? Or to show off some level of marketing prowess?

At the moment, it mostly reads like a satire of Instagram-thirsty restaurants in 2024. Is a Moo Deng–shaped croissant really so outside the realm of possibility? The ruse continues over onto the website, where those who have clicked over (either out of morbid curiosity or because they fell for the slop) have found a reservation page where they can slap a guy in the face with an eel. There are also a couple of blogs, titled “The Battle of Authenticity: Unmasking the Negative Influence of Normie Culture on Austin’s Food Scene” and “The Influencer Dilemma.” In the latter, the masterminds behind Ethos write that “one of the primary dilemmas in influencer marketing revolves around authenticity and trust.” So true. Of course, both the blogs are, according to a quick scan on CopyLeaks, AI-generated.