The Google Cafeteria at the End of the World
Tanya Bush heads to the heart of big tech to investigate the promise of a free lunch.
Cake friends,
Summer is officially here! We hope your ice cream consumption is already skyrocketing. If your calendar is starting to fill up, consider spending Labor Day weekend in NYC—we’ll be running a free combination reading series/writing workshop at Little Island featuring some all-star authors and equally exciting food. More information at the link, and more to come.
This week in the newsletter, our intrepid editor Tanya Bush is sharing a dispatch from the frontlines of the food-as-bribery business: the Google cafeteria. Is a luxurious free lunch still a siren call? Read on for the answer.
The Google Cafeteria at the End of the World
by Tanya Bush
As tech stocks balloon and the specter of AI threatens to destroy us all, what are the workers of Silicon Valley eating for lunch? It’s a question I’ve wondered about for years as a freelance writer and baker with little understanding of, but a latent interest in, the behemoth businesses that offer endless free meals to their employees—perhaps hoping they’ll overlook their role in our demise. Last week, my friend, A, who has been indentured to Google for the better part of a decade, generously found time to take me inside.
I pictured an embarrassment of riches. I’d heard tales of milkshake machines and all-you-can-eat omakase. I once dated someone who waxed poetic about the brown butter soft serve at the Meta cafeteria. But A insists the golden age is over; the taps of rosé embedded in the wall are gone. It’s a scarcity economy, baby, and AI doesn’t need lunch. Lately, most of my lunches amount to a can of tinned tuna mixed with the dejected herbs in the bottom of my fridge, so I figure that no matter what’s on the menu, I’ll be upgrading.
On my first attempt to gorge at Google, A makes the unreasonable assumption that I will bring a government-issued ID. I have never been to a Tech Company™ before and realize, while walking through security, that I’ve forgotten my wallet. I still have my Zyns (I’m a tech bro at heart) but the passport photo on my phone won’t suffice, so I’m promptly escorted outside. We take this as a sign to try for Via Carota but the wait is an hour and a half. Don’t people have jobs?
On the second attempt, the doors to the Death Star finally open. Time to feast. As we pass the neon “Google” sign, A tells me that he’s already signed the release form on my behalf which opts me into the building-wide facial recognition apparatus. Nevertheless, I must wear my “Social Visit” guest badge “otherwise they’ll tackle you and throw you down the garbage chute.” Okay!
We begin the grand tour. There are seven different cafes in this building alone, strategically spaced on different floors. We decide to sample all of them, although of course A has loyalties. En route, we stop at one of the snack stations, an oasis in a corporate labyrinth. Apparently the snacks have gotten worse: what was once a jar of artisanal candy, is now a drawer of Rx protein bars. Optimization culture comes for us all. Still, I am amazed that all of this is free. I feel a rabid urge to stuff pounds of styrofoam-adjacent snacks into my bag, liters of coconut water, packs of nut butter that you can squirt into your mouth so you never have to stop typing. When I say as much, A looks at me gravely: “It’s not free,” he says “you must swear fealty to Sundar Pichai.” I pretend I know who that is, then grab a Coke Zero because I only drink soda on foreign terrain.
We pass an ominously lit “massage room” as we make our way to the cafeteria. A tells me that each year, on one’s “Google-versary,” you are given free points that translate to massage minutes. I wonder if this is commensurate with performance. A already has eight hours worth of massage minutes banked. We pass more perks: a spin room, a gym, and a relaxation room where all manner of employees are decompressing by typing rapidly on their computers. I’m not allowed to enter any of them.
The first cafe boasts a wraparound terrace with enviable views. Regrettably, it’s raining but we go outside anyway. Then, into the line. I skipped breakfast for this so I’ll get my free lunch’s worth. We start with the special: Peruvian roast chicken with green sauce and cilantro lime rice, surprisingly delicious. A tells me that the specials are often the truest luxury; sometimes there’s lobster and curry goat. Today there’s neither. We sample a soggy tostada with seitan chorizo, covered in a mountain of wilting lettuce and decide to skip the line for Google’s version of Sweetgreen.
Bussing our dishes, I am teleported back to college, to the hapless pleasures of not having to do anything on your own, to having the logistics of living taken care of. We watch our soiled dishes disappear down the conveyor belt. “This,” A tells me, “is the slow infantilization of the tech worker.” It starts with lunch and snacks, spin classes and massage. Soon they’re doing your laundry and you can’t remember how to fry an egg. Reasons to leave the office are systematically removed until your whole life exists in a towering gray building that’s stuck in 2015.
On our way to the next floor, I snag a shockingly miniature but surprisingly delicious blueberry coffee cake square and a sliver of “cracked out matzah,” coated in butterscotch and chocolate. The next cafeteria, Annagrams, offers a dizzying array of options. Texas barbecue. Pasta. Antipasti. Indian food. A Chipotle facsimile. A burger joint. We stop in Texas for thick slabs of pork loin doused in a sickly sweet sauce, and a gluey mac and cheese that I can’t stop eating. Interestingly, a lot of the ingredients are on display, massive bags of Valrhona chocolate in every flavor and texture, glimmering jugs of Italian olive oil, cookbooks from every region, as if to advertise what is mass-produced here remains thoughtful and artisanal. That it still has a soul.
Obviously, I’m focused on the dessert. So the subsequent floors are in service of my sweet tooth. All of the pastries are weirdly miniature in contrast to the savory portions, which are monstrous. I try a “yummy pride decadence bar,” (???) which is basically just a brownie gussied up with rainbow frosting, and then fix myself a bowl of chocolate and vanilla soft serve, which tastes like air, but is extremely pleasant when doused with an ungodly amount of Oreo crumbs. At this point, I feel that I’ve gotten the gist.
The luxury here is never having to make a decision: You can pregame with a pakora, help yourself to bibimbap and chase it all down with a gay dessert. You’ll never have to reach for your wallet or tap your phone (even when you’re making Google money). It’s easy to imagine staying until nine because dinner starts at six. I think about what this place will look like in a few years, this campus designed around feeding, exercising, and entertaining human workers. Most of the tapping away is in service of a technology that doesn’t get hungry, probably. If they’re good enough at their jobs, maybe the next generation of Googlers won’t need the cafeterias at all.
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I loved this. Thanks for pulling back the curtain on the mythically famous Google cafeterias. My biggest unanswered question, though, is how much self-control it took not to leave with a massive bag of Valrhona. I mean... it's all free, right? 😂
I loved this. Always fascinated by what corporate people eat for lunch at work and often can’t stop myself from demanding in-detail explanations of their lunch/cafeteria etc. fascinating!!