The Great Convergence: “Food at home” spending (purple) vs. “food away from home” (brown)

But if it’s truly the golden age of restaurants, why is there such widespread concern about the state of the restaurant industry?

Last year was “the worst restaurant year since the recession,” according to QSR Magazine. Dinner “traffic,” the industry term for the number of walk-in customers, has been falling for five straight years, says market-research firm NPD Group Inc. The lunch business is in a veritable depression. Last year saw the lowest level of lunchtime traffic in four decades, according to The Wall Street Journal, which declared “lunchtime is over for the restaurant industry.” The National Restaurant Association’s top trend for 2017? “A challenging business environment.”

What the heck is going on? How can the United States be going through a restaurant renaissance and a restaurant recession at the same time? In the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with almost a dozen restaurateurs and analysts about the state of the industry. Here are four theories.

1. The good news is there are too many great restaurants to choose from. The bad news is … the same thing.

Restaurants have grown from 25 percent of food spending in the 1950s to more than half, today. The shift has been accelerating: In the last decade, spending at restaurants and bars has grown twice as fast as all other retail spending, like clothes and cars.

But today there are simply too many places to eat, according to Victor Fernandez, executive director at Black Box Intelligence, a restaurant data firm. “Half of our food dollar is now going to restaurants, but we have more supply than we have demand,” he said.

Nothing encapsulates this crisis of abundance more than the so-called “fast casual” sector, which includes high-speed, high-quality lunch spots like Chipotle and Sweetgreen. Fast casual is on fire, with total locations soaring 9 percent last year. But the category is adding new spots so quickly that same-store sales are falling more than 2 percent annually. Hungry urban consumers watch lunch spots popping up across their city, and praise new options, across-the-board quality, and a dynamic restaurant scene. But to a fast-casual franchise, “new options, dynamic restaurant scene, and across-the-board quality” are terrifying euphemisms for cut-throat competition, high churn, and wobbly same-store sales.

In this way, the golden age of restaurants is a bit like today’s golden age of TV. For television viewers, there have never been more options or, perhaps, better quality programming. But as the number of original scripted shows has soared, so has the failure rate. A new drama is now four to five times more likely to be cancelled today than it was in the late 1990s.

The golden age of restaurants is similarly beset by cancellations. The experience of being an affluent diner in New York, Washington, D.C., or San Francisco is something like gastronomic nirvana. But the number of restaurants in all three cities is now falling amidst cut-throat competition, according to NPD data. Restaurants hovering around a 3.5 rating are on the razor’s edge of success and total failure; a half-point rise in Yelp ratings for such restaurants can increase sell-out evenings by about 50 percent. These mediocre-rated restaurants operate on such slim margins that a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage can seriously increase the likelihood of closing.