Rappers & Restaurants, Wilfred Skinner

Rappers & Restaurants

BY WILFRED SKINNER

Pusha T has started beef again. In December, he opened a new ramen restaurant and cocktail bar in Washington DC, joining the likes of Drake, Nas, 2 Chainz, Krept and Konan, Pitbull, and Ludacris who’ve all put their fingers in pies these past few years, with varying degrees of success. Why is this still happening, and how is it any different to launching a clothing line, headphone brand or streaming service?

The relationship between rap and food runs deep – Puff Daddy/(P.) Diddy/(Brother) Love was something of a pioneer, opening a restaurant in 1997. Elsewhere, chef/rapper Action Bronson has brought the two together on his ‘F**k, That’s Delicious’ show and both Snoop Dogg and Coolio have launched cookbooks.

For artists, taking advantage of this has become another facet of brand development and mogulhood. Often it’s brazen power play. Jay Z’s 40/40 sports bar boasts an 18-foottall champagne tower and in 2019 Drake and Pitbull opened high-end bar-restaurants. In the creation of a new kind of exclusivity, there’s an acknowledgement that traditionally exclusive spaces can be unwelcoming, snobby and sometimes racist. A restaurant is also a more tangible, fixed measure of success than record sales or streams. Since most are located in rappers’ hometowns they become an expression of civic pride – a way of giving back. Rappers repping the city in their bars have turned to setting up bars. A restaurant offers conviviality and perhaps broader appeal than a clothing line or a pair of headphones – in short, it’s a bit less of an ego trip.

Sometimes new, more accessible spaces are established, like Krept and Konan’s Croydon dessert bar Crepes and Cones which serves halal, vegan food and alcohol. In the song released