A New Dallas Restaurant Is Paying Influencers in Pajamas, and the $1,000 Gift Card Is, Apparently, a Rumor

DALLAS, TEXAS — There is a new restaurant in Dallas, and it has a problem. The problem is not the food. The problem is that the people it invited to the opening did not, in several documented cases, get the thing they were promised, and instead got a pair of pajamas, and then got on the internet, and then the restaurant is now, in the eyes of the internet, either a genius or a fraud, and possibly both at once. The story, per D Magazine’s fall dining roundup, is that the new spot, at its preview event, handed influencers a set of branded Eberjey pajamas that retail for around $158, and then, in the comments, the influencers started asking about a $1,000 gift card that had, by most accounts, never been a real thing.

The restaurant is not, as far as the record shows, a scambait. It is a new place that wanted the opening to be a moment, and it hired a surprise musical set, and it gave away silk pajamas, and it may or may not have, in the early, breathless hours of the invitation, let the word “$1,000 gift card” get loose. The pajamas were real. The gift card was, per the people who were supposed to have one, a “promise-but-not-delivered” thing, which is a phrase that does a great deal of work in the influencer economy and does not, in the end, do anything at all.

Here is the part that should give the restaurant pause, and then, if it is brave, should make it a little bit proud. The post-event internet had a theory about the pajamas. The theory was that the restaurant was paying people in clothing, that the $158 of silk was not a gift but a wage, and that the real economy of the new Dallas restaurant scene is a barter system in which the currency is a matching set and the exchange rate is determined by the follower count. This is, of course, not true. It is also, in the specific way that a $1,000 gift card becomes a rumor, exactly the kind of thing that a $1,000 gift card is for.

The other thing in the comments, the thing nobody is going to say out loud but everyone in the room noticed, is that the influencers invited to the set were, per at least one source who left before the band started, “all White.” The source also noted that the band that was playing, before the surprise act, “was maybe the worst [they had] ever heard genuinely.” The restaurant has not commented. The band has not commented. The pajamas, for their part, are selling.

What the restaurant should understand is that it did not do something wrong. It did something new, and new things, in the food world, are a form of weather. The pajamas were a prop. The $1,000 gift card was a rumor. The rumor was the point. The restaurant is now, for a week, more famous for the pajamas than for the food, and the food, per the one critic who made it to the end of the night, is, in fact, good, which is the one piece of news in the whole thing that is also true, and which is also the one piece of news that is going to be the least retweeted.

At press time, the restaurant’s management was asked to clarify, on the record, whether the $1,000 gift card was real. The response, delivered with the specific calm of a person who has decided not to explain, was that the restaurant was “grateful for the excitement” and that the pajamas were, in their view, “a statement.” When asked what the statement was, the response was that the statement was “the pajamas.” The meeting ended, the silk stayed folded, and the $1,000 gift card returned, as these things do, to the state it was in before the night, which is to say, a rumor.