Week 1 Autopsy: Choosing your specimen

Week 1 — picking the one closed restaurant you'll spend the semester dissecting, and the rules that make a specimen usable.

27 July 2026

Before the session#

Find three restaurants that have actually closed — permanently, verifiably, somewhere you can check. A “temporarily closed” listing or a relocation doesn’t qualify; you need a death, not a pause. For each, note what’s publicly findable in ten minutes: a last review, a news mention, a health department record, a delivery-app page that still loads.

In the session#

You pitch your three candidates in ninety seconds each; the room (not just the tutor) votes on which one has the deepest trail to work with, because a specimen with three sources and one with thirty produce very different semesters. Renata explains the one disqualifying case: closures that were really corporate decisions — a chain divesting a market — rather than a single location failing on its own terms. Those get vetoed on the spot, however interesting.

Afterwards#

You leave with one confirmed specimen, logged with the tutor so no one else in the room is dissecting the same restaurant, and a reading list of what kind of evidence to start collecting before next week’s session, when the case file actually gets built.