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I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

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Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#121

Post by paavoova »

LargeWu wrote: post #79

One of the sad things about this sort of list is that it's literally just one guy's opinion. Sure, he tried all the burgers. I'm sure all the burgers in the top 100 are good burgers, but there's probably very little separating them except some personal preference. For example, I probably wouldn't have rated this place as high because I don't care for grilled onions on burgers; I would much rather have raw onions. The…

Yeah, strangely enough, food and its accompanying culture is one of the most prevalent socially acceptable, encouraged biases. There's no objective, empirical stance you can take. Well, sure you can value food based on its nutritional content, but food and health science is continuously flipping back and forth on the facts and is overrun with pop-science, stirring confusing to no end. But most of all, your brain doesn't care about nutritional value once something is in your mouth.

"I don't like onions." "Oh, how can that be?" "Well, uh, they taste bad, I avoid them." "Well, I think they're great [because I like them]."

And yet these kinds of worthless opinions are given credence to no end in all levels of discourse from casual small talk to high-class cuisine.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#122

Post by throwaway5752 »

narrator wrote: post #22

There's an easy solution to having too much business : raise prices. I think this is one of A16Z's big insights into most businesses[1]: they don't charge enough. If you look at the best restaurants in America like the French Laundry in Napa, they charge astronomical ridiculous prices and they still have reservations for months ahead of time. The oldest restaurant in Paris requires you put down a 400 euro deposit jus…

Yes, but if you read the article that wasn't the problem:

And then, in a quieter voice, he started to explain why it wasn’t just two weeks. He asked me not to reveal the details of that story, but I can say that there were personal problems, the type of serious things that can happen with any family, and would’ve happened regardless of how crowded Stanich’s was

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#123

Post by hnaccy »

astrodust wrote: post #101
hnaccy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provide a locals only card that gives reduced pricing, could even have a locals only day once a week.

Ten minutes later a "locals only" card goes on eBay.

Check ID address, ban people caught reselling, etc.

Get creative you're now a destination restaurant and can charge $50+ a burger. Or go out of business I guess.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#124

Post by craftyguy »

chaostheory wrote: post #103
craftyguy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others in this thread have suggested that the restaurant give locals a 'locals card', which would allow them to purchase food at a more reasonable price.

Why not just look at driver's licenses and student ids instead? Disney parks do the same thing - cheaper prices for locals

Well, sure, but having the customer flash a card to the employee would save more time than having the customer hand over the card for inspection by an employee.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#125

Post by mikepurvis »

deckar01 wrote: post #32
brewdad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not likely. The issues were far deeper than cash flow. The new business was primarily one and done visitors anyway. By the time you've made the trip to the foodie Mecca of Portland and traveled across town to try the "country's best burger" would you really be deterred by a $15 price tag vs $10? How much would you have to raise the price to make that work? How do you do this without forever alienating your loyal loca…

There is a fancy burger place near me that only serves a fixed number of customers per day. It is famous for the chef kicking people out for bringing children, dressing disrespectfully, and being offended for other random reasons. They gave out a membership card that allowed regulars to be seated immediately and avoid the daily limit.

That seems like a really smart way of handling it.

There are a bunch of restaurant types which just aren't that elastic to changing demand; basically anything which has a longer preparation time and is expensive enough that you can't afford to just massively overprovision. Thinking like slow-roasted meats, most soups/chilis, or fancy pastries like croissants, yeast-raised donuts, etc.

Basically any place that's serving that stuff (and legitimately making it in-house vs warming it up from frozen like a chain) is going to be done when they run out for the day. So handing out cards to locals to skip the line would be a great way of not alienating your loyal customer base.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#126

Post by elvinyung »

nradov wrote: post #74
JPKab wrote: post #19

People are lemmings. Franklin's BBQ in Austin has hours long lines. It's very good brisket. The hill country of Texas is FILLED with equally good brisket joints that don't have lines. People who wait in line for 4 hours won't admit this. Cognitive dissonance kicks in, and Franklin's is unique and better than everyone else in their minds. Try telling a person that their Bose headphones are overpriced and overrated, an…

Right I've seen hipsters in the Bay Area lined up for hours just to eat ramen noodles ! What's wrong with these people? Even great noodles aren't much better than average noodles. I really can't understand it.

Well, have you had great noodles?

A crash course on Japanese culture: kodawari. It's a singular, artisanal obsession with making a single thing perfect. In Japan, there are restaurants dedicated to making only one thing, only yakitori or tempura or soba or a myriad other things or, of course, ramen.

With such dedication, you elevate such trivial things, even such an extremely unremarkable thing like ramen, into a high art, and you expose it as what is is, a world full of subtleties. Yes, there are people just doing business, but by and large the field is advanced by people who care, and there is no top on this. SF has one, maybe two ramen-ya that even remotely come close.

You exhaustively experiment, hacker-like, with the parameters of every possible thing you care about, the ratios of the bones and aromatics and fushi and fat that go into broth, the proportions of seasonings that go into the tare sauce that has had entire books written about them, the alkalinity and hydration and timing of the noodles, the little details and seasoning on top of the toppings. It is precisely through the person-centuries of experimentation that we find interesting combinations that we realized we could do interesting things in this thing that was basically just a bowl of pork soup with some soy sauce and some springy noodles. All this, and it's still just ten bucks a bowl.

As far as I know, no other culture even comes remotely close to this kind of kodawari on such a large scale.

It feels ridiculously dismissive to just ignore the achievements of an entire culture like that.

(And for the record, it's not like I think there isn't any overrated ramen. I waited collectively something like two hours for the Michelin-starred Tsuta, and on net it impressed me less than some much more humble ramen-ya. All I'm saying is that the search space is both wide and deep, and it feels weird to just dismiss it like that.)

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#127

Post by jcater »

willyt wrote: post #77
craftyguy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others in this thread have suggested that the restaurant give locals a 'locals card', which would allow them to purchase food at a more reasonable price.

Burger pass. $30 for a burger pass. Gets you burgers for $4 for the rest of the year. or pay $20 for a burger now. You can secretly give out burger passes to locals when the tourists aren't looking.

I live in a touristy area with lots of great, but high demand and correspondingly high priced, restaurants.

Several of the local places do "frequent diner/visitor" loyalty cards, where the 5th or 9th meal (for restaurants), coffee (coffee shops), etc are free. This offsets the otherwise high prices charged on menu items.

Also, once a year (during the off season, of course), the local high school sells a booster card that gets a percent discount off for the entire year at numerous local places.

This is of course not unique to a touristy area, but I find myself using them far more often than in other places I've lived.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#129

Post by pbhjpbhj »

geofft wrote: post #97
daveslash wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about raising prices (at the exclusion of the locals), and then using the increased revenue to philanthropically give back to the community in a meaningful way?

There are some things in a capitalist society that are the domain of philanthropy, and some things that are not. A school or library might be a suitable target of philanthropy, but a burger place or pub or barber shop isn't; there's no way to fund it and have it end up the same sort of place it would be on its own. At best, it can be a target of a GoFundMe or something - but that's just to pay operating costs. The st…

Can't you buy a burger place, reduce the price to give zero profit, adjust the price on the fly to ensure zero profit.

Sure you won't necessarily meet demand, but there's no inherent reason quality need suffer(?).

Or, have a coop where staff wages soak up all excess revenue, giving zero profit.

You'd want a contingency, and a savings account if you seek to expand the business, but they're not profit.

We could do that with all businesses I think.

Re: I Found the Best Burger Place in America, Then I Killed It

#130

Post by nightfly »

hinkley wrote: post #56
narrator wrote: post #22

There's an easy solution to having too much business : raise prices. I think this is one of A16Z's big insights into most businesses[1]: they don't charge enough. If you look at the best restaurants in America like the French Laundry in Napa, they charge astronomical ridiculous prices and they still have reservations for months ahead of time. The oldest restaurant in Paris requires you put down a 400 euro deposit jus…

Years ago I worked at a place downtown that was blocks away from a Thai restaurant that had a line out the door every day. The place was frenetic, like a zoo. The staff in the kitchen were running around like maniacs, making food as fast as they possibly could. The pictures on the menu above the register were all faded with age. The food was merely okay. The story was that it was cheap and decent, not good. But as I…

$2 a plate can be enough to price it out of being a reasonable regular option for people. A food cart in a pod near my work moved into a just-as-close physical restaurant and raised their prices by about $2 plate and I went from eating there once every week or two, to maybe once a year.
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