Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thrillist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 410 posts

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

#151

Post by lozaning »

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.

Smashburger actually had something close to this for a while. SmashPasss, it was like $100 bucks for the right to get a burger a day for 100 days.

https://smashburger.com/smashpass/

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

#152

Post by tptacek »

lazerpants wrote: post #146
tptacek wrote: post #135

It's hard to blame Kevin Alexander for this, because Steve Stanich played ball with the review, like most restaurants would. If he wanted to, he could have asked not to be featured in the list, and Alexander probably would have complied; otherwise, he could have done other things to make it clear to his customers that he wasn't interested in fulfilling the role the ranking carved out for him. We see this effect in Ch…

I made a similar comment further down, but if Stanich's took reservations and just held tables for walk ins (and treated regulars/locals preferentially) they would probably have been fine. Takes more front of house effort though, and he probably still should've raised his prices a bit.

If "Raoul's only makes 12 burgers a night." can fly, it seems like _something_ can be done here too. That said, it sounds like the guy has some complicating life circumstances, and maybe we should just all get out of his way and let him take a few months or a few years to straighten things out before he parlays this enormous PR win into a new venture.

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

#153

Post by moate »

kazinator wrote: post #114
LargeWu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then this prices out the neighborhood locals who made the place successful in the first place. These are people that the owner and workers know and care about. I think he could care less about the tourists that come in once just to Instagram their "best burger in America".

It's okay to temporarily price out the locals until the inundation goes away.

Sure, but then the inundation goes away and the locals won't come back because they got burned already by the long lines and then the price hike. There's no guarantee that plan works.

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

#154

Post by cf498 »

nightfly wrote: post #130
hinkley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Especially if it is at a threshold amount, there even a small hike will scare away customers. While not reasonable, it is a psychological effect. Take the jump from 5€ to 6€. I witnessed the same on myself with a normal dish of fried rice from a take away place. 4,5€ is cheap, 5€ expected, 5,5€ makes no difference, but 6€??

No matter how stupid, the jump by 50cent to 6€ gets me every time. It makes no sense, but I start to calculate what I could get instead on the cheap end. Breakfast to go is the same with 3€ to 3,5€ to 4€. I mean could get a portion of fried rice for 4€! Same goes for pizza or any number of take away items.

It doesnt help that most shop owners arent stupid and optimized for those thresholds.

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

#155

Post by craftyguy »

stickfigure wrote: post #145
craftyguy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...but it would invite a secondary market for these cards. The logistics of fabricating them would suck, and you have to look at an ID to judge if a card should offered anyway. Plus having special cards feels corporate, not homey. Looking at an ID for locals discount is pretty well trodden ground.

> but it would invite a secondary market for these cards

There are already markets for fake IDs, so unless you're suggesting that small local restaurants purchase scanners to confirm the authenticity of each ID, it would be relatively easy to circumvent this check too. (Some states require IDs to be scanned for selling alcohol, but many, e.g. in Oregon, do not, and the only check is some employee looking at a card in their hands for a couple of seconds)

> Plus having special cards feels corporate

Not at all. Plenty of local restaurants in my are (Portland, OR) have rewards cards, where you get stamps and a free meal after some amount of stamps.

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

#156

Post by wallflower »

hnuser355 wrote: post #88
stagger87 wrote: post #43

I eat at a few other particularly popular Portland restaurants where they don't take reservations and the wait can be several hours. Fortunately they will put your name on a list so you can go do something else in the meantime. It's easy to say this sitting behind my computer, but I think the only thing I would change if I were in the owners shoes, is to handle the crowds at the door better. Just because you have a l…

When I visited Portland me and a friend tried to go to that ice cream spot everyone loves. Way too long so we went to the book store instead

I went to that donut place that is a brand in itself. Kind of over hyped. Wish I spent the hour plus waiting in line at the technical branch of that Valhalla of book stores.

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

#157

Post by ip26 »

andybak wrote: post #54
jacquesm wrote: post #23

"Too much love will kill you, just as sure as none." It's an interesting reflection on the effect of the internet hordes that can be called up by a careless article or tweet. A similar thing happens to restaurants that receive the Michelin stars and to single individuals that end up being in more popular demand than can be sustained (this happens to some consultants). Not all of the typical defenses are available all…

> they devour that which they visit and leave it devastated. Not disagreeing but the "they" is "us". You're not in a traffic jam, you are the traffic jam.

Yes & no; some of us are rubberneckers, some of us are not.

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

#158

Post by moate »

elvinyung wrote: post #126
nradov wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hi…

Counterpoint: there is no objectively perfect opinion (except this one :D).

When it comes to anything, there will always be people who care at 100%, and people who care at 0%, and when it comes to art or cuisine or web design best practices there's going to be disagreements on it.

And that's fine. It's not dismissive in a morally bad way. It's just food (full disclosure: I was a chef for over 10 years, I have a LOT of opinions on anything related to it). Some guy on the internet saying that the greatest ramen in the world isn't a substantial improvement over the most average ramen in the world doesn't ruin anything. It's just like, your opinion man.

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

#160

Post by wild_preference »

paavoova wrote: post #121
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 does…

I think we're just in the age of "if you have an opinion on anything, no matter how shallow, you should share it and suggest it's self-evident, universal, and the only thing that matters."
Post reply on HN