People want Bouchon at McDonald's prices.
Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
221–230 of 498 posts
Re: Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
#222Something's up. In Germany in a normal city I can get a döner the same size as the one in the photo for €3 ($3.50?). It's not sourdough nor high quality protein but that can't explain the $7.50 difference. Edit: as the commenter below reminded me, it's actually more like €4-5 but my point stands.
Yeah in Poland it would be about 10PLN(so also about $3). But the the labour and rent are super cheap, even if the ingredients are high quality - that's where the saving will come from .
Re: Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
#223>The craziest thing to me in all this is, I love food. Like, obsessed. Who’s with me? My point is: if eating is literally one of our favourite things ever, are we willing to pay adequately for it? Do we value it sufficiently? Honestly, seems to me like, if there’s one industry that should be profitable, it’s restaurants. One, we have to eat. Two, we love to eat! I'm wondering if there is some personality differences…
As it's something you have to do, why not at least try to make it enjoyable? I don't get it.
The whole restaurant experience is not very enjoyable to me. There is a lot of noise, either because it is crowded and people talk loudly or because of music. Chairs, tables, and tableware are often not comfortable. Service is not that great: I have to wait to order, for my food, for my check, and so on. There are not many options that fit my dietary choices and food is surprisingly often fat, salty or sweet to the extent that I am not tasting the ingredients any more.
How am I to make this enjoyable in a restaurant? At home, at least, I can select ingredients and cook the meal to my taste. I have seats and tableware I am used to and are comfortable to me. I can talk and listen to the people I care about. And this better experience is significantly cheaper than in a restaurant, which means I can have this every day!
Re: Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
#224Unless you're a really special restaurant with significant differentiation capabilities and people come to eat at your place irrationally, here's a tip: Restaurants are never the ones making the money. They enable others to make money. Usually, landlords. And generally, be cautious about going into a business where people want to do it because it's their passion. It means you're going to competing with people who are…
I don't think the passion argument is that valuable. For a LOT of people programming is their passion. Yet they command some of the highest salaries. The labor market doesn't care about passion. It will settle where it needs to based on demand and supply.
I think he's saying the passion factor will increase the supply. I think the same thing happens some with programming, it's just a lot fewer people have the passion (and ability?) than for cooking food.
The same thing happens with teachers, nurses, firemen, police... I think the reason they generally don't make more money is many people have a passion for doing those jobs (ask ten kids what they want to be when they grow up), but they aren't super difficult, so there's a large supply.
Re: Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
But isn't it cash-only at even most established joints in Germany much less mom and pop immigrant-run hole-in-the-walls? My friend tells me even vape shops that sell hundreds of dollars of gear are cash only. We have plenty of those in our ethnic neighborhoods. Heck even some very successful joints like Rosamunde Sausage Grill in the Mission District (S.F.) were cash-only until a couple of years ago, when I last went…
But how does cashless pay make it cost a few bucks per serving more? If it is that, why would anyone offer cashless payment? Most Döner and other Street Foods in Austria are cash only, but that's not the reason a typically priced Döner costs ~5€
Cash only also means you can skip on paying (part) of the taxes because there is no record of any transactions.
Re: Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
#226Unless you're a really special restaurant with significant differentiation capabilities and people come to eat at your place irrationally, here's a tip: Restaurants are never the ones making the money. They enable others to make money. Usually, landlords. And generally, be cautious about going into a business where people want to do it because it's their passion. It means you're going to competing with people who are…
I don't think the passion argument is that valuable. For a LOT of people programming is their passion. Yet they command some of the highest salaries. The labor market doesn't care about passion. It will settle where it needs to based on demand and supply.
Is it a work for $0 market due to passion though? I love programming. I am either programming, writing, or sleeping.
I wouldn't live in a box with roommates to be one though. I think many of us would find regular engineering or analytics jobs instead. Slightly less interesting, but we could still program within those jobs.
People who love food are basically willing to live in poverty to do it.
Re: Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
#227Something's up. In Germany in a normal city I can get a döner the same size as the one in the photo for €3 ($3.50?). It's not sourdough nor high quality protein but that can't explain the $7.50 difference. Edit: as the commenter below reminded me, it's actually more like €4-5 but my point stands.
Wolf Down is in Canada. Your currency conversion is incorrect.
Re: Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
#228I really dislike the way in which this article has been written - it reads as the typical piece from the "bro culture" that massively ignores the rest of the world. Besides this, which is not the point... 1) most restaurants in US and high-end Europe that survive and thrive do so by having big margins on alcohol. Their margins are not single-digits. (edit: just saw other comments mentioning this). 2) Many restaurateu…
I believe the article is talking about a Canadian restaurant though much of it would apply to the US.
Re: Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
#229If we want convenience and scale, we need more cafeteria style restaurants. Everything is cooked in bulk, you walk in and choose visually what you want. This is very popular in post Soviet countries. There doesn’t need to be a compromise on quality and taste either. Maybe presentation only. Won’t be able to get an instagram shot out of the cafeteria portion. Analogous to that are food markets in South East Asian coun…
Isn't this just a buffet?
Re: Why Restaurants Are So Fucked
#230I'll make another observation about the landscape of restaurants. You may notice that in Europe, Asia, the demographics of restaurants are noticeably different from the US. There are far more hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop restaurants in those places compared to the US, running a small and seemingly profit-thin but subsistence restaurant for the neighborhood. Think of a suburban neighborhood in Madrid or Rome, where a…
I want small restaurants as much as I want shoe makers instead of automated Nike factories. The way forward is not by enabling people who can serve 500 people/day to exist when we can have a robot serving 5,000. We want automation, we want people doing what they choose to do because we've automated away things they had to do, such as work for a living. The way to get there is more automation. Restaurant cooks/servers…
* Restaurant cooks/servers are the equivalent of hand washing clothes. We have washing machines - technology has enabled humanity to do a great deal more with their life, let's move in that direction please.*
Maybe you might as well drink Soylent. Washing clothes or dishes is a chore. Cooking food is a social event and lots of people like cooking and creating food.
If anything automation of mundane tasks will lead to more food being cooked by humans. I’ll also eat my hat if you can get a robot to cook an 8 course degustation.