This reminds me of Anthony Bourdain's visit to Venice and a local restaurant that only accepted being filmed if he didn't tell anyone the name or location of the place. It can definitely kill the business.
Off-topic question: how does a submission gets front page with just 3 points?
It can definitely be gamed. I always used to notice links to the nautilus science site would instantly get 6 or so upvotes. While pondering this was when I realised they were YC backed, and stopped wondering if they'd get called out on it....
"But on the other hand, that's kind of a destructive process because if I name the place - and I don't always when it's a place like that - I've changed it. The next time I go back, there's tourists. There's people who've seen it on the show. And then I might hear from the same person from that neighborhood say, you ruined my favorite bar, (laughter) you know? All the regular customers have run away and it's filled with, you know, tourists in ugly T-shirts and flip-flops. There are times that I have looked at the camera and said, look, I'm just not going to tell you where this place is. I don't want to change it. It should stay like this forever. I do do that now and again."
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 local customers once you have successfully chased the hordes away?
I wonder if those punch cards (or the digital equivalents) for loyalty points are effective at building a consistent customer base. They're not limited to locals but it might encourage locals to come back.
I used to work right next to Union Square in San Francisco, and the restaurant right across the street would give us a 'locals' card that would get us $5 off the crazy high prices. That way, locals could eat a normal meal but they could keep the tourist traffic at a reasonable level.
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.
I think it would be interesting to try surge pricing with a twist: Keep menu prices the same, but when a line forms, require people eating at the restaurant to donate to a worthy charity. The price mechanism continues to function, but people feel good about paying more instead of feeling ripped off.
No, it is inability to deliver the intended experience.
Some people identify with that very, very strongly. Steve is one of those people.
Nail it, or don't bother.
He has a hard choice. Franchises are very hard to get right, and no matter what, they are shadows of the original. Like Vegas presentations are.
Or, go big. In n Out Burger us a potential example. They are growing, and own the culture, experience, even the food ingredients.
Both of those things are very different lives for the family, who prior to this story, were living one they held dear.
I applaud Steve for not placing blame. He knows it was good intent gone bad, and we cannot always know. Good human. And he also closed the loop, sharing it all.
The writer, having come to realizations, did right by telling this story, and Steve seemed to understand the value in all of that.
I enjoyed this piece. There is much to think about, and both writer and impacted person appear to be solid people, sharing their experiences in honest, frank, high value ways.
I think raise prices AND hire more people. Staffing could have solved lots of the problems. Restaurant owners are often penny-wise, pound-foolish when it comes to hiring...
Enjoyed the article. This reminds me a lot of what Groupon used to do to restaurants in the early days. They would just get slammed by hundreds of crabby people looking to one and done them for a half priced meal. Obviously as Groupon became more ubiquitous this lessened, but I do vividly remember going to a hot dog and burger place and finding the two owner-operators absolutely miserable as a line of 20 people formed out their door.
Back to the article: seems this is why Shake Shack succeeded and prospered with one store being inundated by customers. I'm sure this place has a lot of smart money wanting to use their name and recipe. Maybe not such a bad outcome?
Shake Shack began as a hot dog stand, but a hot dog stand created for a park being developed by a successful NYC restaurateur who owned a hospitality management company. If you're the sole developer of a new downtown park, and you own the only hotdog stand in that park, and you have lots of resources, it's going to be a success. When later there's the opportunity to develop the park further, you may pony up the cash to build a building to sell even more food. And later, when you see how successful it is, and you see the opportunity to branch out, you can do that, too.
Some restaurants become popular because people with money are in the right place at the right time, and not because it was an old-school authentic eatery discovered by a food writer and put on a top-foods-list.
Shake Shack is more about hyping just-ok products. There are better (and cheaper) burgers to be had without the megadosing of salt to compensate for a mediocre blend. They keep the seats filled because they worked the hype machine and the tourists flock there.
As another child comment mentions, Shake Shack was designed in a lab to be a franchise monster. The founder of Shake Shack is Danny Meyer, who is quite possibly America's most celebrated restaurateur and the CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group. By the time Shake Shack opened, Meyer had been running restaurants for over 30 years.
The hot dog cart in Madison Park that originated Shake Shack was stocked by the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park (then a Meyer owned restaurant) which sits next to the park, has three Michelin stars and in 2017 was #1 on the World's 50 Best Restaurant's list.
> I'm sure this place has a lot of smart money wanting to use their name and recipe. Maybe not such a bad outcome?
You have to understand and emphasize with someone's goals for starting and running a business. It's not always money and notoriety. Sometimes it's just that someone wants to do a certain thing with their waking hours.
Totally agree. More just meant at this point he doesn't have that option as easily, so maybe he sells out and then starts something small again. I know it's probably not too feasible given the emotional attachment he has to the business, just can't imagine some operator coming in there without ruining the charm of the place, which would be the main reason to keep things the same.
It was a place you took someone to for a special time. And when done that way, as it was done for me (Thanks Joe P), the need to respect that seems obvious, built right in.
With life being how it is sometimes, it has been a while.
What a great, thoughtful, introspective piece. How rare. I do miss Stanich's and was actually unaware of what happened. Great place - I hope he can work it out.
The question of how businesses should treat long term customers is something I think about a lot. When I worked in a cable company call center I used to hear people complain about rate increases being unfair because they had been customers for such a long time. Which doesn't really matter in a duopoly. Compare that to a restaurants where there's so much competition that efforts to maintain loyalty seem almost futile.
Vox Media just published a video about the negative impact of Instagram and photo geo-tagging on nature sightseeing. The "Leave No Trace" organization now recommends that people not geo-tag their nature photos so as to limit the number of visitors to remote or sensitive nature areas.
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, and you will see this in action.
Lists are indeed stupid, but only because people aren't rational decision makers.
That's because we are not satisfied unless we feel we have the best. Second best just doesn't cut it, and making it measurable is a great way to focus all the attention on the #1 spot. Same with music rankings, movies, books and so on. It's what powers best sellers: best sellers will sell more because they are best sellers!
Agreed. For me, most restaurants fall into good/so-so/not good buckets, so I dislike ranking them and selecting a best, however folks love top 10 lists.
Came to say the same thing. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but being able to listen to an audio book at less than 110% volume while walking next to a busy road is fantastic.
I bought the Cowin E7's from Amazon for $60. I've tested them and the noise-cancelling is every bit as good. The audio sounds just as good too, but I don't pretend to be an audiophile and the noise-cancelling is what is important to me.
I’ve been very happy with the Monoprice “SonicSolace” ones. Haven’t done a side-by-side comparison, but I’ve found them perfectly good for airplane use, and they’re definitely cheaper.
They're not even active noise cancelling. They work just as well with no battery. They're not "dead silent" but I can be making no noise and you have to yell to get my attention.
As an added bonus they're reflective, not that that in any way makes up for the massive reduction in situational awareness you are causing by purposefully handicapping your hearing ability while in/around traffic.
Edit: Did you edit your comment or was it someone else who mentioned wanting to listen to audiobooks while walking down the street?
No. I know of dozen better solutions for people who want to listen to music in high-noise environments, starting with the cheap-and-good (Mee M6Pro, $50, plus ear-safety isolators, $10) and ranging through moderately priced and good (Sennheiser HD280Pro, $100, Beyerdynamic DT770, $150) and going on up in price but not necessarily isolation.
I live in Austin and I've made the exact same point to people before.
Q: Which BBQ place should I go to in Austin?
A: Most are good. I've even enjoyed the brisket served at the UT dining halls. (This is blasphemy to some.) You probably would do well to pick any well established BBQ place without a line.
The most confusing thing about the line at Franklin's is you can just order it to go and skip the line entirely. Granted, you have to plan ahead a bit, but who's deciding at the spur of the moment to go eat lunch at Franklin's anyway?
yep, I have a friend who went and stood in line to buy the new apple phone because it was "part of the experience". whatever makes people happy, I suppose.
It's like how a night club with no line is stupid, lame, and not worth going to, but one with a long line is forbidden fruit and so you must line up too.
So many clubs make people line up for no reason other than to have a line.
Yes. My Bose headphones are absolutely overrated and overpriced. They're 2-3x as expensive for being maybe 10%-20% better than the competition.
But they're still 10% better. They're the best consumer grade noise canceling headphones available. None of the offerings from Sennheiser or the like have both a comparable comfort and the same or better noise canceling. So, for me, there just isn't anything else that solves the problem of having to do high-concentration work in an open office for hours at a time.
I agree. I'm still an owner & fan of the Bose Quiet Comfort 35 II, but also have the latest Sony WH-1000XM3 (and XM2). I think the Sony's have better noise cancelling, enough that I pick them up daily. I typically work with them on, no music. The QC 35 travels better, being slightly less bulky.
For the above comments about Bose in general, it's untrue for this specific use case. Before the Sony model was released there wasn't a better option out there.
I think the internet caused a lot of this. It's easier for everyone to herd to a SINGLE point. I don't remember this sort of line size discrepancy being nearly so common twenty years ago.
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.
Why does anything have to be wrong with them? Why can't it just be that they have different tastes?
I have no issue with you having your own opinion (it's stupid; I won't do it, I can't understand). That's all well and good.
Saying "what is wrong with these people" about something you don't understand, but that is harmless thing and doesn't involve you significantly... that's just plain close-minded.
The comment above yours at least tried to provide some reasoning (people following recommendations, fooling themselves with cognitive dissonance), but it didn't try to draw a distinct "me vs them, something is wrong with them" as your comment did.
You should reflect a little if this is your gut reaction to people doing something you don't understand but that is harmless; it shouldn't be "something is wrong with them", it should be "I wonder what they see in it? I just don't get it for some reason; I guess we live different lives"
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.)
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.
That's fair; I think I'm slightly more-pissed-than-usual about this just because it's very easy to dismissive of ramen, especially in North America, because all people remember are those deep-fried dehydrated brick fixtures of every college dorm. It is precisely that it doesn't look like traditional fine dining, or even New American cuisine, that I think a lot of people think it's nothing worth looking at. It's really, really easy to say "this is what it is to me, how could you ever do anything interesting with it?"
I just kind of wish more people (including me) would try more things, you know? :P
(I guess I'm channeling my inner David Chang right now.)
Oh GOD, you want to get me pissed bring up that cry baby Chang. I could rant. But I won't.
Listen, I get it. I spend 8 hours every few months boiling off a massive pot of bones and feet to make my own ramen broth to store in my freezer. I get that it's easy to dismiss it soup and noodles as just "some soup and noodles".
Food is usually about what you know and are familiar with. It's about comfort for most people, but other people are about finding novel or interesting experiences.
There's definitely an element of performativity in food that strikes me every time I see cooking shows.
It can be great food, but you're going to poop it out the same as anything else. So what are you paying for, when you get above a minimum bar of nutrition, sanitation, and taste? An experience. Fashion. Hospitality. With high end ingredients and techniques, scarcity.
And I can see the appeal of chasing after "the best" on both ends. Something that is not just a great experience once, but great on every plate, every service. It's not unlike other aesthetic and cultural pursuits in that at the higher end it becomes about the coloration that you prefer, and most objective measures fall apart.
But then most people aren't even able to describe what they want aesthetically, so a ranking substitutes. And when it's a ranking of something familiar and popular like burgers or noodle soups, it's simultaneously more interesting(more people have comparable experiences) and easier to dismiss(there are many great options).
Earlier this year I visited Tokyo and decided to find "the best burger" (according to some guide) and the place I ultimately visited was, indeed, quite good by any standard, and it wasn't busy or unusually expensive, even. Was it the best? I have absolutely no idea. But I get to tell a story about visiting "the best" regardless.
I don't really particularly like David Chang, but one thing that I do identify a lot with is that there is a lot of art and expertise in Asian cuisines that have been neglected in the west, precisely because it has been dismissed as simple, as lower class, as cheap.
shrug Has it? I can't speak for "the west" but I live in New Jersey. We have large Asian populations (half of my friends in high school were some sort of East asian) including some towns with the largest concentrations of Indians outside India.
There's plenty of non-asians eating at the most "authentic" places, but when I go into some of them I notice that the populations are still more skewed towards the people of that make up that culture. Why? Because most people tend to gravitate towards food they're familiar with. No matter how much I tell someone that a beef tendon and noodle soup is going to be good, they're going to be hesitant because it's foreign and they're unfamiliar with the ingredients. That's fine. It's ultimately just food, and people don't have to eat anything they don't want to.
To me, David Chang and his constant hemming and hawing about how nobody respects Korean food (specifically Korean food, although he sometimes tries to throw a blanket over the whole of Asian food although he knows he's being disingenuous and his whole tone changes when he does that) is just so annoying. I'm sorry that Koreans haven't done as well marketing their cuisines as Indians, Chinese and Japanese restaurants have. But it's changing. In the mid-90's sushi was still considered exotic and interesting. Now you can buy it at a gas station. He just seems very impatient and indignant that "the masses" take a long time to change what they consider to be part of normal American Cuisine, and he should know better.
TL;dr- getting upset someone doesn't want to eat your food is stupid. Just don't invite them to dinner anymore.
I assume you have seen Tampopo. In case you have not and for others, it is a VHS-era film comedy about two truck drivers who help a struggling roadside chef learn how to really make noodles.
I just hope you understand that you're not just doing that.
> Even great noodles aren't much better than average noodles. I really can't understand it.
I have no reason to be mad at this, I have literally no reason to be emotionally connected to this, but... it still disappoints me a little bit on the inside to read this.
I waited about two hours to eat at a ramen place in San Diego. Worth it. And the whole time we waited I complained this was stupid. I was wrong. Very well managed wait experience though.
Just to add a little subtlety to your comment, Franklin (no s) BBQ revolutionized Texas BBQ when it first opened. Nowadays, there are several places that can go head to head with it (Micklethwaite and La Barbeque for example), but at the time, there was nothing even close.
Many of those famous places in the hills or even, gasp, Lockhart, really weren't that good once we had Franklin BBQ. I've noticed a lot of these old-school places have had to up their game in recent years and are now competitive again.
That said, waiting in line at Franklin is sort of an event of itself. Most people bring coolers of beer and turn it into a tailgate-like atmosphere. You're right though, I haven't waited in the line for years because I can get something similar much easier.
I'm with you 100% on the Bose headphones comment though. Those things are a ripoff.
I've been to Sukiyabashi Jiro, in Tokyo, four times. The Ginza location twice and the Roppongi Hills location twice. Lunch and dinner service at both locations. These are Michelin 3 and 2 star restaurants, respectively, and it is actually quite challenging to get in to the Ginza location as a foreigner, especially the dinner service. I don't mean to say anything to discredit Jiro or his sons or their apprentices. They are absolutely amazing chefs of the highest quality and they are serving some of the highest quality sushi you can get. It is the best sushi that most people could ever hope to have and the food service itself is worth the experience. But... This place was made famous by Anthony Bourdain and then a documentary.
All of that said, I've personally had sushi that is comparable in quality out in the Japanese coastal countryside at an essentially random michi-no-eki. It's also significantly cheaper and they have pieces of sushi that you won't find in the larger cities that are unique to the region or town.
> If it's just as good for cheaper, then why have you been 4 times?
Because the lunch and dinner services are different. Because we later vacationed in Japan with a couple that we are friends with and they wanted to go and were more comfortable going with us (both of these places are an intense experience, to put it mildly, though one is a more comfortable atmosphere than the other). Because of that intense experience and the atmosphere that it provides.
Because it's more difficult still to comfortably navigate those smaller towns and regions, outside of Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto, etc..., without any sort of handle on the language. That alone implies a few things. You or someone you're traveling with knows the language well enough to navigate those smaller towns and regions and that it's very likely not your first or even second trip to the country.
We didn't come to understand that sushi in a place like Shimoda could be better than what you'd find at a Michelin rated sushi restaurant until we were able to find ourselves in Shimoda having that sushi and we weren't comfortable even going to a place like Shimoda until our third trip to Japan.
edit/ Because my wife and I are just as vulnerable as everyone else that is being talked about here for falling prey to "top 10 lists" and the like.
I mean, you are a local, right? You know all those places. If I am in town for a few days for work, WTF am I going to do? Go to the one place someone told me about or I saw on a list? Of course.
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 just to make a reservation! That these burger joint owners shut down instead of raising prices seems like a huge business mistake. They could have put 50% off coupons in the local newspaper or something if they wanted to make the place available to locals at reasonable prices.
Raising prices would reduce the volume of customers, so the restaurant could maintain its quality standard, but Stanich felt his mission was to give back to the local community of regular diners. He didn't want to price out regular, repeat customers from the neighborhood and have only tourists eating there.
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.
This sounds like a super good idea to me, I really love it. Seems pretty simple but just makes a lot of sense.
Any person travelling just coming by for the "best burger" probably would not want to spend $34 and not use that card anymore so $20 sounds great. Any regular would probably be super cool with paying that extra $30 knowing they can get a burger once a week or whatever for $4. This works out for the restaurant and the regulars, and like you said they can just hand out those cards to anyone for any reason.
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.
The point is, there are ways to distinguish between locals and non-locals. There are merits and drawbacks to having your own ID card vs. using a state ID card.
...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.
The high prices would be to ward off these one-time customers who are only there for the single instagram photo. If someone is invested enough to make a fake ID just for cheaper burgers, presumably they're going to be repeat customers that develop a relationship with the restaurant, which is what he wants.
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 store itself has to operate like a normal capitalist store for the concept to work, accepting customers, charging money, etc. There is no concept in our society of a non-profit burger joint.
I love this idea: zero profit capitalism. Sure some people would abuse savings accounts more than others, but taxing standing profits on a gradually increasing scale the longer they stand (sure the market already does this at a minute level, but it's not enough to deter wealth hoarding) seems like an effective way to solve the wealth extraction problem corporations introduce.
I think daveslash was suggesting the burger joint runs as the for-profit entity that it already is and that it is the source of the philanthropy, not the target.
To give an example, charge exorbitant prices for burgers knowing there are still people desperate enough to try the burger that paying $30 is fine and then use the extra revenue to give back to the community, possibly by paying for the local soccer club to get a new clubhouse, or possibly by providing free/subsidized burgers at local events where the crowd will be local. In this way the business stays open and isn't overwhelmed by the demand, while not completely isolating itself from the local community that the owner wants to give back to.
Yes, that is how I understood 'daveslash. My claim is that this fails to accomplish any of the goals of the burger joint's owner: he wants to provide a burger joint for the community, not a soccer club for the community. Saying "Why don't you run a fancy burger place and help the community in other ways than you wanted" isn't actually a solution to anything.
Also... he was just burned out. An experience many here may identify with. That's why the place is still closed.
It's possible there was something he could have done to make things good again... if he wasn't too burned out by the experience to figure it out and carry it out.
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".
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.
>>Then this prices out the neighborhood locals who made the place successful in the first place.
Did they really make the place successful though? I don't see what exactly they contributed to the business. Had the locals not liked the food they probably would never have returned and would have also told all their friends never to go there.
It seems to me that Steve was serving a ton of one-time customers and if he did that he would turn off the regulars that helped him get to where he was. You're right in that the technically correct solution would be to raise prices but I can empathize with the owner about how he would probably feel about that.
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 stood looking at the staff I couldn't help thinking that it would be better for everyone if they raised their prices $2 a plate and just slowed down.
$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.
You're making the point for them...adding even $1 to the price will ratchet the demand down to reasonable levels, and you'll end up making a little more money with lower stress levels.
In a similar vein we have a lot of bakeries here run by a local Vietnamese population. They do these amazing pork rolls for $5, which is very cheap for food in Australia (A big Mac meal is around $12 for perspective). They are popular because of the price and if they were $7 they would sell far far less.
That poses a substential risk to the business. You are changing your entire customer base over night. If you are a small restaurant like the one in the article, it is unlikely, that your earlier customers will book month in advance, even at half price.
Your old customer base was hopefully working, but your new customers expect the words greatest burger. Can you deliver on that hype?
The owner above payed month of utilities for an empty restaurant and has to make a sizeable investment to cater to that new customerbase.
Unless you didnt have a functioning business model beforehand, this is a real curse and puts your livelihood at stakes.
They live in a community. If they raise prices such that their friends and neighbors can not afford to eat there, they will become social pariahs. It would be very difficult to do, and it would alienate the very people they probably wanted to be serving.
If you’re a restaurateur, you probably don’t even live near that restaurant. But this advice is tantamount to: tell your friends and everyone who helped you get where you are that they’re too poor for you, now.
It’s called supply and demand. If there is a 5 hour wait, there’s a problem: no local will wait 5 hours for a burger so you exclude them anyway. Price is the best mechanism to address supply and demand.
Thats not a solution for the problem though, if your goal is to keep your old customer base. It is only a solution if you view your restaurant as an investment instead of a passion. The counter example from the article is Paiche.
edit: To give another example, I have a kebab shop in my neighborhood who will not take any orders by phone let alone online. They dont have flyers or a web presence. Its a small street faced window run by an immigrant family who keeps the booth open throughout the day, from 11 to 11 longer or shorter depending on when they are out for the day. Most of the time the place is empty but during mealtimes there is regularly a line for half an hour. For the area, this is extremely well. And they sit right next to two other kebab shops, a pizza place and two asian places with mostly no line, literally the street down in 3 minute walking distance.
The reasonable thing would be to close the shop in the afternoon and take orders in advance, but thats not what they want for their shop. They want to talk and be a place where people meet, despite them not having any tables and not serving any drinks except a tea on the house from time to time.
And their food is absolutely amazing. Home made sauce and bread, it is worth the wait or to eat at 4pm in the afternoon. They dont let them self get rushed and it is always an amazing meal.
All the successful restaurants I've experienced chose to give preferential treatment to locals and regulars. That's because they often give the place the charme that makes it special in the first place. And that the business is rather cyclical, and you don't want to end up without tourists AND local all hating you.
At the point where you're running 20 tables or more for three rounds every night (plus mabybe 2x lunch) you stop caring about making more money. Because if money were that important, you would have gone into investment banker, not chef.
Plus restaurants tend to get into and out of favour. IT'
And everyone hates tourist. Seriously: if you work anywhere close to tourists, you will hate work because it's full of tourists. Then you take a vacation and start hating yourself.
I wonder if you could switch the 'locals only' card for just requiring proof of address on a driving license or utility bill. Might still be a problem with locals offering 'burger tours' - you pay me $10, I buy the burgers for $5 because they'd charge you $20, everyone is happy (except the restaurant).
In this case, Stanich wanted to serve his community, and if he raised the prices, he would drive away his own community.
If I were Stanich, I would raise the prices but also offer reusable vouchers/coupons to all past customers, friends, and family so they can pay the original prices.
Making a burger joint reservations-only changes the character of the service significantly. Imagine Twitter saying "We're scaling too fast for our backend to keep up, so we're going to require reservations a day in advance before you tweet so we can throttle the number of requests."
Not necessarily. I live in a heavily touristed neighborhood in Brooklyn. But I also know the managers at the restaurants I like in the neighborhood. The secret is that these managers hold some tables for walk-ins every night, and that they mostly give them to locals.
I can guarantee you there are famous NYC restaurants in my neighborhood where I can get a table even if there are lines out the door or reservations are completely full.
You just have to live in the neighborhood and actually put some effort forth to introduce yourself to staff and maybe go occasionally when you know it will be slow (like during a snowstorm or holiday). It does require a good manager/host though.
Yes, this is the classic gentrification problem. Now you've turned a restaurant that locals can visit into a purely tourist attract that only the upper class can enjoy. This solves the problem of the restaurant owners having to close down, but for all the locals the restaurant might as well be gone.
P.S. And then when the next "top N burger joints in America" list comes out that everyone goes crazy for and all the burger-tourists start going somewhere else now you've lost your local customer base and you might go out of business regardless. Raising prices works well if you're a fine dining establishment in a dense metro area and that's the kind of business you expect to run. It doesn't work so well for burger joints or BBQ shacks elevated to a bizarre level of temporary fame.
> And then when the next "top N burger joints in America" list comes out that everyone goes crazy for and all the burger-tourists start going somewhere else now you've lost your local customer base and you might go out of business regardless.
Then lower your prices again to match demand. It's almost as if prices aren't set in stone.
You're missing the important detail here: you've destroyed the relationship with your local regulars. They aren't going to return just because prices are affordable, they're going to find other places to be their regular burger shop.
I would do it like this: I would create a yearly --- no, make that lifetime membership pass which can be obtained for $30 or whatever. The locals would get this for free. With the membership pass, you would go to a separate lineup which has priority over the regular line up. Then I would work the the same relaxed pace as before, not caring whether 3 people are waiting or 300. The membership pass could make users and their guests eligible for a discount, like 15-25% off. Nothing too drastic.
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
This is a classic humans are rational actors and spherical volumes in empty space economic answer, which entirely misses the point.
The restaurants we love, we love for the entire experience, and price is part of that experience. Even for people who can happily afford the higher price, it still results in a different experience. The people around you in the restaurant will be different. Your perception of the value of the meal will be different. Your willingness to try more adventurous items on the menu will be different. The whole thing is not just quantitatively different, but qualitatively different.
A $20 burger is not a $10 burger, regardless of how the two are prepared. If the former is not the experience the chef wants to create for their customers then, no, just raising prices doesn't "solve" the problem.
The customers you made money from when you're starting out don't have to be the same customers you make money from when your restaurant hits the big time.
If clients have to wait hours for a burger, the existing clientele is gone either way. If you end up folding, the existing clientele is hosed anyway.
And as the original commenter noted, you could put coupons in the local newspaper and the library and whatever else, so the locals have access to burgers at the old price.
Or you have someone whose job it is to stand outside and memorize the names and faces of local patrons and turn away any newcomer who can't present an ID with a local address. You can have a second entrance for everyone else, takeout-only, with an hours-long wait, which plenty of food tourists will happily endure.
I think this is the point many people are seemingly missing.
Ask any family restaurant/bar owner in a seasonal tourist destination and they’ll explain why locals must be one of the first considerations before you make drastic changes. Particularly if an important reason for opening was a personal preference to serve locals over tourists in the first place.
It’s incredibly interesting to see how few people understand that someone may open a business with priorities other than massive growth potential.
At this point it's not about earning money, it's about not getting overworked to death.
Raising prices sounds like the best strategy. You keep raising until the workload returns to normal. If you feel you're serving the wrong customers, you now have time to figure out how to fix that. Otherwise, if people eventually get turned off by the price and your workload goes down, you drop the price, and keep dropping it until you reach a stable point with just the right amount of orders.
"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 the time, such as raising your prices or other ways of limiting the influx. Besides that not being fair to your original customers.
Hard problem, the internet mob is like a bunch of locusts, they devour that which they visit and leave it devastated.
I think everyone is to some extent, but you can choose whether or not to recognise that there are consequences and learn to moderate your behaviour accordingly. Or not.
Agree. Whilst I think that people, or rather popularity, ruins everything, and whilst I'm frustrated that rather explore and discover things for themselves people would rather be told what's good and descend in a mob, I have to admit that I'm part of the problem: sometimes it's just easier.
You don’t truly mean popularity literally ruins everything, correct? There are all kinds of things that are better because they’re popular, or at least could not have been as great without their popularity. Smart phones, for instance: if they didn’t get really popular, and there was not as much competition in the hardware and app space, the apps and hardware would not have gotten so much better so quickly.
Other ones off the top of my head: air travel (popularity has led to fairly low prices, even if the experience has suffered for those looking for bargain basement prices), computers, coffee, beer.
There is a local barbershop I have been going to for the past 4 years or so. Recently, they wanted to increase some business, so they were asking customers to leave a review. Loving the place and wanting to give back, I left a good review on Google. Fast forward a few weeks, and received emails from google saying my review has been viewed 100s of times. I used to be able to call and get an appointment the same day, or same afternoon even, but now it's difficult to be seen the same day. It's a bit of a bummer, and I'm not really sure how to solve it. It hurt me as a long time customer, but the shop is doing a ton more business now. Now I'm hesitant to do this for any other business I enjoy, even knowing this is a selfish feeling.
That happened to me. Now I just scheduled my next appointment when I finish the current appointment. Every 5 weeks. And you get the same barber every time which is nice - you don't need to tell them what cut you want every single time. And it is good for the business because the have a somewhat predictable revenue source.
Yep exactly or "this" as they say. The Market doesn't have to respond so slowly that prices stay the same even though demand went up. It doesn't have to charge a faithful customer more than an unfaithful one either.
It would be funny, although not culturally normal, to see companies start to review customers.
Sorry, my engineering my mind craves a solution. Wouldn't forcing people into an asynchronous online/mobile queue be the best solution? You can favour verified locals if you want there, control exactly how many orders you take in, and nip any potential disappointments (leading to bad Yelp reviews) right in the bud.
I've trekked to enough "Best <X> in <Y>" places and been the "outsider" grumbling waiting outside in a giant lineup (or being at the front of the line at 9am), to know that it is a cherished experience while travelling, giving you a piece of local flare, and like many problems a focussed effort could help it scale properly.
You're trying to engineer a solution to the problem of "how do you make everyone happy" (albeit in a specific scenario). If you change things, someone will be upset by this. At best you can hope to optimize this to make the MOST people happy and the LEAST people unhappy, but you can't get a perfect score here.
I feel like the problem there is that it would require expending a lot of effort to solve what will probably be a temporary problem. That kind of system isn't going to be cheap, and the high traffic will only last as long as the list in question is popular. As soon as another 'best burger place' comes along, all that traffic is probably going to die down, and now you're a small diner left with this complex expensive system.
It reminds me a lot of the dilemma facing graphics card makers recently, wherein the cards keep getting bought up by cryptocurrency miners. If they raise prices, they're pricing out of the regular customers who will stick around after the cryptocurrency mining dies down, and if they raise their production capacity too much then they will be left with massive overcapacity with things die down.
I'm thinking this could be a solution that various businesses could adopt temporarily. And not a turnkey solution for each business.
These stories also keep coming out of various businesses in Europe with the influx of Chinese and Indian tourists, eager to pay them but the businesses have no infrastructure to "shape" the inflow of customers.
If this is indeed a big problem, this is also a big opportunity.
Reminds me of a Nathan For You episode that lampoons the idea of ranking something as subjective as a burger.
Nathan convinces the owner of a burger joint in LA to go on a popular local radio station and promise that he has the best burger in LA, and offer $100 to anyone who eats there and disagrees. The comedy in this is apparent to pretty much anyone, but people will still refer to different restaurants as 'the best'.
My mood has more effect on the pleasure I get from many things than their intrinsic nature. The first beer on holiday in a new country is the best beer you've ever tasted. A meal eaten in silence when you've been looking forward to it tastes divine.
Hell - my own narcissism even overrides most things. My own cooking is often my favourite thing in the world.
And on the other side of things - high expectations or rote habit often kill pleasures for me. If I try too hard to enjoy something it blows away like dust.
Context is king. Back when I was a consultant and flew all over the place a lot, there were more than a few times I landed at O'Hare sometime after midnight, got off the plane starving, and immediately beat it to the "open 24 hours" McDonalds in the food court and had a box of Chicken McNuggets that were, at that moment, the best meal I could dream of. I mean, who knew that damn mcnuggets could be absolutely heavenly under the right circumstances...
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 long line doesn't mean you have to change anything about your business, go faster, be more stressed, etc. You would have to convey that to your employees as well.
I suppose it says something about the city that I'm pretty sure "that ice cream spot everyone loves" is Salt & Straw on NW 23rd. The line there is always ridiculous and there's other great local ice cream places within a 10-minute walk throughout downtown.
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.
In case anyone tries to look this up, the standalone Powell's technical book store is now closed and has been merged into the main store on Burnside (mostly located on the top floor).
This reminds me of the first thing everyone asks when you tell them you just got back from Maui: "Did you go see the sunrise on Haleakalā?"
And, no I have not, because I don't want to wake up at 5:00am while on vacation and drive to a crowded parking lot to watch the sunrise in the cold with 80-100 strangers.
Why is it that we all have to have the same experiences?
This coupled with the articles I've seen on people on vacation all hoarding together to get the perfect picture of $insertMonumentOrSkylineHere. I remember one in particular that showed this gorgeous picture then showed what was behind the photographer and it was mob of people all taking the same picture. It honestly makes me sick. Those are the people that do thing to say they did them rather than for the experience IMHO.
If your life looks perfect on FB/Insta/Snap I just assume you are empty inside. Well "produce" our lives a little but some people go so far out of their way I just don't understand how people can follow that shit and not see how vapid/fake/BS it all is. Like serious this [0] fuck right off. I in no way endorse or support the backlash she got but it just all seems so stupid and wasteful to me.
Yes. Similar to my child, who's interested in the process of the "art" she's scribbling rather than the result, and forgets about it soon after. But more self-conscious, as the process of taking common photos is a social act.
What if the mechanics of camera/social photo apps rewarded people for taking original photos?
If you have a week there, and it's on the list of things to do, why wouldn't you go do it? Are you going to go all the way out there and not do the things? Then you'd be missing out!
We all want a magical experience in a drive-thru window, and we fear missing out. If you live on the east coast, you could go to the Caribbean cheaper and quicker, but it's not Hawaii!. The Caribbean is beautiful, but Hawaii is magical! At least, that's what we're told by the travel agencies. Then you arrive and realize it's basically the Caribbean with a Wal-Mart and better hiking (and more rain)
Due to the weather, you can miss out even if you had gone.
I went to Haleakalā after being recommended to go after a visit to the big island. The early morning that I went via a local outfitter, it was raining cats and dogs, visibility nada, so it was wet and uncomfortable. I had opted for the ride down the mountain on bikes option which seemed adventurous at the time. Riding down fearfully slick roads and switchbacks with limited visibility and having the bike ride leaders joke about having to pull guests out of ravines with ropes did not help. But that was my personal Haleakalā experience.
>> Apparently, after my story came out, crowds of people started coming in the restaurant, people in from out of town, or from the suburbs, basically just non-regulars. And as the lines started to build up, his employees -- who were mainly family members -- got stressed out, and the stress would cause them to not be as friendly as they should be, or to shout out crazy long wait times for burgers in an attempt to maybe convince people to leave, and as this started happening, things fell by the wayside. Dishes weren’t cleared quickly, and these new people weren’t having the proper Stanich’s experience, and Steve would spend his entire day going around apologizing and trying to fix things. They might pay him lip service to his face, but they were never coming back so they had no problem going on Yelp or Facebook and denouncing the restaurant and saying that the burgers were bad.
Poor management is what caused the shutdown. Stanich knew about the problems and didn't fix them. Instead he went around apologizing about the problems that he shoulds have fixed in the first place.
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 only reason anybody cares about that reviewer's opinions are because he has a platform and people are desperate to belong to something, anything.
His opinion about what's best probably could be argued with.
However, there are lots of definitely mediocre restaurants out there that would not make it to anyone's top ten list. So I'd have every reason to visit a restaurant on this sort of list as opposed to visiting a restaurant at random.
Personally, I'm OK with either grilled or raw onions (though I prefer raw). But there are lots of characteristics with few if any fans - soggy, overdone, cooked lettuce, etc.
The big thing is most restaurants don't have any reason to work at being good not to mention great. Most restaurants just soak up whoever happens to be in the area and has a preference for their type of food and so mediocrity not pretending to be anything else rules. Good-enough food at a good-enough price to make the owner a good-enough profit is it.
> 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.
Blasphemy! The one true greatest burger has both kinds.
Also, the grilled onions are between the meat and cheese so that the latter holds them in place.
> The only reason anybody cares about that reviewer's opinions are because he has a platform and people are desperate to belong to something, anything.
I disagree. It's not about "belonging to something". I agree with what the author wrote in the article. The problem is with the paradox of choice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice). Decisions are paralyzing when people are faced with a myriad of choices. "Best of lists" fix this problem for many people, which is why they are so universally popular across industries. Now instead of picking from a 1000 choices, you have 10.
I think it's both. Lists do practically help us navigate the overwhelming number of options we're presented with, but there is also a large social signaling factor to them. Knowing what restaurants are popular or new or exciting is a way for someone to communicate to other people that food is an important part of who they are. But in order for that signal to work, it sometimes helps to have "canonical" definitions of which restaurants are "in" and lists and critics enable that.
What I find really sad about all this, though, is that it sacrifices the value of our own personal narrative and preferences. The idea that there is a "best" restaurant implies that my experience at it is irrelevant since "best" is apparently a customer-independent property.
That in turn implies that my own stories around which meals I loved are not worth telling to others. I think that's a terrible perspective. I'd much rather read an article about the top ten meals someone had — a narrative about them experiencing the food and not about the food itself — because it's ultimately people that matter.
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.
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."
“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Even sadder is that it probably depends on a lot on the day and time you go. Its not like you get the same experience every time you go to that restaurant.
Also on the person who cooked it, the ingredients they got that day, how busy they were, whether they got a call during the cooking process, what you ate that day and the day before, as well as what you drank, and even how you go there.
There are several types of onions. Some are sweeter and can be eaten raw, reds are ofter smaller and closer to the wild type and not so accurate for that, but some people would prefer its more complex taste and are better adapted to survive in cold areas. The same variety can taste also different if cultured in winter or summer and if you use vinager or not.
Great article. A paragraph with the gist of what I enjoyed in it:
"Or is this just what we are now -- a horde with a checklist and a camera phone, intent on self-producing the destruction of anything left that feels real, one Instagram story at a time?"
409 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 376 ms ] threadOff-topic question: how does a submission gets front page with just 3 points?
Maybe it's more sophisticated like votes must be from people with high karma points?
"But on the other hand, that's kind of a destructive process because if I name the place - and I don't always when it's a place like that - I've changed it. The next time I go back, there's tourists. There's people who've seen it on the show. And then I might hear from the same person from that neighborhood say, you ruined my favorite bar, (laughter) you know? All the regular customers have run away and it's filled with, you know, tourists in ugly T-shirts and flip-flops. There are times that I have looked at the camera and said, look, I'm just not going to tell you where this place is. I don't want to change it. It should stay like this forever. I do do that now and again."
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/20/558792269/anthony-bourdain-on...
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 local customers once you have successfully chased the hordes away?
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.
No, it is inability to deliver the intended experience.
Some people identify with that very, very strongly. Steve is one of those people.
Nail it, or don't bother.
He has a hard choice. Franchises are very hard to get right, and no matter what, they are shadows of the original. Like Vegas presentations are.
Or, go big. In n Out Burger us a potential example. They are growing, and own the culture, experience, even the food ingredients.
Both of those things are very different lives for the family, who prior to this story, were living one they held dear.
I applaud Steve for not placing blame. He knows it was good intent gone bad, and we cannot always know. Good human. And he also closed the loop, sharing it all.
The writer, having come to realizations, did right by telling this story, and Steve seemed to understand the value in all of that.
I enjoyed this piece. There is much to think about, and both writer and impacted person appear to be solid people, sharing their experiences in honest, frank, high value ways.
Back to the article: seems this is why Shake Shack succeeded and prospered with one store being inundated by customers. I'm sure this place has a lot of smart money wanting to use their name and recipe. Maybe not such a bad outcome?
Some restaurants become popular because people with money are in the right place at the right time, and not because it was an old-school authentic eatery discovered by a food writer and put on a top-foods-list.
The hot dog cart in Madison Park that originated Shake Shack was stocked by the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park (then a Meyer owned restaurant) which sits next to the park, has three Michelin stars and in 2017 was #1 on the World's 50 Best Restaurant's list.
You have to understand and emphasize with someone's goals for starting and running a business. It's not always money and notoriety. Sometimes it's just that someone wants to do a certain thing with their waking hours.
I would visit this place a couple times per year.
It was a place you took someone to for a special time. And when done that way, as it was done for me (Thanks Joe P), the need to respect that seems obvious, built right in.
With life being how it is sometimes, it has been a while.
Damn. This story makes me sad.
"What happens when nature goes viral?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itjc14Fm-gs
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, and you will see this in action.
Lists are indeed stupid, but only because people aren't rational decision makers.
https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=16219
They're not even active noise cancelling. They work just as well with no battery. They're not "dead silent" but I can be making no noise and you have to yell to get my attention.
As an added bonus they're reflective, not that that in any way makes up for the massive reduction in situational awareness you are causing by purposefully handicapping your hearing ability while in/around traffic.
Edit: Did you edit your comment or was it someone else who mentioned wanting to listen to audiobooks while walking down the street?
Q: Which BBQ place should I go to in Austin?
A: Most are good. I've even enjoyed the brisket served at the UT dining halls. (This is blasphemy to some.) You probably would do well to pick any well established BBQ place without a line.
I don't know if it's driven by Disney resorts and cruises, but it seems as if people like standing in line for some reason.
So many clubs make people line up for no reason other than to have a line.
We would have been better served going anywhere else, and will be sure to do so the next time I'm down there!
Franklins is good - but I sure as hell wouldn't wait hours in line for their brisket...
Yep. Even The Salt Lick at AUS is decent.
For those coming in from out of state, take a look at Texas Monthly's BBQ section to get some ideas: https://www.texasmonthly.com/bbq-home/
But they're still 10% better. They're the best consumer grade noise canceling headphones available. None of the offerings from Sennheiser or the like have both a comparable comfort and the same or better noise canceling. So, for me, there just isn't anything else that solves the problem of having to do high-concentration work in an open office for hours at a time.
For the above comments about Bose in general, it's untrue for this specific use case. Before the Sony model was released there wasn't a better option out there.
> I really can't understand it.
Why does anything have to be wrong with them? Why can't it just be that they have different tastes?
I have no issue with you having your own opinion (it's stupid; I won't do it, I can't understand). That's all well and good.
Saying "what is wrong with these people" about something you don't understand, but that is harmless thing and doesn't involve you significantly... that's just plain close-minded.
The comment above yours at least tried to provide some reasoning (people following recommendations, fooling themselves with cognitive dissonance), but it didn't try to draw a distinct "me vs them, something is wrong with them" as your comment did.
You should reflect a little if this is your gut reaction to people doing something you don't understand but that is harmless; it shouldn't be "something is wrong with them", it should be "I wonder what they see in it? I just don't get it for some reason; I guess we live different lives"
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.)
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.
I just kind of wish more people (including me) would try more things, you know? :P
(I guess I'm channeling my inner David Chang right now.)
Listen, I get it. I spend 8 hours every few months boiling off a massive pot of bones and feet to make my own ramen broth to store in my freezer. I get that it's easy to dismiss it soup and noodles as just "some soup and noodles".
Food is usually about what you know and are familiar with. It's about comfort for most people, but other people are about finding novel or interesting experiences.
It can be great food, but you're going to poop it out the same as anything else. So what are you paying for, when you get above a minimum bar of nutrition, sanitation, and taste? An experience. Fashion. Hospitality. With high end ingredients and techniques, scarcity.
And I can see the appeal of chasing after "the best" on both ends. Something that is not just a great experience once, but great on every plate, every service. It's not unlike other aesthetic and cultural pursuits in that at the higher end it becomes about the coloration that you prefer, and most objective measures fall apart.
But then most people aren't even able to describe what they want aesthetically, so a ranking substitutes. And when it's a ranking of something familiar and popular like burgers or noodle soups, it's simultaneously more interesting(more people have comparable experiences) and easier to dismiss(there are many great options).
Earlier this year I visited Tokyo and decided to find "the best burger" (according to some guide) and the place I ultimately visited was, indeed, quite good by any standard, and it wasn't busy or unusually expensive, even. Was it the best? I have absolutely no idea. But I get to tell a story about visiting "the best" regardless.
There's plenty of non-asians eating at the most "authentic" places, but when I go into some of them I notice that the populations are still more skewed towards the people of that make up that culture. Why? Because most people tend to gravitate towards food they're familiar with. No matter how much I tell someone that a beef tendon and noodle soup is going to be good, they're going to be hesitant because it's foreign and they're unfamiliar with the ingredients. That's fine. It's ultimately just food, and people don't have to eat anything they don't want to.
To me, David Chang and his constant hemming and hawing about how nobody respects Korean food (specifically Korean food, although he sometimes tries to throw a blanket over the whole of Asian food although he knows he's being disingenuous and his whole tone changes when he does that) is just so annoying. I'm sorry that Koreans haven't done as well marketing their cuisines as Indians, Chinese and Japanese restaurants have. But it's changing. In the mid-90's sushi was still considered exotic and interesting. Now you can buy it at a gas station. He just seems very impatient and indignant that "the masses" take a long time to change what they consider to be part of normal American Cuisine, and he should know better.
TL;dr- getting upset someone doesn't want to eat your food is stupid. Just don't invite them to dinner anymore.
I assume you have seen Tampopo. In case you have not and for others, it is a VHS-era film comedy about two truck drivers who help a struggling roadside chef learn how to really make noodles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampopo
> Even great noodles aren't much better than average noodles. I really can't understand it.
I have no reason to be mad at this, I have literally no reason to be emotionally connected to this, but... it still disappoints me a little bit on the inside to read this.
Many of those famous places in the hills or even, gasp, Lockhart, really weren't that good once we had Franklin BBQ. I've noticed a lot of these old-school places have had to up their game in recent years and are now competitive again.
That said, waiting in line at Franklin is sort of an event of itself. Most people bring coolers of beer and turn it into a tailgate-like atmosphere. You're right though, I haven't waited in the line for years because I can get something similar much easier.
I'm with you 100% on the Bose headphones comment though. Those things are a ripoff.
I'm not sure how much better Franklin's would be, but I'm not sure I would care all that much either.
All of that said, I've personally had sushi that is comparable in quality out in the Japanese coastal countryside at an essentially random michi-no-eki. It's also significantly cheaper and they have pieces of sushi that you won't find in the larger cities that are unique to the region or town.
Because the lunch and dinner services are different. Because we later vacationed in Japan with a couple that we are friends with and they wanted to go and were more comfortable going with us (both of these places are an intense experience, to put it mildly, though one is a more comfortable atmosphere than the other). Because of that intense experience and the atmosphere that it provides.
Because it's more difficult still to comfortably navigate those smaller towns and regions, outside of Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto, etc..., without any sort of handle on the language. That alone implies a few things. You or someone you're traveling with knows the language well enough to navigate those smaller towns and regions and that it's very likely not your first or even second trip to the country.
We didn't come to understand that sushi in a place like Shimoda could be better than what you'd find at a Michelin rated sushi restaurant until we were able to find ourselves in Shimoda having that sushi and we weren't comfortable even going to a place like Shimoda until our third trip to Japan.
edit/ Because my wife and I are just as vulnerable as everyone else that is being talked about here for falling prey to "top 10 lists" and the like.
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 just to make a reservation! That these burger joint owners shut down instead of raising prices seems like a huge business mistake. They could have put 50% off coupons in the local newspaper or something if they wanted to make the place available to locals at reasonable prices.
[1] https://a16z.com/2016/08/13/pricing/
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.
https://smashburger.com/smashpass/
Any person travelling just coming by for the "best burger" probably would not want to spend $34 and not use that card anymore so $20 sounds great. Any regular would probably be super cool with paying that extra $30 knowing they can get a burger once a week or whatever for $4. This works out for the restaurant and the regulars, and like you said they can just hand out those cards to anyone for any reason.
Plus having special cards feels corporate, not homey. Looking at an ID for locals discount is pretty well trodden ground.
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.
At best, it can be a target of a GoFundMe or something - but that's just to pay operating costs. The store itself has to operate like a normal capitalist store for the concept to work, accepting customers, charging money, etc. There is no concept in our society of a non-profit burger joint.
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.
To give an example, charge exorbitant prices for burgers knowing there are still people desperate enough to try the burger that paying $30 is fine and then use the extra revenue to give back to the community, possibly by paying for the local soccer club to get a new clubhouse, or possibly by providing free/subsidized burgers at local events where the crowd will be local. In this way the business stays open and isn't overwhelmed by the demand, while not completely isolating itself from the local community that the owner wants to give back to.
It's possible there was something he could have done to make things good again... if he wasn't too burned out by the experience to figure it out and carry it out.
Maybe a better approach would be to jack prices up sky high for tourists and open another burger joint with a different name for locals.
Did they really make the place successful though? I don't see what exactly they contributed to the business. Had the locals not liked the food they probably would never have returned and would have also told all their friends never to go there.
The food was merely okay. The story was that it was cheap and decent, not good. But as I stood looking at the staff I couldn't help thinking that it would be better for everyone if they raised their prices $2 a plate and just slowed down.
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.
Your old customer base was hopefully working, but your new customers expect the words greatest burger. Can you deliver on that hype?
The owner above payed month of utilities for an empty restaurant and has to make a sizeable investment to cater to that new customerbase.
Unless you didnt have a functioning business model beforehand, this is a real curse and puts your livelihood at stakes.
If you’re a restaurateur, you probably don’t even live near that restaurant. But this advice is tantamount to: tell your friends and everyone who helped you get where you are that they’re too poor for you, now.
edit: To give another example, I have a kebab shop in my neighborhood who will not take any orders by phone let alone online. They dont have flyers or a web presence. Its a small street faced window run by an immigrant family who keeps the booth open throughout the day, from 11 to 11 longer or shorter depending on when they are out for the day. Most of the time the place is empty but during mealtimes there is regularly a line for half an hour. For the area, this is extremely well. And they sit right next to two other kebab shops, a pizza place and two asian places with mostly no line, literally the street down in 3 minute walking distance.
The reasonable thing would be to close the shop in the afternoon and take orders in advance, but thats not what they want for their shop. They want to talk and be a place where people meet, despite them not having any tables and not serving any drinks except a tea on the house from time to time.
And their food is absolutely amazing. Home made sauce and bread, it is worth the wait or to eat at 4pm in the afternoon. They dont let them self get rushed and it is always an amazing meal.
At the point where you're running 20 tables or more for three rounds every night (plus mabybe 2x lunch) you stop caring about making more money. Because if money were that important, you would have gone into investment banker, not chef.
Plus restaurants tend to get into and out of favour. IT'
And everyone hates tourist. Seriously: if you work anywhere close to tourists, you will hate work because it's full of tourists. Then you take a vacation and start hating yourself.
Get creative you're now a destination restaurant and can charge $50+ a burger. Or go out of business I guess.
Imagine you were taking a trip to Dallas. You're taking PTO, paying for flight/hotel, and so on.
Are you really going to waste time buying a local's 30% off card on ebay that you will use once a year? Maybe once in your life? No way.
Even if you did, what is the result? A handful of people hustled you for a few bucks, but still generated profit for your restaurant.
Someone that is only going to go there once or twice? Then it won't cause a problem.
Someone that isn't a local, but goes to the place over and over anyway? Consider them an honorary local.
The whole idea is that non-locals are probably going to buy 1 burger per year or perhaps lifetime.
These kind of people don't fiddle with ebay and paying a random guy just to get 25% off of a burger that they will use once.
Presumably it would also expire, so it would be that locals loss rather than the restaurants.
If I were Stanich, I would raise the prices but also offer reusable vouchers/coupons to all past customers, friends, and family so they can pay the original prices.
I can guarantee you there are famous NYC restaurants in my neighborhood where I can get a table even if there are lines out the door or reservations are completely full.
You just have to live in the neighborhood and actually put some effort forth to introduce yourself to staff and maybe go occasionally when you know it will be slow (like during a snowstorm or holiday). It does require a good manager/host though.
P.S. And then when the next "top N burger joints in America" list comes out that everyone goes crazy for and all the burger-tourists start going somewhere else now you've lost your local customer base and you might go out of business regardless. Raising prices works well if you're a fine dining establishment in a dense metro area and that's the kind of business you expect to run. It doesn't work so well for burger joints or BBQ shacks elevated to a bizarre level of temporary fame.
Then lower your prices again to match demand. It's almost as if prices aren't set in stone.
I seriously doubt it. Do you have any empirical evidence for this?
Maybe you truly can do that, but it is not easy.
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
The restaurants we love, we love for the entire experience, and price is part of that experience. Even for people who can happily afford the higher price, it still results in a different experience. The people around you in the restaurant will be different. Your perception of the value of the meal will be different. Your willingness to try more adventurous items on the menu will be different. The whole thing is not just quantitatively different, but qualitatively different.
A $20 burger is not a $10 burger, regardless of how the two are prepared. If the former is not the experience the chef wants to create for their customers then, no, just raising prices doesn't "solve" the problem.
And as the original commenter noted, you could put coupons in the local newspaper and the library and whatever else, so the locals have access to burgers at the old price.
Ask any family restaurant/bar owner in a seasonal tourist destination and they’ll explain why locals must be one of the first considerations before you make drastic changes. Particularly if an important reason for opening was a personal preference to serve locals over tourists in the first place.
It’s incredibly interesting to see how few people understand that someone may open a business with priorities other than massive growth potential.
It really is interesting, but hardly surprising, given the demographics of this forum. :)
Raising prices sounds like the best strategy. You keep raising until the workload returns to normal. If you feel you're serving the wrong customers, you now have time to figure out how to fix that. Otherwise, if people eventually get turned off by the price and your workload goes down, you drop the price, and keep dropping it until you reach a stable point with just the right amount of orders.
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 the time, such as raising your prices or other ways of limiting the influx. Besides that not being fair to your original customers.
Hard problem, the internet mob is like a bunch of locusts, 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.
Other ones off the top of my head: air travel (popularity has led to fairly low prices, even if the experience has suffered for those looking for bargain basement prices), computers, coffee, beer.
What happens when nature goes viral - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itjc14Fm-gs
Speaking of not fair, I'm imagining a scenario where prices fluctuate by the hour or by the customer. Maybe it's not unfair, but just different.
Dynamic pricing is the right answer for this, but people don't like it and it's hard to execute technically.
I'd have no shame about asking for some free haircuts as well. Your review is probably responsible for increasing their business 1.3-1.5x
It would be funny, although not culturally normal, to see companies start to review customers.
Too much success too quick is always bad I guess.
I've trekked to enough "Best <X> in <Y>" places and been the "outsider" grumbling waiting outside in a giant lineup (or being at the front of the line at 9am), to know that it is a cherished experience while travelling, giving you a piece of local flare, and like many problems a focussed effort could help it scale properly.
It reminds me a lot of the dilemma facing graphics card makers recently, wherein the cards keep getting bought up by cryptocurrency miners. If they raise prices, they're pricing out of the regular customers who will stick around after the cryptocurrency mining dies down, and if they raise their production capacity too much then they will be left with massive overcapacity with things die down.
These stories also keep coming out of various businesses in Europe with the influx of Chinese and Indian tourists, eager to pay them but the businesses have no infrastructure to "shape" the inflow of customers.
If this is indeed a big problem, this is also a big opportunity.
Nathan convinces the owner of a burger joint in LA to go on a popular local radio station and promise that he has the best burger in LA, and offer $100 to anyone who eats there and disagrees. The comedy in this is apparent to pretty much anyone, but people will still refer to different restaurants as 'the best'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A-wUs-fofs
Hell - my own narcissism even overrides most things. My own cooking is often my favourite thing in the world.
And on the other side of things - high expectations or rote habit often kill pleasures for me. If I try too hard to enjoy something it blows away like dust.
I walked 7 miles home from work through 6 inches of slush last night. Right after that came the best beer I've ever tasted.
And, no I have not, because I don't want to wake up at 5:00am while on vacation and drive to a crowded parking lot to watch the sunrise in the cold with 80-100 strangers.
Why is it that we all have to have the same experiences?
If your life looks perfect on FB/Insta/Snap I just assume you are empty inside. Well "produce" our lives a little but some people go so far out of their way I just don't understand how people can follow that shit and not see how vapid/fake/BS it all is. Like serious this [0] fuck right off. I in no way endorse or support the backlash she got but it just all seems so stupid and wasteful to me.
[0] https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/blogge...
What if the mechanics of camera/social photo apps rewarded people for taking original photos?
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/camera-wont-let-take-photo-eve...
We all want a magical experience in a drive-thru window, and we fear missing out. If you live on the east coast, you could go to the Caribbean cheaper and quicker, but it's not Hawaii!. The Caribbean is beautiful, but Hawaii is magical! At least, that's what we're told by the travel agencies. Then you arrive and realize it's basically the Caribbean with a Wal-Mart and better hiking (and more rain)
Maybe one day. I guess I'd rather pack in as much surfing as I can.
I don't feel I've missed out on the Haleakalā sunrise thing, I just think it's funny that that is always the first thing people ask.
Some of them seem to almost discount my trip when they found out I didn't go.
I went to Haleakalā after being recommended to go after a visit to the big island. The early morning that I went via a local outfitter, it was raining cats and dogs, visibility nada, so it was wet and uncomfortable. I had opted for the ride down the mountain on bikes option which seemed adventurous at the time. Riding down fearfully slick roads and switchbacks with limited visibility and having the bike ride leaders joke about having to pull guests out of ravines with ropes did not help. But that was my personal Haleakalā experience.
Poor management is what caused the shutdown. Stanich knew about the problems and didn't fix them. Instead he went around apologizing about the problems that he shoulds have fixed in the first place.
The only reason anybody cares about that reviewer's opinions are because he has a platform and people are desperate to belong to something, anything.
However, there are lots of definitely mediocre restaurants out there that would not make it to anyone's top ten list. So I'd have every reason to visit a restaurant on this sort of list as opposed to visiting a restaurant at random.
Personally, I'm OK with either grilled or raw onions (though I prefer raw). But there are lots of characteristics with few if any fans - soggy, overdone, cooked lettuce, etc.
The big thing is most restaurants don't have any reason to work at being good not to mention great. Most restaurants just soak up whoever happens to be in the area and has a preference for their type of food and so mediocrity not pretending to be anything else rules. Good-enough food at a good-enough price to make the owner a good-enough profit is it.
Blasphemy! The one true greatest burger has both kinds.
Also, the grilled onions are between the meat and cheese so that the latter holds them in place.
I disagree. It's not about "belonging to something". I agree with what the author wrote in the article. The problem is with the paradox of choice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice). Decisions are paralyzing when people are faced with a myriad of choices. "Best of lists" fix this problem for many people, which is why they are so universally popular across industries. Now instead of picking from a 1000 choices, you have 10.
What I find really sad about all this, though, is that it sacrifices the value of our own personal narrative and preferences. The idea that there is a "best" restaurant implies that my experience at it is irrelevant since "best" is apparently a customer-independent property.
That in turn implies that my own stories around which meals I loved are not worth telling to others. I think that's a terrible perspective. I'd much rather read an article about the top ten meals someone had — a narrative about them experiencing the food and not about the food itself — because it's ultimately people that matter.
"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.
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
:)
There are so many variables.
Really? Yes, people are different, but this automatically invalidates you from any lists at all. Raw onions. Wow. Why not just eat an onion
"Or is this just what we are now -- a horde with a checklist and a camera phone, intent on self-producing the destruction of anything left that feels real, one Instagram story at a time?"