How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt My Business
munchies.vice.com
munchies.vice.com
Consider the gentleman from New Zealand who made reservations via an email to the owner five weeks in advance, spent the afternoon walking around downtown LA to avoid rush hour traffic, and then showed up only to be told that they were closed for a wine tasting. Or, there was the reviewer who got the point of the restaurant, but still found the flavours rather difficult. Or heck, consider the endless comments about how poor the service was.
I take a couple of things away from this:
- No matter how interesting your product is, you still need to please your customers.
- When you're emotionally invested in something, it is tempting to set aside criticism as being gratuitously negative. But, sometimes your critics are your best advisers.
there can be too many customers with half the tables empty.
And... my experience? when you are small, if you are really good at that one thing you do, it's mostly okay that you suck at the other aspects of the business. As you scale, this becomes less and less true, you need someone at least minimally competent in the other business stuff, and "just hiring someone" is a lot harder than it sounds, when you are hiring for a skillset that you don't have. Scaling is hard to the point where it sometimes make sense to set a limit and try not to scale above a certain point.
So when people are heaping hate on one of my projects, I am now starting to think of it as a failure of messaging on my behalf. If someone says something like "don't reinvent the wheel", it's because I've failed to explain my constraints that prevent me from using existing systems. Maybe one of those constraints is "I don't like that particular system". But whatever it is, it probably needs to be explained if someone is bitching about it.
I might rather people hated my projects than completely ignored them. Getting ignored sucks a lot. Receiving hate tells me people were actually excited by the idea and I was on to something, but that I didn't do something right. I can't figure anything out from getting ignored. It's just blowing in the breeze at that point.
(All of this is to your point and ironically..)
Btw it looks cool but if I can't easily scroll your homepage you have lost me as a potential client.
Filing a defect report is one thing, complaining about the very idea of having an animated background, yelling at me for being a "typical front-end dev, doesn't test in Firefox" or something like that, that's the sort of negative criticism I'm talking about.
My point was, even the people who are engaging in dismissive, negative criticism need to at least be a cause for consideration. You might not take them at their word, but it should trigger a process of introspection.
People hate animated backgrounds for the reason you just mentioned, it causes a slow experience. But I didn't know it was causing a slow experience for you. You are correct that it is better to not have a slow experience than to have an animated background, but maybe I can have both. I wouldn't have known there was a problem until you complained (not that I don't test my projects, just that particular site is not very high on my priority list because it is not and has never been a source of business for me). So now I get to make the choice of either improving the animation or removing it entirely, just because someone complained and I didn't just dismiss it as "haters gonna hate".
Thanks for getting Taylor Swift stuck in my head for the next hour, by the way! Not the worst problem to have in my book, though! ;)
Take, for example, a recent review on my iPad app:
As a creative professional I can tell you that this is junk. Today I had an important meeting and this app acted up to the point the client laughed hard for how bad it was. Stay away!
EDIT: Anazon->Amazon. Feedback to Apple: Really? Really?
I tried that, but I got really burned out.
Someone writes a one-liner "I hate byuu's idea for X", and I write up an article explaining my motivations and rationale, spending three hours on it, listing a dozen cases where I explain why what I am doing is essential, and not just whimsical fancy. They ignore my response. And two weeks later, I see the same person with the same one-liner posting it somewhere else.
I find most people don't want to understand your reasoning. They simply want things exactly as they want it, or they're not happy. I never get anyone willing to have an open dialogue where they're actually open to trying new things, even though I am open to hearing any true criticisms that go beyond appeal to tradition (we'd all be using DOS if that were a valid argument.)
Very thankfully, in my case, I'm not selling a product, and I'm not funded by advertisements. And as such, I can get away with choosing to ignore certain types of criticism. I'm very empathetic to those who can't.
I have a very good friend who quit his job in finance three years ago to focus on photography. (It's been a significant improvement to his health and happiness, but that's a story for a different day.) He has been doing a lot of very abstract photography, lately. He shoots and develops his own film in a pinhole camera he built, and the imagery is intentionally motion-blurred. He gets heaps of praise from other photographers, and tons of vitriol from randos on the internet. It's all of the very predictable, "this is bullshit, anyone could do this," kind. That's not true at all, the images are much harder to make than you would think. But he has not replied to the critics directly. Instead he works on making the images more obviously about the sort of dream- or ghost-like qualities he's chasing.
It is so easy to just dismiss a critic. "They don't understand what I'm trying to do." What's harder is building that explanation of what you're trying to do in what you're trying to do. It makes us better to not completely dismiss the critics.
And you do it for the next person. You've pretty much lost a person forever if they get to the level of vitriol. Don't bother with replying to them.
For me, I have a project that I care very much about. I want to make it work, because it has things in it that I want in my life. I haven't ever cared about my side projects as much as this one--which has more to say about this particular project than my past projects, I cared very much about some of them. Which is why I have to be honest about it. I can't delude myself about it, because I certainly won't be able to delude anyone else about it. I don't have that kind of social media power.
Oh neat, I have a friend who develops his own pinhole photography as well! Here's one of his:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/12035849/Pinhole-Photography
I don't think he builds his own cameras, but he definitely tweaks the hell out of them. I can't really understand most of what he says about it, but he clearly knows his stuff.
> What's harder is building that explanation of what you're trying to do in what you're trying to do.
Oh, definitely. I have a really hard time with explaining my intentions in a way that promotes their strengths without it coming off as arrogance. And dealing with negativity only seems to amplify my desire to stress the strengths, so it's kind of a negative feedback loop.
Nonetheless, I gave it a shot and tried writing up another article about my niche. We'll see how it goes I guess.
He basically planned his holiday in advance, sensible if you want to make the best use of limited time in an unfamiliar location.
I'm not sure what you mean wrt McDonalds...
Then you talk about an example where they forgot to cancel a reservation, and one where the restaurant was closed and a customer didn't call ahead to check before driving for an hour (why is driving for an hour through rush hour something that reflects on the restaurant?). Then one guy who didn't like the food style.
None of those point even remotely to a restaurant being in crisis, so let's look at your last piece of evidence - claims of poor service. Is the service poorly rated on average compared to other similar restaurants? How did you check? Based on how much more poor their service is compared to other similar restaurants, how did you determine that it is a sign of crisis rather than a weakness of the restaurant? (There are many places with good food, but weaker service, which we do not call 'in crisis')
Also worth noting is that I live in LA, where Alma is (was). LA is basically a "nothing is set until you call to confirm it" kind of town. It's the entertainment industry culture, and its effect on places like hotels and restaurants. There is always a danger that aomeone more important calls and bumps you off the list. Especially at hot restaurants. (Hell, I'd bet at least half the maitres d' in this city are on the take.)
Not saying I blame the customer at all in this case. I really don't know the circumstances. Just saying that reservations in LA are weird.
The problem is that Ari thought that Alma's humble origins mattered to people coming in for a good meal such that they would somehow obscure some pretty big problems with the restaurant. I can't imagine ever excusing a product's flaws simply because the founder had difficulty raising capital, and no other restaurant has these deluded expectations.
In this case, the founder didn't listen to his customers — instead, he chose to rest on his MVP laurels and never move beyond. We appreciate that you were able to open the place on $50k, but now that you're more well known, could you possibly stop ripping people off with Eastern European wine that didn't pair with any of your tasting menu? I understand that your approach required an "us vs the world" mentality, but perhaps you could improve service that was spotty bordering on rude. When your customers dislike the tasting menu because it lacks many standout flavors beyond the snacks that initially made you famous, it's advisable to step up your dishes, not simply change to an ala carte menu and start blaming the Yelpers.
From what I can tell, he raised his own funds to start Alma. Before that, he was fired from an internship at a James Beard award winning restaurant, worked unpaid at a community garden and few other places until he just up and left. The article notes that he's never appeared on any of the cooking shows or anything, and that he was about to have to start working in someone else's place before the permanent real estate "opened up" in Downtown LA (which makes no sense if you've been to the neighborhood).
Point being, it's easy to sound blasé about giving a fuck what other people think of your cooking, but it masks the fact that this guy has never had to answer to anyone about some very obvious flaws in his cooking and business skills. Instead, blame your customers and their "shit talking."
Good riddance.
Perhaps it's my disdain for wine snobs or anyone else that takes ridiculous things seriously, but I find your comment extremely distasteful - especially the quoted part. Unless he is actively misrepresenting the origin or brand of the wine, he isn't "ripping people off". He simply made a menu choice that you vehemently disagree with. If the negative Yelp reviews are similar to your rant here, he absolutely has a point in blaming the positive articles about the restaurant for bringing in the wrong kind of clientele with outlandish expectations and a penchant for publicly deriding others' lifework.
I can't tell from the grandparent comment whether he's grousing about a bad choice he made personally or some botched tasting menu pairings - but if he got the tasting menu with the wine pairings and the wine didn't match, then yeah, he absolutely got ripped off. Expecting two things the restaurant recommends together to actually go well together isn't an 'outlandish expectation' at all.
I am curious, though, why you seem so insistent that it's the commenter at fault, to the point of calling out his 'sociopathic tendencies'. Do you really think there's no way for a restaurant to screw up a wine pairing?
I guess I don't think it's that important of an issue regardless of whether it was screwed up or not - certainly not enough to publicly cheer the demise of someone's business. There are reasons that some restaurants should be closed. Food handling practices that endanger public health is one example. Serving wine from the wrong part of Europe at a restaurant where the food is critically acclaimed, however, isn't one - at least in my opinion.
This kind of extreme overreaction to criticisms of people who have incredibly opportunities ahead of them no matter what they did wrong or failed at is just silly.
Again, my point is that conflating the fate of the restaurant with the fate of its owner (as with any business) is the extreme reaction. The owner is fine, the restaurant is closed. Does it suck for the owner? Yes. Is it career ending or livelihood ending? Not by a long shot. Is it part of opening a business? Absolutely. Most businesses fail. And restaurants fail far more often than other businesses to boot. I have no doubt this owner knew all that going in.
We would all do better to break out of this 1950s idea that losing a job or closing a business is cataclysmically bad. It's disappointing for the founders, but everyone involved will most likely find something else just as good very soon.
Capital doesn't simply line up for restaurateurs because there is no big exit. The most you can hope for is to make a profit by the time your lease runs out, and maybe pay yourself a salary.
And while capital does not (and really should not) line up easily for restaurateurs, I would still argue that someone who can raise capital once has a well above average chance of being able to raise it twice, regardless of the risk of the venture. This also assumes the only choice a business owner has when their business fails is to start another.
I agree with you about the current problematic trope of losing a job = destitute for life, but at the same time we seem to have converted every small-businessperson into a '[startup] founder'.
If you are going out on a limb and pairing with wine from a nontraditional region or using a uncommon grape, I expect an amazing pairing that could only be accomplished with this more unique wine.
Really? That's what they did?
June 2015: "If you add another $18,000 a month in legal fees ... we just can't absorb it on our own."
October 2015: "We're still working with the other party to wrap up the lawsuit. But to maintain the restaurant at this point it would just continue to put us in a substantial amount of debt. [...] as small business owners, we won't be able to afford a trial, and we really can’t even afford to go through the proceedings leading up to a trail. The realization was that the only way to bring this all to a close is to dissolve the business and move on"
http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/10/alma-closing-interview.htm..., http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/06/alma-crowd-funding.html
This next article gives the other side of the story regarding the lawsuit.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/alma-lawsuit
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/...
"... they offered to set up a payment plan to reimburse the money he had spent on the restaurant."
Which goes to show - it's a bad idea to do anything before terms have been put down on paper! It is quite amazing when you first start doing business by yourself (as a contractor, entrepreneur, or even chef it seems) how often people "go back on their word".
What happens is that both sides have a different idea of the deal, probably picking on whatever hints were in the conversation to interpret them in the most favorable light possible; and in some cases, it's just a case of one side last-minute-changing the deal because they feel the situation has progressed to give them more leverage.
In this case, the disagreement could easily have been avoided if they had typed up a term sheet and preferably some kind of legally enforceable shareholder's agreement BEFORE the payments were made.
Now begins the PR battle as both sides will try and influence public opinion to protect their reputation.
Can you imagine that? Who is he, Stalin? (I'm giving Hitler the day off.)
Everyone thinks their opinion is important because the internet has made it easy for people to broadcast their complaints to the world (and yes, I realize I'm literally doing this right now). Review sites like Yelp exacerbate this by making everyone think they're a damn food critic.
Throw in a heavy dose of entitlement and its a recipe for disaster.
I haven't seen the negative reviews, but I read the article declaring Alma best new restaurant, and the article is focused a lot on the humble origins and surprisingly very little on the food. The author talks a bit on how some of the pairings were surprising, but more so because the author wasn't expecting it to be this good.
I'd like to see some of the actual negative reviews, but if that's the article that brought people in, it's not hard to imagine how some might take the declaration of "best new restaurant" as a challenge instead of as a claim.
If they all say this food is underwhelming then that's a wake up call to owner. Its tough feedback but it's real.
At the same time people do have a responsibility not to be a jackass. Don't name call, back up general comments with specifics, don't forget to point out what went well, etc.
The best example of these food nuts gone wild can be found in "Mexican" restaurants all over the country. Once a small cabal of folks decide that a place isn't "authentic" or not, forget about it... They'll be whining about the lack of fish tacos or whatever forever.
What I heard from them is that stuff like this is also part of the restaurant culture of different cities. The rap on NYC and LA is that they have competitive, take-down cultures (NYC more so than LA).
That's why they're better in the arts. In NYC, they tell you if you suck. In LA, they don't call you back if you suck. In SF nobody says anything and you can suck forever. Go to little theater or art openings and this is quite obvious.
Some of this gets to what you're looking for from a restaurant. If you're looking at food as an art form, and only want to spend time getting exposure to the very best of it, NYC may indeed be a better filter for you. If what you want is a Great Neighborhood Restaurant, which is perhaps Great in ways that make it distinctive regionally or even nationally, I think Chicago is a better bet than LA.
Also, look, let's be clear: NOBODY is arguing that there's a more important restaurant scene in the US than NYC's.
$50k means you're a neighborhood restaurant, most dive bars and sandwich shops cost more to open...
In LA opening a restaurant with only 50k is irresponsible mathematically. I say this having taken restaurant management courses with the goal of one day opening one myself.
It is true that restaurants are one of the most difficult businesses to start. It takes time to find your groove, and 50k no matter what neighborhood your in is not a lot of time. Most people in this situation would start with a food truck or save more.
I don't know anything about this particular restaurant but it seems like he's accidentally targeting the wrong audience. Wine pairing menus, fancy plating, an article in Vice, Kickstarter... none of these things strike me as targeting his desired customer, which is someone with modest expectations and expecting just dinner, not an event to review.
Edit: I wonder if there is a great opportunity for some disruption here. Well be tough do to overcome yelps moat. I would love to work on this!
(If that were the case, some of the negativity would be justified.)
This reminds me a little of Clay Shirky's article A Group is it's own worst enemy.
Not faulting in the restaurant owners (all businesses have growing pains), it raises thoughts about branding and how much "this is how we do it here" is as much about the holes in the walls at the restaurant as it is the food, and how that story was known and told.
Was the restaurant's message about who it was clearly known, before outside reviewers came in and interpreted their story and told their story for them? For me, a restaurant bootstrapped on so little money is remarkable and worthy of support, but it might not be for everyone.
Some things aren't meant to appeal to everyone and still be successful.
Link to essay: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/top-chefs-michelin...
I do feel bad that they had to shutdown, but I suspect the same thing that hurt them (the accolades) also helped them to land a gig in The Standard. I consider this a success for a young chef, even if it arrived via a perceived failure.
Whether or not Yelp and publicity helped or harmed them is debatable, but that doesn't change the fact that their restaurant wasn't anything spectacular to write home about.
There are many instances where a genuinely good product or service receives negative publicity (remember the original iPad anyone?), but is still a genuinely innovative product or service.
It just seems like they weren't able to deliver an exceptional restaurant experience.
yet, most of what i read irks me because of its raging, venting way. oh well, its not like i haven't written similar things because of bad experiences.
best of luck to this guy.
I'll only consider a bad review if you give me food poisoning. Cooking your food thoroughly isn't hard.
... Or if your service personally lost me real money. Then it's a legit "beware."
On a completely unrelated note, I'm so glad that western public opinion views this guys on the same level of evil.
If only russian public opinion was like that.
There are probably a lot of people on HN in academia who after publishing popular papers or gained some fame find themselves with targets on their back for criticism.
Anyone dealing with the pressure of criticism should read a very small book that contains 10 letters written by Rainer Maria Rilke to an aspiring poet who went to the same German military school he went to called Letters to a Young Poet. [1]
It starts with:
"I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings."
I did cook professionally for 17 years. I understand what this chef feels. However, I have learned to not care about what anybody feels or says about my dishes. I do not cook for other people. I cook for myself, because I enjoy the process, intensity, and experience of cooking and the food I make is what I would want to eat. Most of the time I find what I want to eat is also what other people want to eat and in the cases it is not they can move along to next restaurant because I don't care what they think.
The Phantom Menace features offensive racial stereotypes, terrible dialog, A poorly-executed subplot about a trade dispute, and characters that I personally could not and cannot identify with.
Is it fair to speculate that you were born in 1992, making you the 7 year old you refer to above? Search your feelings, zappo2938, you know this is a bad movie!
Do you have a recommendation on a specific edit?
[1] http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2011/11/11/the-star-wars-sa...
(I'm not one, but I am empathetic enough to imagine how they feel.)
Objectively it's not perfect, but every movie means something different to everyone and registers on a different level with each person.
So you're free to criticize it and rate it based on how well or poorly it portrays the things you think it stands for.
But other people have opinions too. And unless you're a filmmaker worth a damn yourself, your opinion doesn't count for anything.
When you practice something, you usually don't practice it in order to impress others who practice the same thing. Unfortunately, this ends up happening in many cases (usually with abstract things such as pure mathematics or classical music, where appreciation is difficult without context). But in most cases, you produce things that can be appreciated by others, regardless of their interest in the process. If you knit your friend or loved one a cool scarf, they don't necessarily need to be interested in knitting to enjoy wearing it. And if you're a great baker, someone doesn't need to know anything about baking to enjoy your creations.
All the same, ordinary people can have valid negative opinions of things that they aren't proficient in. When a scarf has numerous dropped stitches or a pie doesn't taste quite right, many people can make observations and express their distaste. Just because they aren't knitters or bakers doesn't mean that their critique doesn't "count for anything." They might not be able to pinpoint the part of the process where something went wrong, but that still doesn't invalidate their opinion.
In this case, the intended audience of The Phantom Menace was not film makers, it was ordinary people (in contrast to say Birdman, which may be easier to appreciate if you have some insight into the dramatic world). Maybe it was meant to appeal to a younger crowd (I enjoyed it when I first saw it). Maybe it was meant to appeal to fans of the original trilogy. But the fact remains that aaronbrethorst is entitled to his opinion and his opinion is perfectly valid.
P.S. I also don't like The Phantom Menace, but that doesn't really matter.
I wasn't passing judgement on the films whether they were good or bad. I was pointing out like the chef, after Lucas gained popularity, people started to attack him and his films with harsh criticism. Maybe the criticism of the chef is legitimate, maybe is earlier stuff was better than his latter stuff -- I don't know. My point is that criticism is an inevitable part of creativity and people can't make works of art to satisfy criticism because they will crush under the pressure. If the motivation for this chef is the applause, feeling accepted, and getting accolades, he is going to have a nervous breakdown.
This chef, George Lucas, Mark Zuckerberg, and before him Bill Gates can't catch a break from the shit talkers. I'm not passing judgement. But if you base your self esteem on prestige be prepared to have people tear that prestige and your self esteem away with it.
As if Disney executives were shocked to find a bunch of 30-40 year olds lining up for late showings of The Force Awakens on Thursday?
Star Wars may be made to appeal to children in addition to the adult audience, but it's pretty obviously not "for children" exclusively. That's especially true of the prequels and now the sequels, which are obviously made to cash in on the nostalgia of people who grew up with Star Wars in the 80s.
If a bunch of adults complain that the prequels don't speak to them, it's because they're fully aware that their childhood nostalgia is being exploited for cash, and the exploiters couldn't even be bothered to do a good job of it.
That's objectively false, though. Star Wars marketing quite clearly targets both children and adults; much more so than, say, Pixar films, which are marketed solely at children despite arguably being more mature (in the "thoughtful and intelligent" sense, not the "sex and violence" sense) than Star Wars.
You're actually trying to say that adults who like Star Wars are childish, and you're welcome to your opinion. But if you choose to back up your opinion with facts, you need to pick facts that are true. There are many exclusively kid-targeted properties that attract sneering attention from adult fans (mostly TV cartoons, in my experience), but Star Wars doesn't fit.
[1] http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero's_journey.htm#Memo
[2] http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-the-p...
By the way, I was 10 when the Phatom Menace came out, and I can tell you that I found it very disappointing. For a film supposedly targeted at children, it has a lot of scenes involving politics, both at the Senate and at the Jedi Council. And no, Jar Jar wasn't funny, not even then.
At no point did I say the movie was good or bad, only that it was for children and most of the children I know loved it. So I think it was on target.
My original comment was about handling criticism. I think that George Lucas will continue to make movies not caring about what people think about them. I'll let him speak for himself on the subject. [1]
[1] https://thescene.com/watch/vanityfair/george-lucas-on-why-he...
Ah, so the cowardly Japanese business guy stereotype complete with stupid accent, that's okay, because the film 'is for children'?
The concept that the Star Wars films are just for children is just nonsense that is meant to deflect criticism. They're clearly meant to appeal to all ages. Hell, the new star wars film is rated PG-13 (as was the previous one); children aren't supposed to be able to watch it.
Please notice something about the average age of the people lined up to see Star Wars on opening weekend in 1977.
http://ww1.hdnux.com/photos/21/46/45/4614480/9/920x1240.jpg
There are a lot of non-children there. George Lucas, at some point, decided that Star Wars was entirely targeted at children. He was wrong. From the very beginning, Star Wars has had fans of all ages.
The only thing in the entire original trilogy that I can think of being "for children" is the Ewoks.
From ep.3 of the interview between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers at Skywalker Ranch 1988:
"JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we know what they do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be, you know, a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they’re naked except for stripes of white down that has been stuck on their bodies, and stripes with their men’s blood. They used their own blood for gluing this on. And they’re swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voice of the spirits, and they come as spirits. The boy will try to take refuge with his mother; she’ll pretend to try to protect him. The men just take him away, a mother’s no good from then on, you see, he’s no longer a little boy. He’s in the men’s group, and then they put him really through an ordeal. These are the rites, you know, of circumcision, subincision, and so forth."
I for one completely support we stop coddling privileged children at Yale.
or just watch this bit here. Which highlights the soap opera style blocking.. goto 1:20:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABcXyZn9xjg&index=1&list=PLJ...