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Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that actually speaks against the story, though. The story is: we started small to do our own thing, then a national review blew us up and we couldn't handle the stress in order to scale the business. A lot of the yelp reviews sound like scaling issues, especially since the great reviews are interspersed with the bad: they were capable of delivering great experiences just not consistently.

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The second paragraph says "the restaurant was never, ever full." So it seems like they expected to handle more business, and in fact the lack of business shut them down. Maybe they had problems with the growth, but if they were never full then they really shouldn't have. Restaurants with growth problems need to serve food quickly so they can get people in and out to make room for more people, this restaurant apparently never had those problems.

The negative reviews could be why it was never full. I wonder if there are consultants in the restaurant business that can help places like this through the wave of people that are more interested in eating at an acclaimed restaurant than trying some small new place that opened up nearby.

You pay the Yelp ransom and make the problematic reviews disappear.

there's number of tables and then there's number of people working there and how much they can handle.

there can be too many customers with half the tables empty.

Reminds me of a local restaurant here. First time I went, shortly after they opened there where hardly any people there and I had one of the better meals I've had at that (low) price point. I promptly told everybody how awesome the place was and they got a glowing review in a local paper. A few month later they had tripled the number of tables they had, where packed, and the food and service was dire. Haven't been back since.

Yeah, that's a fair point, actually.

A "not full" restaurant scenario can be a scheduling algorithm issue -- "we need a 4 top at 7:30 pm;" meaning everyone who comes in between opening and 7:30 pm sees it empty. Multiply across the entire space, and you can get bad utilization while "100% booked."

Yeah. I mean, loving to do one aspect of the business is a huge advantage when running that business... but it's not the whole of the business. there's still all that other bullshit.

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.

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