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Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

Really fantastic achievement and a really down to earth take on food - good to see Michelin not adopting a stuffy elitist stance on their awards.

I shudder, however, when I think of the queues to try this tasty goodness. For reference, queues can easily top 90 mins if a hawker stall is locally well reviewed! And just over the sea, the queues for Tim Ho Wan (Michelin star dim sum in Hong Kong) are also already oppressively long (1-2 queues). Bookings are non-existent (it's a street stall after all).

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Queues like that always make me wonder if the restaurant is charging enough. If demand is outstripping supply, perhaps they should raise the prices until they have _just_ enough customers. Otherwise it seems like they're throwing money away and not capitalizing on success.

It's the Pulp Fiction $5 shake; if your food is good enough people will certainly pay more for it, even if the price seems absurd at first.

Note: I'm speaking from an American perspective, where it would be seen as odd to leave money on the table. In other cultures I'm sure the pride of having good food and happy customers outweighs profit.

I agree, but enough people don't that it can quickly turn a community, or portion of it, against the business.

There's also the desire to not price out the loyal customers that got you to where you are.

This is pretty astute.

Theoretically, the owner could probably get away with charging quite a lot more. If he were a cynical man/short-termist he could double/triple his prices (possibly even 10x his prices) and still be turning away business in the next couple of weeks while the hype train is running. The spectrum of prices for food in Singapore is pretty wide, you can easily have a meal for anywhere from 4SGD to 200+SGD so there would still be people up for trying Michelin-quality chicken rice if he suddenly started charging 20SGD for a meal.

That will definitely rub the community up the wrong way, given that hawker food is very much deeply entwined with the local community and relies heavily on regulars. The owners are often from the community too so such behaviour would incite feelings of "casting aside your roots".

Would seriously love to give this a try though, when I think of michelin food I tend to think of Heston-style experimental cuisine, which pushes the boundaries of food and employs novel cooking techniques. This type of food is labour intensive though and doesn't really work when one guy in a stall is serving 180 chickens a day. Hawker food done right is like the pinnacle of home-cooking so would be good to taste first-hand how good this is!

One reason might be too attract a certain kind of clientele. I know AirBnB people who charge less than what the market will bear, because they know that at a higher price point customers will be much more demanding - both because of the psychological impact of paying more, but also because the kind of people who can afford $100/night are likely to be older and more picky.

Similarly, by charging less and having a line out the door you get to enforce standardization and other nice things on your customer base.

My experience with AirBnB is opposite.

The higher the price I charged, the nicer, cleaner, more-accomodating, courteous, and non-demanding the clientele.

The lowest-price guests were rude, uneducated (scratching non-stick pans with forks, for example), noisy, ungracious, and otherwise a huge pain.

Likely because people paying higher price points have ample cash and aren't watching every penny they spend.

I agree that it is an American perspective, but not everyone shares it. Case in point: my wife offers horseback riding lessons and is very good at it. She is recommended enough that new clients have said "you got such good recommendations that I wasn't sure I could afford you."

Yet she charges under $40/hour even though I remind her that she could easily get north of $60/hour based on what I've seen people will pay. Her response: "I want to make it accessible to people." Great motivation, but poor profit.

I should add, though, that part of it is what another poster mentioned below: beyond a certain price point you tend to get a class of customer that's simply annoying to deal with.

Secret to Tim Ho Wan is to get there before rush times! Went at like 4:30 for an early dinner and had no wait. Amazing.

According to my Photos.app timestamps I went at 5:30PM and there were no lines at all, too.

I actually didn't came out that impressed - sure, the BBQ Pork Buns definitely lived up to their reputation and are worth the trip alone, but the rest of the menu was kind of a disappointment.

I did spend the previous week in Bangkok though, eating almost everything in sight, so my heightened expectations might have had something to do with my impressions.

Agree it's more about the individual dishes rather than the entire menu, but their prawn dumplings (har gau) are also spot on.

Photos of menu I took say that I did have them too, but I can't say they were memorable.

The only two dishes from Tim Ho Wan that I _really_ remember are BBQ Pork Buns and the steamed egg cake.

Looking at the photos now — I remember thinking toasts filled with kaya were interesting too. But none of shrimp or pork dumplings, neither any of the vermicelli or steamed rice were notable.

I agree. The stall Bourdain went to, across the street at Maxwell's, has always super long queues. Not 90 mins but still a pain. I'm glad most of the other stalls are usually not far off on their quality..

Given the multitude of good quality food you can get in Singapore (and presumably also HK) I cannot imagine that there's a hawker stand worth waiting 90 minutes for. Am I missing something?

That's pretty true - quality of food in HK and SG really is at another level for certain cuisines (though options for decent European food are naturally fewer).

From what I've noticed, Asians seem to be more prepared to queue for a good meal.

Examples above aside, those in London need only to go to Kanadaya by Central St Giles to see queues galore.

Jury's out on whether this is a down to a great desire to experience good food or people being kiasu (fear of missing out)

> Really fantastic achievement and a really down to earth take on food - good to see Michelin not adopting a stuffy elitist stance on their awards.

This is kind of late to say this.

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