What It Costs to Open a Restaurant in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

What It Costs to Open a Restaurant in San Francisco

sf.eater.com

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During a team review last year, I remember mentioning that I wasn't "excited" by work per se, but that I didn't expect nor desire excitement from work. For me, books, traveling, and music are exciting, and I get a sense of value and self-worth from the relationships I build with other people. But I work in a big tech firm. A coworker of mine actually questioned whether I was in the right field, saying that a lot of the successful people in our industry are excited by work. I can't remember his exact wording.

Maybe I'd be able to work harder if I wrapped my self-worth up in my work, but I saw what that kind of attitude did to my father. He would come home drained and tired, and wouldn't be available during the week to do something like watch a TV show together. On the other hand, my mother had a fulfilling job, but she didn't have the same kind of emotional stake in it. She turned down a promotion because while it would have advanced her career, it wouldn't have served her interests as an individual.

"I understand it’s very unhealthy, but I base my self-worth off the success of my job." That's the quote at the bottom of the article. There's a gulf between knowing something is unhealthy and building a healthy life for yourself, something I wish more people would respect.

Honestly, I think it's healthy to not view work as part of yourself - but I think the people who do, know that as well.

I've got a job offer for a very nice job, doing software development next month. The pays great, the people, the are great. However, I'm desperately looking for a product design job - because it's 100% my dream. I am fully aware that it's not healthy to tie my self worth to my job, and I should focus on financial stability, and work / life ratio.

But i'd just feel so unfulfilled, and at the end of the day, I just can't help it. Being excited to get up in the morning and go to work, also means getting hurt when it goes wrong.

It's a perfectly valid decision to make, but I have a couple reservations.

First, when you say that it's 100% your dream, I can't accept that assertion at face value. Maybe this is cynical on my part, but the fact that your dream lines up so neatly with our cultural definitions of what it means to be successful is too suspicious to be a coincidence. So my cynical take on it would be that much your dream was given to you by other people, and only a small portion of it is truly yours. (There are rabbit holes here, for sure.)

My second reservation is that it's meaningless to "accept" that something is unhealthy without a solid understanding of the consequences of unhealthy behavior. I can accept the unhealthy consequences of eating a donut, because they're broadly familiar to me (an expanding waistline, elevated risk of heart disease in my future). I know people who have had heart attacks, I know people who are too heavy to comfortably hike the trails I love. But it's meaningless to accept that pouring yourself into your work is unhealthy unless you understand what the consequences are. I have friends who can barely enjoy being retired, even though they didn't really "enjoy" working, either. I have friends who have been depressed and unable to enjoy life for months after project failures. And I know people who have had panic attacks at school or work, panic attacks bad enough to call an ambulance.

There is no definition of free will that everyone can agree on, but in my book, understanding the consequences of our actions, and the ability to change our decisions as our understanding of consequences changes, are requirements for exercising free will.

People have a tendency to project themselves onto others and poorly conceive of the fact that it's ok for people to be different. Someone that "lives to work" and someone that "works to live" should be able to work together without thinking something is wrong with the other.

> He would come home drained and tired, and wouldn't be available during the week to do something like watch a TV show together.

Have you ever sincerely asked him if he did it because he had to or because it was his genuinely wanted to?

Some people may find the latter to be absurd, but I'm usually the same way during the weekdays.

> Have you ever sincerely asked him if he did it because he had to or because it was his genuinely wanted to?

The line between "had to" and "wanted to" is hard to see, because we internalize extrinsic motivation. However, I don't think the distinction between "had to" and "wanted to", or the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, is a useful distinction in and of itself. Rather, I would like to understand the reasons people have for their decisions, whether they had foreknowledge of the consequences, whether they had false beliefs that contributed to the decision, and for what reasons they think they made the right or wrong decision.

Perhaps that's just my perspective, but if I think he made the wrong decision, the fact that he wanted to make the wrong decision doesn't change that. And my judgment that a decision is right or wrong is based on decades of experience and earnest conversations that we still have to this day.

And underneath all that is my own system of values, which in my experience outlasts all my wants or desires. Rather than understanding whether I want to pour a bunch of energy into my work, I would rather understand how I judge the value of work compared to other things in life, because that judgment will stick with me longer than a fleeting desire.

And to further clarify things, I don't think it's wrong to make a decision on the basis of your own desires, but just that desires are an inferior basis for decisions.

I'm sure I haven't answered your question, but I hope this is a satisfactory explanation.

> ...just that desires are an inferior basis for decisions.

Inferior in what sense? I don't see that there's any other sensible basis for the decisions we make, regardless of outcome.

Adhering to a reasoned system of values sounds fundamentally like a driving desire in itself; some desires are simply less tangible than others.

Inferior to purely rational decisions not based on emotions?

For me for example, it was switching countries for which I had no emotional desire, I knew it would be hard, I will lose bunch of friends, but in the long run, it will help me in many ways. I can hardly name this decision as desire to move.

Looking back, I was more than 100% correct since it was probably best decision of my life despite all the drawbacks. But if I would listen only/mainly to my emotions, I would stay where I was before.

The thing is, I can do many/most decisions in my life on purely rational level (or so I like to think). I don't see this behavior around me much, in fact it's pretty rare. Same goes for opinions and attitudes - emotions change, cold hard facts remain the same (I must sound very unemotional, which is not true at all - I just can separate the pleasure of enjoying emotions from them taking control and making me do stupid/irrational decisions... don't know how to describe it better).

I think what we have here is a semantic disagreement over the definition of "desire". It sounds like your position might be similar to Frankfurt's? So when I say that "desires are an inferior basis for decisions", maybe that could translate as, "desires not based on value systems are an inferior basis for decisions". And when you say that desires are the only sensible basis for decisions, it doesn't mean that any desire is a correct basis for a decision (that would be absurd), so the question of whether he "genuinely wanted to" becomes a question of what his "genuine" desires are. It's nigh impossible for me to figure out what my own genuine desires are, so I can't conceive that I'd be able to figure out what my father's genuine desires are, and I wouldn't take his explanation of his own desires at face value. When we absorb cultural values we internalize extrinsic motivation, so the fact that a particular desire is intrinsic rather than extrinsic is meaningless if we are trying to figure out if it is genuine.

A chef is a kind of artisan. It also pays poorly for the amount of training that goes into it, the amount of work required daily, and all the risks.

It definitely takes a certain type of individual, and is a pointless career if you don't care about job satisfaction. But also keep in mind, job satisfaction means you provide a service where you make people happy, and can interact with your guests and see their happiness every day. You're not just a cog in a giant machine extracting money from advertisers or whatever.

The only real difference here is that software engineers make enough money and have enough stability that they can overlook an unfulfilling role or other problems. There's nothing about the roles that makes one or the other more satisfying or more like a cog in a giant machine.

Speaking as someone who's worked in both roles professionally.

"A fire department permit worker told Tortosa that it would take him two to four weeks to even look at Robin’s paperwork — or, for $536 ($134 per hour of overtime with a four-hour minimum), Tortosa could pay for him to look at it right now."

Can someone please explain to me how this isn't extortion and bribery?

The SFPD would be happy to look into it in two to four weeks... or for $536 ($134 per hour of overtime with a four-hour minimum), they can look at it right now... /s

> Can someone please explain to me how this isn't extortion and bribery?

Easy: it's part of the "pay per use" idea that a lot of people seem to think that government should have. Just like express toll lanes or a $7 express bus along side a $3.25 local with three times as many stops, if you want something and don't care how long it takes, choose the low- or no-cost option. If you want it RIGHT DANG NOW, choose the high-cost option.

It's not bribery, it's just business...and people seem to think that government should operate like a business, so we get this fee-for-service setup.

Well then there should be competition. Lol. We could write software that would probably handle that way more efficiently.

And it would never get deployed as you'd get union'd into nothingness.

>It's just business

It would be that if your tax money wasn't already paying for the guy's job. I see it as blatant bribery.

> paying for the guy's job

The taxes pay for a certain pace of work. Faster work requires more parallelism (more employees or better software) and thus more taxes.

Tax dollars are paying for the regular work on the FIFO queue; satisfying the expedite request without impacting the regular work on the FIFO queue requires additional hours of work to be done in the same time, which costs money that the taxpayers, through representatives, have elected not to pay for. Rather than prohibiting such extra work outright, they permit it to be done, at the requesters expense.

It's a two-tiered system that favors those with more resources to expend, but it's not bribery.

I'll be very surprised if anyone is actually pulling overtime to get your paperwork done. My guess is they just put it to front of the line and work continues as usual, overtime or not.

Even a business won't allow that. We are not talking about a business or a government agency charging more for expedited service. We are talking about individual employees doing it. You think a company will allow the sysadmin to personally charge people $500 extra to get their work done faster? They would be fired immediately.

But a sysadmin who frequently upsells customers for a $500 higher-tier service agreement might get a raise.

To wit: "Would you like fries with that?"

...Or we could raise tax so that a fire department can maintain enough personnel to handle paperwork in a timely fashion, while still doing the primary job of keeping people from dying.

Either way, somebody's gotta pay the bill.

> Can someone please explain to me how this isn't extortion and bribery?

Charging a service fee directly based on the additional cost to the agency, that goes to the agency to pay the costs rather than benefiting a decision-maker personally isn't extortion or bribery.

Now, one can certainly debate whether such user fees are a good idea, but that's a different question.

The decision maker is getting the juicy overtime pay.

I am presuming that the decision-maker instituting the policy is not the one doing the work, even if the individual informing you of the policy is. (And, generally, decision-makers authorized to make policy of this type wouldn't be eligible for overtime pay, in the first place.)

It's more tragedy of the commons. (Though yeah, it's right up to the line.)

I guess that's another way of describing NIMBY. Focusing only on the short term pennies society misses the overall value in actually having proper capacity for growth and spike uses.

It's that same kind of decision that tries to use overtime from other shifts to cover the gap of a worker's vacation (instead of actually having enough coverage that vacation is built in). I suspect the same effect also contributes to shafting part time workers who "can't get hours" or who get massively screwed (because they're not friends with the boss doing the scheduling).

This has nothing to do with NIMBY.

I agree with the comments stating that paperwork is not the fire department's main task they may already be at capacity, therefore this is a way to expedite the process.

Furthermore almost any endeavor that requires permitting takes a lot of time and a lot of waiting. Paying a few hundred dollars to make it happen 2-4 weeks more quickly is a screaming deal, especially for a business.

It depends on if the employee is truly too busy to handle this permit within the next 2-4 weeks or whether he just puts an arbitrary hold on all permits unless they pay the overtime fee.

FWIW, this isn't a one-off sketchy employee thing. It's actually an official city-sanctioned process. You can find the form for this online. http://sf-fire.org/file/2156 (PDF).

SF's not the only one that does this either. Delaware, for instance, offers one-hour expedited filing for some things if you're willing to pay $1000 ( https://corp.delaware.gov/expserv.shtml).

Thanks for posting the link. I am actually fine with this. In my reading of the article it seemed to be a sketchy one-off employee thing. I will amend my previous posts.

Well, honestly, that doesn't seem all that unfair. If the department is busy - or is known to have emergencies that drain resources - a 2-4 week timeframe for looking at it seems reasonable.

The very way they move someone up to the front of the line is by pushing other things aside, and possibly having folks work overtime to finish those very things no time. It would be reasonable to charge for such a thing. It really isn't much different from paying an extra fee to get a package more quickly or paying an extra fee to skip lines at airports or theme parks.

I'm a programmerby trade, but I own a restaurant in Vancouver. A friend owns 3. Several other friends own several other restaurants. It's a restaurant town.

Anyways, it costs from about $50,000 to $1,000,000 depending on the brand and the size of the room. Averaging around 100k for a non mom-n-pop sit-down place

Mine was about $40k, but it's tiny

Boneta (which was award-winning and loved) was cheap at around $70k

A big Boston Pizza, which is not a great place to eat, is gonna cost $200k+ or so, and a big Cactus Club could hit a mil

A higher price doesn't mean a better restaurant. In fact, I'd say a strict budget can make it more appealing due to creativity

May I ask about ROI and profit margin for the restaurant business?

If you make it, you make it big. My place makes $1M in revenue and ~10% profit

But if you don't blow up, the rent will kill you. My friend ran a good place, but it wasn't busy enough to pay the $30k/month rent

You mention it only cost you 40k to get started; how long did it take to reach $1MM in revenue/10% profits?

We did that in our 3rd year

Is 10% profit considered good? That seems to be a lot of work to just net 100k.

Is that net and your take home?

It's not truly net unless he's paying himself a market rate for the amount of work he's doing (which if he's a programmer, may very well be $0 if everything is run by staff).

10% margin seems great for a restaurant, especially if that's after paying the owner. I've worked in management in restaurants (diners, nothing fantastic but a great way to help pay for school) and profit margins in the low-to-mid single digits before paying the owner is not uncommon.

The economist and food critic Tyler Cowen often writes that the best food is typically in low-rent areas for precisely this reason. If fixed costs are low, then the restaurant can afford to focus on the quality of the food a bit more. This is particularly true for many varieties of ethnic food, where the restauranteurs may be immigrants without a lot of money to put up, but a rich knowledge of the food from their home country.

You see that a lot in Chicago were good restaurants are often found in weird parts of the city (I'm looking at you 42 grams)

> Boston Pizza

The real question, here, is what in the world is a Boston Pizza? Boston is known for many things -- baked beans, Sam Adams Lager, clam chowder -- but pizza is not one of them...

Exactly ;)

It's owned by one of the Canadian Dragon's Den (Shark Tank) Dragons. It's very generic, but at least consistent

I am used to think in cost per square meter, 700,000/116 sqm makes 6,000 US$ per square meter (if you prefer 700,000/1,250 makes 560 US$ per square foot).

That is a very, very high unit cost, even if SF is costly (but the US$ 8,000 month of rent seems to me like "appropriate" and all in all in line with "common" market values).

There is no reference to the number of seats for the new restaurant that I could find, but judging from:

> In the end, the 24 burnt orange leather chairs, 13 wood sushi bar stools, and nine tables — finished with the Japanese wood burning shou sugi ban method — set him back $19,760.

It should be 24+9=33 seats, which makes it an extremely small restaurant.

More than 20,000 dollars per seat is more than "high" as I see it it borders to "crazy".

Re-reading, mistake, my bad, 24 chairs + 13 stools =37, anyway almost 19,000 US$ per seat.

The best starter restaurant is those little lunch places with no seating: just a counter and a long line, you see them around downtown. Less risk on many levels. Every desk in those office towers is a person who needs to get lunch.

A friend in the business says that's usually the second restaurant business someone opens.

>Every desk in those office towers is a person who needs to get lunch.

Do you have any insight into why so many people buy lunch instead of bringing it? I've had a desk job for about 20 years now and I think I've bought lunch maybe 10 times when for some reason I wasn't able to make my lunch that day. It seems to me that buying lunch is more expensive and a person will probably eat more calories. I can't imagine it is a time issue, I probably spend less than 5 minutes putting a lunch together every day. That is far less than the time required to go somewhere for lunch. I assume it also isn't an issue of wanting to get away from the desk - most office places I've seen have lots of places a person can go and eat.

Socialisation is a big part of it - going as a team to grab lunch from a specific place; I'm sure there are plenty of anthropological studies on groups sharing food as part of bonding etc.

If you work downtown SF you are likely making 80-100k and have a bit of disposable income that you can spend socializing with other people while eating out.

At least to my palette, whatever I can buy is going to be tastier than what I can make. It's also fun to spend money on things and get out of the office.

For me, it's the exact reverse. :) I rarely buy a lunch that I couldn't have made better myself, for less money. But then again I also find cooking fun, whereas for others it's a time sink.

I love cooking. And sure I could, possibly, make a better burger or taco at home than the one I buy at the food truck, but I'm not going to be able to do so at work.

I wish I could cook at work!

There are plenty of meals that you can make in advance and reheat at work, but I see your point. Working remotely makes this a non-issue, though. :)

I go out for lunch basically every day.

Price: Within reason, who cares? I don't have a wife or kids or any obligations really. What good is a six figure salary if I have to micromanage what I'm spending on food?

Calories: Diets don't work, so who cares? If the meal is too big to finish then I'll take half home for dinner, like I did today.

Time: IDK if you eat a cold turkey sandwich for lunch every single day or what, but it would probably take me 30-60 minutes to make the things I often eat for lunch, if I even had the ingredients. I don't have the benefit of hours of kitchen prep before the restaurant opens.

Getting away: This is a big part of it actually. Not just leaving my desk, but leaving the office entirely. Walking around the downtown, remembering what it's like to be a human being in the sunlight.

I realize these answers may not match your lifestyle but I'm just trying to give the insight you asked for, from a person who does this.

> Price: Within reason, who cares? I don't have a wife or kids or any obligations really. What good is a six figure salary if I have to micromanage what I'm spending on food?

This mentality always blows me away and I am genuinely curious.

Has it not occurred to you that if you spend less, you can work less? (i.e. part time or retire sooner)

I cut things like this out of my spending, now I work a couple of years then travel a couple of years, first time I drove to South America, now I'm driving around Africa.

To be honest, I like my job, it brings me fulfillment in my life and I don't have a lot of other sources of that (as stated no wife/kids). I'm not really interested in restricting my lifestyle now to hasten my retirement, although I'm certainly not so stupid that I don't save for retirement. I just don't bother to minmax my finances.

I find the type of travel you describe stressful. I also don't like the insecurity of part-time work. Maybe I'll feel differently later, but at age 31 that lifestyle is just not for me.

how much do you spend on food? I eat out every work day and I spend on average 5$ per meal. how much less could you possibly be spending per unit?

I translated food costs to my income per-day, after taxes/rent.

The choices were:

* 1 work day allocated to making/eating 20 personally made meals a month

* 2 work days allocated to eating 20 professionally meals a month.

Factoring in time, variety, and the fact that professional meals taste better than mine - yes, I absolutely eat out most days. I'll pinch pennies on bigger items like car insurance or rent, but food was simply a good cost-benefit trade off.

YMMV; cost-benefit is subjective.

Important point: you may or may not have any control of the number of paid work days you have. The time you save won't trade against the average value of your time, but the rate at which you can trade time for money at the margin. So if you save an hour and spend $30, you wind up behind in cash-flow if you can't monetize your extra time.

And, uhh, most fixed-salary programmers don't have great options for spending an extra hour a week and winding up with more cash.

In my opinion, eating out is definitely a luxury. If/when I get serious about saving more money, cooking my own meals is absolutely the first thing to do.

Saving money is not my point here... it's saving personal time. Every month I have surplus income, after expenditures/long-term savings, but never have I had surplus time. There are always more things to do!

I am committed to ~160 work hours / month. Of that, I spend 10 work hours buying lunch - versus spending 2 work hours and 5 personal hours making my own lunch. Spending 8 work hours to buy 5 personal hours is worthwhile for me.

Theoretically, you can work less. Then again, it's hard to guarantee the market won't tank and hurt your savings, that taxes won't go up, that a minor healthcare crisis won't screw you over, etc. etc.

The notion of "retirement" is a quaint one.

Unless you are eating $20-30 lunches every day, the difference really isn't that great. It really boils down to: spend money to save time, or spend time to save money?

A typical week of lunches for me is one meal out with coworkers (~$15), three meals at the work cafeteria ($6-8, we'll assume $8), and one day WFH that we won't count. Average cost of $9.75 per meal, and no time invested. If I was taking my lunch, I'd probably be looking at $2-3 worth of food per day, and at least 15 min of prep time per day; more if you count extra time needed for grocery shopping and so on. I'm not pulling in a fat SV 6 figure salary, but even so my hourly rate is upwards of $40 per hour, so the meal prep time alone is equal to what I'm spending on lunch.

Personally, I'd rather have the time than the money. YMMV.

Even if you value your time at $40/hr doesn't mean you're going to GAIN any income for the time spent prepping food. Since I don't get a paid lunch break, I prefer to eat at my desk and work through lunch. This way I can leave an hour or so earlier each day.

I figure I've been able to save an extra $25,000 since I started consistency bringing my lunch ten or so years ago.

$10/day for lunch x 240 working days is $2400. For someone on a high wage, that's nothing. It's certainly not make-or-break in terms of holidays. Plus you don't spend your own time preparing your own lunch, and you get to sample lots of different kinds of food (if you're in the right place).

Also, self-made lunch isn't free. It's cheaper, but it's not 100% cheaper. The difference isn't between $10 and $0, but between $10 and, say, $4. A lot cheaper, but it lowers the 'saved' amount (at the cost of adding in shopping + preparing labour)

$2400 a year is nothing?

That's enough for two people to fly from Los Angeles to Paris, stay a week in a 4-star hotel, and fly back. Or to buy the highest spec Macbook Pro, every year, with change. In a year and a half, it's enough to buy a used BMW convertible.

Yes, but what if I already have a BMW and don't have enough free holiday for the trip to Paris, but really want to relax for a bit rather than make my own lunch?

Yes, buying lunch is a "luxury", but a small, daily one. Don't make me bring Orwell on food into this..

Hmm. The cost of buying lunch to me is 2% of before tax salary or 3% of after tax salary. Assuming a 45-year career, that's over 300 days. But of course making your own sandwiches isn't free for ingredients, nor time. You're trading time in your "youth" for time in your old age.

I do like the idea of going travelling, but you're not going to do it by cutting out lunch (unless it's something pricier like a proper sit-down lunch with waiters and drinks). Effectively you're moving your hedonism around so you can take it all in one go, rather than day-to-day.

I buy lunch most days and only eat 2 meals a day, my meals range from $6-11.

I pay ~$50 for 5/14 meals a week. I'm happy with that. I also spend a grand total of 120/month on transportation costs (includes costs of car, maintenance, gas, and insurance).

People have different priorities.

> Calories: Diets don't work, so who cares?

Umm, eating less than your caloric need makes you lose weight. Eating more makes you gain weight.

The world is full of people who were unable to maintain a diet. If you can't maintain a diet, then that diet doesn't work.

No, that means that you can't maintain a diet.

If something fails for lack of maintenance, it doesn't work. It's kind've self-evident.

The diet didn't fail. The person failed. There's a pretty big difference. If someone's diet plan consists of "don't each a cheesecake every week," and they continue doing that, you don't say "this no cheesecake thing is nonsense, that doesn't work!" You wonder why that person doesn't just stop eating the cheesecake.

Next you'll be telling me that the US won the Vietnam war. I mean, the politicians failed and the military failed, but the plan would have worked if they could have seen it through. Therefore the war worked.

So if my car fails because I never change the oil, cars don't work?

Not all calories are created equal.

Interesting. I prefer to eat a home-made lunch at my desk or chilling outside with co-workers for 15-20m, then leave work 45m early. This reduces time wasted on commuting by avoiding peak hour and gets me home by around 4:30pm (after a 7:10am start). But everyone needs to find what works for them, and within the limits of their employer's tolerances.

"Calories: Diets don't work, so who cares?"

If you're implying that calorie restriction isn't an effective way of losing and controlling body fat then I'd like a source for this wild and absurd claim which counters absolutely mountains of evidence.

I think they're saying "diets" don't work. It's true. Take all the diet attempts and divide by successes. Even counting calories fails if you don't count them.

Anecdata, but since I started bringing lunch to work I lost 9kg (~20lb) and that has been the only change in my regime.

It does make a difference in the quality of the food you get if it is home-made vs restaurant/snack bar/cafeteria, even in Germany where the meals are not ridiculously large as in the US.

If you can't manage calories-in focus on calories-out.

You can manage calories in.

I think the best to do a bit of both and gradually increase the exercise or keep a better track of calories.

> I can't imagine it is a time issue, I probably spend less than 5 minutes putting a lunch together every day.

It's not a time issue, it's an organization and mental energy issue.

I've always viewed it as a work expense. The guy bringing his lunch misses out on the conversations that happen and friendships that form over lunch. Whether it's technical conversations, office gossip or just discussing life events, it's an important bonding experience that more easily leads to becoming a close-knit team. There's something subconscious going on with conversations over food that bypasses some of the filters/walls we put up and isn't really replicated in normal work conversations. It's a bit like storytelling that way. I'm guessing it's because primitive humans only shared food with members of their tribe.

At $15/day, 200 days per year, it costs around $3k/yr, which really isn't that much when you consider tech salaries and the benefits it brings. The only downside is I have to be hyper conscious about eating healthy since meals out are optimized for taste, not health (i.e. lots of butter and salt and other stuff that makes it taste really good but not particularly good for me to eat).

Do you have any insight into why so many people buy lunch instead of bringing it?

I'm one of a handful of people at my office who never brings lunch and for me it's all about getting away from my desk leaving the office building, getting a walk in and looking for something interesting to eat. I'll often walk to one of the places where food trucks tend to congregate and see if there's something good there. Sometimes I'll take the chance to try out that new restaurant I know I'll never get to otherwise. Yes, it costs a fair bit, but eating a brought lunch in the lunch room would destroy the entire joy of lunch for me.

This guy should have hired someone else to design the dining space. There entire experience is disjointed and not appetizing. The walls make me think that there is a plumbing problem from the tenant above, all of the furniture is geometric while the dinnerware is handcrafted and asymmetric. He spent a lot of money custom making chairs that belong in a 60's airport lounge, that all of his friends also dislike. For the amount of money spent, he could have had a beautiful restaurant.

"Lizarraga hand-poured the rose gold resin that drips down the main room walls, a technique she has never used with this medium before."

Presumably she will never use that technique with the medium again.

A couple golden quotes about the same subject:

“I was very excited when the chairs came and then everyone I showed them to hated them. Like everyone. They either hated the color of leather, or they hated the design, or both,”

“A lot of people are going to hate the design. It’s not for everyone, and I understand that. But the feeling of the restaurant is so important to me and I wanted to be 100 percent involved in every aspect,”

It's not a flattering article... laid bare, it seems to depict a man who obsessed over decisions outside his competency, and paid out the nose for self-indulgent decoration.

In a market as competitive as restaurants, I can't help but think that making crazy decisions might be your only way to set yourself apart from the crowd.

Having delicious food makes people forgive a lot when it comes to comfort or decor. And just maybe having hideous chairs and walls would help you stand out in the minds of customers.

"But the feeling of the restaurant is so important to me and I wanted to be 100 percent involved in every aspect,"

I hate to be this guy, but it feels like a perfect #1 example of why startups fail -- he basically designed restaurant for HIMSELF.

I honestly wish him good luck of cloning himself 100,000 times and being happy to eat at his own place and pay for each bill to return $700k of initial investment.

You left out the very next sentence about the chairs.

"But then when people saw them in the space, they liked them."

I liked how it turned out, but the startup cost seems INSANE. He'll never reap the benefits of his hard work.

Hearing all about dealing with the government permitting process and government workers made me so mad. Government should help business, not get in its way.

Yet nobody mentions the far higher rent.

The rent is an entirely separate issue. The delays with permitting and the 14 different departments can be solved without dealing with the highly complex issues surrounding high rent.

Yet once the restaurant is in place the rent continues month after month, year after year. The permit delays / fees are less pernicious. And less $$.

This sounds like an opportunity along the lines of @pud's DistroKid:

"By paying a company $5,000 to secure his beer-and-wine license, Tortosa was able to skip the work himself of that particularly involved process, which includes minutiae like mailing notices to every single resident within 500 feet of the restaurant. For Robin, the company mailed out 586 notices."

It's hard to scale, liquor license rules vary a ton from city to city and state to state, and many jurisdictions personal connections matter a great deal.(Not to mention out and out corruption). And some cities have a license cap, so you have to know of someone who's selling an existing license to even be able to bid on one.

Plus you have to deal with the fact that some of those residents might actually object to your business opening. Even if they don't, your company probably still needs somebody who can show up at a meeting, greet the people in power by name and convincingly reassure everyone you're not secretly trying to open a nightclub and pretending it's a sushi spot.

Wow, this is like a how to guide on how to not run a business.

Raise a bunch of cash, go into a location that has so much wrong with it, blow literally all the cash plus $1k just setting up furniture and permits...

Why wouldn't you find a restaurant that just went under and buy out the lease? Take over the kitchen in place (buying the equipment from the bankrupt owner who just wants out), do a revamp on the sitting area, and spend pennies on the dollar compared to this? Added advantage that all the zoning and permits are already complete?

Despite what you've probably heard, restaurants actually fail far less than other types of start up businesses. In a booming economy there will be very few built out restaurants available to buy, and they'll probably have some sort of fatal flaw. Plus, you get TI money if you take over an empty space, and as you can build out how you want, the rewards are potentially better too.

Restaurants may fail less often than other startups, but the potential upside is microscopic compared to other startup type businesses. Restaurants are the opposite of scalable: costs scale basically linearly with revenue, but worse complexity of managing the business scales not linearly, but still very poorly with revenue.

There's a menu here: https://sf.eater.com/2017/6/23/15864260/robin-sushi-menu-hay...

Omakase courses $79-$179. The profit margin of a successful restaurant is around 5%, so he's going to need >100,000 customers at $100/head just to pay off the $700k he's put in.

Pretty much hit the nail on the head. So many restaurants are funded with little regard for profit (backers provide capital for vanity, amongst other non-profit related reasons) which makes financial success in the field rather difficult.

He has only put in 300k through his family. The rest are friends and invests he could lose.

It's more or less certain that his investors have the most senior shares and get paid first.

Is the margin that thin even in that price range? I would think the 5% number is for cheaper restaurants but not for higher prices ones.

The most profitable restaurants are typically the ones with cheap food. It is counterintuitive, but true.

Profit and margin aren't the same thing though.

There's a difference between profit and profit margin. A cheap restaurant with a low margin can be more profitable due to volume.

Yes, and fine dining is typically worse in every metric imaginable. That's why there is no McDonald's of fine dining. Besides being an oxymoron, the business model is terrible.

You turn over fewer tables with more expensive food, more staff, more real estate, more everything. Then the landlord raises your rent, sucks out all the profit, and you're done.

Exactly. The part where the owner raises the rent and eats the profit is a horrible thought. But it made me think. Take a look at the World's 50 Best Restaurant list Top 10 [0]. 4 out of the Top 10 are located in cities that I expect the rent to be below national average. I myself have dined at Azurmendi, which currently sits at a hill top somewhere in the Basque countryside, really remote. Maybe they can afford to be remote and pay less rent because they are on this list or strive to be on there.

[0] http://www.theworlds50best.com/list/1-50-winners

I find it absurd to rate restaurants from best to less best. I prefer the michelin rating star.

That's called revenue, not profit.

That's not called revenue at all. A business with a small profit margin can be more profitable than a business with a large profit margin, not just have higher revenue (although higher revenue would be required).

Majority of the people i know just go with individual sashimi they like on the menu, so the average diner is gonna pay quite a bit less than the Omakase courses.

Also it was nice to see vegetarian options in the menu. A couple of times I've been in situations were there was one vegetarian person in the group so we would have to skip over restaurants that don't offer even a single vegetarian dish.

..or just skip over the vegetarian. Being in San Francisco social scenes can be exhausting. There is the gluten free guy, the vegetarian, the vegan, the one that avoids dairy, the dude with the nut allergy, the one that only eats pedigreed beef from a specific Colorado mountain. The Paleo guy..

There used to be a time when people would just eat and it was far less exhausting finding a restaurant.

You need different sets of friends ;)

(I live in the bay area)

Margin is more like 10-20 percent if you're not overpaying on rent...

Something tells me if the landlord knew you were making 20% margin you wouldn't be making 20% margin for long.

This is why you sign long term leases. It's not unusual for restaurants to move out after the first lease term is done, so you need to be able to recoup your entire investment and make a profit in the first term (typically 10 years).

But yes, you're right, landlords raise rent, and restaurants often move out because of it.

>A fire department permit worker told Tortosa that it would take him two to four weeks to even look at Robin’s paperwork — or, for $536 ($134 per hour of overtime with a four-hour minimum), Tortosa could pay for him to look at it right now.

This makes me very angry. This is approaching the corruption say in India that Modi is trying to get rid of where every local official requires a bribe for them to do their job. I hope this kind of behavior is severely punished.

It's a pretty standard practice. You can wait the standard amount of time for the work to be done in queue, or you can pay for the additional time required to get it done faster. The government has to pay that worker overtime to do additional work, and if it's that important to Tortosa he should be the one to bear that cost, not the taxpayers.

I am fine with the government charging an expedited fee officially. Individual officials charging expedited fees soon turns to a culture of bribery.

Edit: A commenter posted http://sf-fire.org/file/2156 which shows that this is an official policy. I can't edit my parent comment now, but I am fine with this.

Its called 'contracting' and its a standard practice for engineers. But a fireman tries it - and its wrong?

I doubt engineers are allowed to contract doing their job functions. Saying "Boss, this feature won't be ready for 2 months, but if you also hire me as a contractor with more pay, I could have it done next week" is going to get you fired.z

There's no implication the fireman did this during working hours. Nor did they try to contract out to their boss - it was a private citizen.

Lost of engineering contractors do work on the side.

All of that $ and a shit website, http://robinsanfrancisco.com/, that has poor on-page and off-page SEO...

Ugh http://robinsanfrancisco.com/img/

PDFs in the img directory makes me sad.

This should be titled "What it Cost to Open My Restaurant in San Francisco". Costs are ridiculously variable in SF, depending your location and what kind of restaurant you build.

A couple years ago I invested in a new restaurant in SF. I believe the total amount spent as of opening ended up around $400k, maybe a little more.

Sadly, it folded after about a year. Restaurants are difficult, especially in a hyper-competitive market like SF. I probably wouldn't invest in one again, even if it was being built by a team with previous restaurant successes. There are just too many variables, and SF is over-saturated with restaurants.

Was expecting more of the operational costs of running a restaurant, rent, utilities, food, labor etc. This article focuses on all the stuff he bought to get to day 1...interesting, but not that useful.

Wouldn't the tile for such an article be "what it costs to run a restaurant"?

Does anyone know: What kind of numbers (revenue, expenses, profits) are typical for a medium-successful restaurant of this size in SF? I'm just curious. I know zero about the restaurant business, except that I've heard that the failure rate is high.

I think those gold stained resin walls look great, however it also depends on the background wall color. If they don't keep the wall clean enough, those stains would look cheap.

Honestly I'm excited by the crockery and interiors. The chairs don't look comfortable but I would give this restaurant a shot.

What I don't understand is the overzealous budget Mr Tortosa has in this project. In my opinion it would be wiser to spend a lot less on the restaurant and slowly upgrade it over the next couple of months or years. Also, by the looks of it they could have easily shaved off couple of 10 grand just by properly planning and anticipating the license wait period.

If you're looking for a chart of the breakdown, I made one with Canva here: http://i.imgur.com/nK56ERu.jpg

I would've considered a different color palette.

He doesnt even have a full bar, that would have been another 300k for the full bar alcohol license.. Restaurant looks amazing, just the right location. I think he is going to make a killing.

For another, IMO much more interesting take on the nitty gritty of opening a restaurant from scratch, Serious Eats had a series from Tyson Ho on opening his Brooklyn BBQ restaurant Arrogant Swine: http://www.seriouseats.com/building-a-bbq-restaurant

What it costs to open a fancy restaurant with top quality finishes including walls dripped with rose gold resin.

He spent half a mil on rent, construction, kitchen equipment, permits, etc. Artwork, furniture, plates etc (= the "fancy" stuff) came in at "only" $100k.

I can't believe that half the time and about 15% of the budget were all due to permitting delays. That is totally nuts.

And you wonder why the rent is expensive

And actually a cheap kitchen since the stove/oven expense at a sushi place is considerably less than it would be at other kinds of restaurants.

Construction and rent also vary with fanciness. Rent because rent is more expensive in the fancy parts of town. Construction because the quality of finishes is a significant factor in construction costs.

> including walls dripped with rose gold resin

That to be honest looks like someone threw a bucket of paint on the wall and let it all drip down.

Delayed because of a permit application’s font size? Is there a regulation on the proper font specifications?

Why do people tolerate this kind of government? It seems like this ridiculously Byzantine process is filled with too much discretionary power, ripe for abuse.

On another note, why is paper being used at all?

I chatted to a guy from Chicago who'd opened a successful rib place in Saigon. Apparently it would cost over $1m, which he couldn't afford, to do in Chicago but cost $30k in Saigon. Not that operating in Vietnam is without it's difficulties.

Tl;dr Amount Spent to Date: $701,095

Final total: $701,095

A more interesting read is the continuing trials and tribulations of DNA Lounge, DNA Pizza, and the (now defunct) Codeword.

Seeing the city of SF totally fuck up over and over on things as simple as "when is the street outside going to be under construction" is absurd.

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