San Francisco Is Losing Its Great, Inexpensive Restaurants
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If you have a family, your costs are astronomical. Mortgage, daycare, multiple cars, school-related fees.
If you're single, you're dealing both with the gender-imbalanced dating market (the imbalance hurting both men and women), as well as the difficulty of saving for a SV mortgage. If you plan ahead of time, coming into SV, that you're going to leave SV eventually because of the high cost of living, then that future move is going to come at the cost of most of the professional and personal networking that you built up and will have to say goodbye to, and build all over again after you move.
Sure, SV is the mecca for professional networking and VC funding, but a) you don't need to be in SV to be successful (counter-examples abound) and b) is it really worth it?
The death of cheap eats in the Bay Area is just a symptom. You're either making enough money not to care, or you're wondering anyway whether it's worth it to live there.
As an ordinary developer? Consider New York. The pay in engineering is about the same, but instead of keeping all the people with normal amounts of money across the bridge in Oakland and beyond, you actually have a meaningfully integrated city that tries to cater to a variety of wealth levels.
And even if you stay in an enclave of rich-and-fanciness, your neighbors will be in media, finance, and creative fields, not just wall-to-wall tech. My first neighbor in New York had recently left his old job at the AP as chief correspondent to the White House. The guy who lived downstairs was retired, but had run a machine shop, and collected crazy old radios.
The result of fleeing middle class is that you have a city with a strange mix of very wealthy individuals (who can afford the high COL) and very poor people (who cannot afford to move out).
There is a significant emotional cost to leaving behind everybody you know, moving to a new place where you know nobody, and have to build new local social and professional networks. Making a long-term plan where paying that cost is factored into your current decision is naive at best.
I'm curious about how an excess of men can hurt women in the dating market.
However, the diversity of men may be limited (e.g. they are all software engineers...). It would be like going to Baskin-Robbins and all they had was various types of strawberry ice cream.
When you go back to the ice cream shop to demand some kind of control over what kind of ice cream flavors end up in your cone, the shop-owner apologizes and reveals that the reason why the other flavors are at random is because he doesn't actually scoop the ice cream, the giant ice cream cones actually arrive like that from the factory, and although 70% of the cones do come with some claims about which flavors are inside, 60% of those claims turn out to be false, so nobody pays attention to the label, and anyway here's another giant cone, maybe this one will turn out great and really be "your kind" of cone.
https://www.salon.com/2016/02/07/the_guys_who_wont_hear_no_m...
http://www.theonion.com/article/romantic-comedy-behavior-get...
When men are over-represented, true, women in general will find it easier to arrange dates. But those dates will, in general, be of lesser quality when men feel increasingly pressured to actively mask their flaws, in an attempt to stand out from other men in the dating market. Women then require more time, on average, to parse a potential partner's true personality and intentions, and develop trust. Requiring more time to develop trust raises the true cost for women of giving an individual suitor a chance.
(note: the prior paragraph is gendered because of context, but it also applies vice-versa in dating markets where women are over-represented compared to men, e.g. New York).
Why does everything perfectly ordinary and expected in any other city have to become "Great" in an American city?
Across the world, restaurants, from the very basic to the very high end, arise around every agglomeration of people but here Bloomberg headlines these SFOs restaurants "Great". What makes them "great" that a decades old Irani restaurant in Mumbai cannot hope to match?
I can think of only one other place where "great" gets applied to very very ordinary things - Great Asian Cities when referring to Asian mega cities like Mumbai or Manila.
1. One of the best, truly magnificent (Michelangelo was a great artist.)
2. Better than something you would describe as "good". (How are you doing, Bob? - I am doing great, what about you?)
In modern American culture, "good" is often seen as normal and expected. Which means "great" turns into merely better than normal or expected. I think that is the sense in which the word is used in the article.
In some other cultures or languages, the same notion might be described as "not bad".
For a class project once I was encouraged to skim advertisings from the late part of the 19th Century through the early 20th Century and there certainly is a case to be made that American media have been drowning in hyperbole and fantastic claims for a long time now.
"Amazing" is another word we tend to overuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Wo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel_Ford_Fong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnrs6Hzp6Kg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es0-GnG8qGs
At least the Tamale Lady is still delivering her scrumptious blessings to late night denizens.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/diningout/article/Res...
Here's the simple truth: there should be no such thing as an excellent, inexpensive restaurant for more than a flash in a pan. Why? Because if a restaurant is excellent and is inexpensive, then it underpricing its offerings the same way as an excellent software developer making $50k a year should not exist in Bay Area for longer than a flash in a pan because that software developer is underpricing his offerings.
Say I have a successful restaurant. For the sake of the argument it seats 40 people and does fixed price brunch and is only open between 11am and 4pm on Sunday. Brunch costs $20. It is amazing. I have a line out of the door. People wait for hours for tables. What should I do? Well, it is simple, I am going to raise a price for $30. Am I still packed? Are people still waiting? $50 it is! Holy crap, still a line? $100! I'm charging a hundred. Oh look, the line is smaller but I'm still doing the same number of covers I did before. $150! I really have no line but the number of covers now is right around what I can do. Excellent. $150 it is.
What does it mean? It means that before my restaurant was excellent, inexpensive and mispriced. Now it is just excellent and priced correctly.
Lets try it again: same setup. $20, i have a line and a wait list, and people outside clamoring for the brunch. Ok, I raise price to $30. Line is gone. I'm doing as many covers as before but there's no real line. I decide to hold at 30. Two months later I have half of the tables empty because people moved on. I drop prices to $20 and nothing changes. Still half of the tables are empty. What happened? I discovered I did not have an excellent and inexpensive restaurant, I just had an inexpensive restaurant and as soon as it tripped into not so inexpensive category it was over.
P.S. There are tons of cheap eats in Bay Area and SF. They are just not the kind of "cheap eats" that the people who make $150k/year like to eat.
P.P.S. Comment of the owner of the restaurant that tech companies are taking away the talent because they pay more, give full benefits and have 9-5 schedule is pure gold: pay. more. money. That will solve the problem. The owner do not deserve to make money for her services any more than Jack The Dishwasher deserves to make money for his.
Or you could do what the restaurant down the road from me did when they found themselves in a similar situation. Buy out the place next door, build a huge outside patio area, quadruple the number of tables you have, have the quality of your food and service completely collapse under the strain of trying to serve this many guests and lose your reputation is a great restaurant.
I am actually surprised that more people don’t try to go micro size, but very high end. Two or three tables, but super high prices.
Doesn't that assume that profit maximization is the ultimate and only goal of every restaurant owner?
Perhaps it is, I'm not familiar with San Francisco restaurants. But some might simply enjoy being able to offer excellent food at a comparatively low price simply because all their business, personal, and employee needs are met and rising prices could be detrimental to that balance. For example, if you enjoy seeing low-income families from your local neighbourhood eat at your place because you are affordable (not to mention healthy and delicious), then raising prices would drive them out, and you might be sad and disappointed, for whatever personal reason (i.e., your personal needs are no longer being met as neatly as before).
It is. Every single restaurant owner wants to make the maximum amount of money. That's why they open restaurants and don't go to community centers to feed less fortunate for free ( or for price below the cost )
> Perhaps it is, I'm not familiar with San Francisco restaurants. But some might simply enjoy being able to offer excellent food at a comparatively low price simply because all their business, personal, and employee needs are met and rising prices could be detrimental to that balance. For example, if you enjoy seeing low-income families from your local neighbourhood eat at your place because you are affordable (not to mention healthy and delicious), then raising prices would drive them out, and you might be sad and disappointed, for whatever personal reason (i.e., your personal needs are no longer being met as neatly as before).
In that case they have a hobby they can practice in community centers and dare I say churches.
If you've ever worked in hospitality, you'd find that a lot of owners, especially chefs who own their own restaurant, aren't in it for the money. They treat it as an art.
It would be preposterous to say that every artist wants the maximum amount of money. It's not always about the money.
If one is doing it for "the love of people" and love of craft he or she has a minimum incremental cost place to do it : community centers and church kitchens.
Fascinatingly, I do not find that acknowledging that water is H2O to be blidning.
> Get out more, there's more to life than money. So sad seeing so many people like you today, if you ever lost your life savings you'd probably sooner have a mental break and commit suicide than see the world which you've ignored in favor of scapes of paper and an imaginary system of bean counting.
Money is a proxy for absolutely everything. As someone who grew up and used to be unimaginably poor I'm rather sure that I can survive with very little. I will, however, do my best to avoid it.
It's incredible that you can state this even with tons of evidence to the contrary. You may want to rethink your assumptions or understanding of other people's thinking and motivations.
Restaurant economy is local, just as salaries of software developers.
The difference between good and excellent restaurant is larger than the difference between someone who has 1800 ELO and 2200 ELO rating in chess.
The 67 restaurants on the list this year hardly seems to touch the surface of what's available.
Breakfast or lunch seemed to be about $30-40 for two. Evening meals were easily double if not triple that, depending where you go.
If you go fancy, you'll get a fancy bill too.
LA was no different.
Wow, I wasn't expecting the restaurant business being affected by tech companies running their own canteens.
If you don't have any lunch business because everyone eats at work, you're done.
If your dinner seatings are empty before 8PM because nobody leaves work until 6:30 and the traffic is terrible, you're done.
If the rent keeps going up because the real estate market says so, you're done.
What survives: takeout, with low service overhead, small footprints and fast turnaround. High-end, where the money from a few tables each night pays for everything.
I think SV and SF are heading for a Shoe Event Horizon.
For people coming from Pittsburgh, Chicago, or Houston, the San Diego selection in cheap food is laughable.
Houston Chinese food used to be terrifyingly cheap--we would hit our favorite dumpling house with something like a dozen people and the bill would be less than $40 for an absolutely enormous quantity of great food. Once we all graduated and were earning money from jobs, we would go back and we would leave tips of double, triple or more of the bill just because we never wanted them to go out of business.
Or, you know, just talking to a local who has already done the legwork