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> Take the leap, but you've got to do your diligence. Listen to the feedback and concerns people voice about your endeavor.

Absolutely, but there's never a situation of any kind without drawbacks.

A quote from David Chang of Momofuku, etc:

> I think almost everything we've done has been a failure from the get go. That's just the truth, and I don't think people see that. We have fucked up just about every opening in every restaurant we've ever done. We grind it out and figure out how to make it work as we go. That's what makes it a very organic experience and sometimes maddening. But I can't see any other way to do it than to engage with the world, make the mistakes, and pick up the pieces from there.

The landlord may or may not be a dick. I'd like to see some more on that chain story (because I'm really curious about the specifics physically) and the general statement about unpermitted work.

The hype machine thing you mentioned might be the real deal. As far as I can tell chef's food wasn't remarkable for Portland. His highlight pic was a french onion soup and a steak tartar, not even plated well. The rest of the atmos looked like snippets from "How to be Portland" magazine. They said "Keep Portland Weird" but that brand has been bought and sold and done with since Death Cab for Cutie had that song about answering machines.

It might be good food, it might be expensive, but man... Portland basically invented what we think of as the modern 'foodie' dickweed.

I'm not sure that any place that doesn't have extremely deep pockets isn't dealing with a landlord that wouldn't try some chain foundation voodoo, or even like real deal fraud, and chef still gotta survive plus overdeliver world class dining experience if he wants to be heard.

I have to agree, that was a very pedestrian food shot. There's nothing wrong with straight bistro fare but not at premium prices. I think the problem here was they went premium with the location and environment and preparations, but it didn't translate into an exciting experience.

Also the author sounds quick to blame external forces and the general malaise of the industry, which perhaps can cloud one's focus on identifying and fixing your own weaknesses.

If the facts are as stated, there is not much room for him not being a dick.

Nothing that guy said was a fact, I am specifically questioning the facts as stated. Wrapping a chain around the neighboring building sounds crazy but if it happened at all there is definitely a story that involves more than a few sentences of detail. Like ... seriously, that is wild. He might have had an agreement with someone about using chain and a come-along to fix his foundation and it went sour. It might have been all legit and a neighbor just talked shit about something they didn't understand. There is no proof. You don't just freestyle chain moving of a building to sit on a foundation and expect it to work. If you did and it physically helped, like in a way that made your building uncondemned or something, you are either extremely lucky or a god damned wizard or probably fucking both.

I've had landlords that I sort of liked do unpermitted shitty work to fix electrical in my house that I had to argue with them about and get resolved, but it's not a reason to crucify them. Some cities and I think Portland is in this group only have like 3 inspection officers sometimes less for commercial and the wait list can be astronomical and unavoidable. People still need stuff, sometimes with hard deadlines to make the property generate income. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it happens... constantly, in almost every building you go in. Sometimes the work is completely up to code or better, sometimes it's all a gnarly fire hazards. If homie up here is gonna call shit out and smear a man, he really should be more specific. If he can't be, then it's really rude to just call the guy an asshole because he failed to pull a sticker for having posts put in for a deck.

He also might be Dick Dastardly roping up his own fiefdom with a network of chains to all surrounding office parks while building a tesla coil out of garbage in the attic next to a putrid leaking grey water line that dumps into the women's restroom sink sending random heart stopping voltage through a soap dispenser.

I'm still not sure he is UNIQUELY that dick so much so that it cost chef his golden ticket. I'm pretty sure chef's uninspired menu, inexperience, and refusal to adapt from his vision to appropriately match the costs he was not measuring vaporized the dream many months before chef woke up. If the landlord hung him so bad, then he really should have negotiated harder for an improvements clause that made sense for his budget and found middle ground to grow. Either that or open up somewhere that... you know... he can afford?

You can't just offhandedly condemn the other business party because some other dude you don't know says he saw him using a chain in his neighborhood once. Dude is basically already doxxed it's all so specific. Maybe landlord was trying to save the next house from a landslide or pull out a tree stump with a chevy nova you couldn't see. All I'm saying is I really want to see pictures of this chain operation.

The other moral of the story would don't assume that enthusiasm equals friendship. This poor fellow's erstwhile landlord fleeced him and I'm astonished that his investing partner didn't warn him away in favor of some less glamorous but more economically sustainable location.

Also, commercial landlords are not nice people. I see and hear a lot of similar stories here in the Bay Area, where it's now routine for landlords to jack up the rent by 100% at the end of a lease period. In cases like this landlords often plead that they have no other choice than to charge the market rate, and this is partly true - but they omit to mention that they are often leveraged to the hilt and are using their existing holdings as collateral to buy more property.

Even when property is sitting empty, it may still be 'working' for the landlord - commercial property can be depreciated for federal tax purposes over a 39 year period, so a building in a downtown area can sit empty but serve as a tax umbrella for profitable rentals elsewhere, as long as the costs of maintenance/blight mitigation stays low. I'm no accountant but as far as I can tell the tax code disproportionately favors property owners.

Novice restauranteur. . .. is just another word for failure.

You cannot purchase a restaurant without knowing the industry (eg by working in it), and expect things to just flow.

Don't take the leap, actually learn what the hell you're getting into.

As for the landlord, bloody hell. Needing to spend 20k on plumbing and they didn't think that was a bad place to rent ? There is no excuse for that, even if there was more than 20k of equipment on premises, they should have seen the warning signs.

Tldr: foolish investor thinks buying a restaurant is easy money, learns the hard way that it isn't.

>I told myself what I'm sure every single novice restauranteur tells themselves: I'll be in the 1 percent that make it, by sheer will.

I would be surprised if every single novice restauranteur tells themselves that before starting a venue.

Most of them are probably tell themselves something like "If I build it, they will come".

Still, 1% seems to me very low, we are not talking about startups, are there actual statistics on it ?

From what I have read, margins are so thin in the restaurant business that doing an energy audit and tightening up costs that way can be the difference between running in the red and profitability. That doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for a greenhorn to learn the ropes, to figure out this isn't working and pivot, etc. I imagine that's part of why franchises are so popular in this space.

Do you have a source on the audit thing? I'm genuinely curious about energy use attitudes in small businesses.

The source I am remembering is specifically about catering, not restaurants per se:

The energy used in catering facilities typically accounts for 4-6% of operating costs. Many caterers work on a profit margin that is within this range, so it is obvious that saving energy can directly increase revenue and profitability without the need to increase sales.

https://www.carbontrust.com/media/138492/j7895_ctv066_food_p...

I often wonder how these things are calculated. I just don’t know that there is enough time in a year and enough buildings in a city for there to be 100 times as many attempts as there are successes, unless you include everyone who has ever thought, “I’ll open a restaurant!” And goes back to watching TV. Put another way, if 10 restaurants were successfully launched in a year, that implies 990 failures.

I've thought the same thing, I think it's a national stat and there is a lot of stuff opening in markets that make no sense for a restaurant in the first place. It's invisible to me, maybe you, because we live in and frequent urban/suburban places of middle+ class economics where seemingly most restaurants succeed. The rural and <middle class areas is where a lot of the failure comes from. That's my hypothesis anyway.

There are a number of sources of statistics, and while they vary a bit, they all show that the popular story of a ludcirously high failure rate for new restaurants is not true.

That said, the majority do either fail or get sold within three years, which (given that owners generally aren't building them for an exit) suggest a high combined rate of failure or burnout. But nothing like the 90, 95, or 99% short-run failure rates often tossed around.

I saw in a British documentary some years ago where they said 95% don't make it past five years. I didn't confirm this.

in Britain restaurants "fail" and reopen for tax optimization. I doubt it's that low.