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Comment by photoJ | Hacker News Reader

Running a restaurant is hard and unsurprisingly its even harder if you never have run one before. Staffing, food cost, vender management and health code malarky: these are some of the first things that make or break a restaurant. Then maybe location. Quality of food clearly doesn't make the list, at least not disconnected from price as Dominos, McDonalds and Starbucks succeed with high probability. Sad to see a vanity project eat up someones life.

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A point that Gordon Ramsay makes is that consistency is more important than peak food quality for a restaurant. Occasionally serving bad food does way more harm than occasionally serving amazing food does good since many customers will not return after one bad experience and you won't establish regulars if your quality is not consistent.

What McDonalds and Starbucks do well is produce consistent (though not particularly high) quality at a price people are willing to pay and with staff who are not coming on board particularly well trained or talented. They also systematize / automate a lot of the other things you mention.

That's correct. It worse now that a motivated irate customer can magnify the damage to small restaurant with only a handful of bad reviews.

I worked in a few kitchens for a few years. I regularly read reviews on yelp and I would say that near half of the negative "reviews" that showed up on there that pertained to what I myself witnessed or pertained to the kitchen were mostly to totally unfair. The one's that were fair I owned. One of my favorites: one star review for not being seated without a reservation on mother's day. Another favorite review: "I've been a regular here for quite a while and love this place but my porridge was too cold this one time: one star." Another gem: "Food is A+, waiter only refilled our water once: one star." (Pretty much any negative review that centers on waiters can be disregarded; they don't want to eat, they want to be served). I also witnessed outright lies by apparently angry and, I assume, tortured miserable people who were looking to be displeased in every realm of their life. You find those kinds of people in fine dining a lot, rich entitled pensioner types with no respect whatsoever. Unless there's a major sanitation or corruption issue on yelp reviews I take them about as seriously as youtube comments.

Yeah, what's fascinating is that some non-trivial percentage of your customers are going to be unhappy. Pretending it won't happen is silly. You're just insuring you don't have a strategy for when they are displeased. Some complain to your face, and in a perfect world you can do something to remedy that. Others behind your back, which is worse and unsolvable. Porridge should be not "too warm" nor "too cold" but "just right" Great, where have we heard that before.

I can't wait for McDonalds to be robotized. The last two small towns I have lived in have been consistently bad and that's saying something for McDonald's!

Please god, if i had a choice between amazing food or consistency I would choose consistency. Too often I've had some absolutely amazing meals, and the next day the chief is different or the staff is different and that amazing meal is now sub-standard and pisses me off.

At some point in your life `Money` isn't really a problem anymore. What is more of a concern is the quality of the experience and the food. Considering if you've had a good, over-all happy meal then you don't think about the money and cherish the experience. On the other hand if the experience and food is sub-standard or poor then you hate it more because not only have you wasted your money but you've wasted your time and also other people time.

One thing I would say to restaurant owner's is procedures, standards, and having consistent meals is more important than anything. When taking my family out to a restaurant I just recently had a investor meeting with and the food is amazing and then the food is sub-standard then I feel cheated.

I'm taking (off topic) issue with the notion that Starbucks is not particularly high quality. Before Starbucks the options for coffee were almost universally limited to weak or burnt and stale bland Columbian beans. Starbucks is excellent at consistency (that was in the manual actually; I worked as a Starbucks barista for a year after college), to the extent that they replaced their skilled/training-required espresso machines with push button devices, but that does not diminish the overall more-than-acceptable quality.

Starbucks may be consistent at making coffee, but coffee elitists would claim that their coffee beans are over-roasted in order to hide the generally poor quality of the beans and used to burn out a lot of the flavors. If you buy a bag of coffee beans of freshly roasted coffee beans from a local coffee shop, and a bag from Starbucks, then make yourself a cup of coffee the difference is enormous. The predominant taste of the Starbucks coffee is bitterness, but the local coffee will taste fragrant.

Starbucks is much better than the average Folgers-type diner coffee (in that it's not both totally burnt and weak), which was the previous point of comparison for most Americans. At best, a cup of Starbucks is merely strong. However, it's not remotely as good as something from a coffeeshop which tailors the whole process to highlight the quality of the ingredients and attention to detail in the process.

Of course, I perhaps do not appreciate the challenges of managing a global supply chain and making it scale to the size of Starbucks, but I would agree with gp's assertion their coffee is not particularly high quality.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Starbucks-considered-bad-by-cof...

Agreed. I don't have a sophisticated palate and even I can tell that Starbucks is inferior to competitors.

Agreed again. Starbucks coffee being over roasted is a common complaint, also I find the atmosphere unappealing usually. Most coffee shops I frequent have to hit the sweet spot of having decent coffee + price and being a pleasant place to work while having access to reliable wifi -- for me that turned out to be the local supermarket, I get real ambient noise as well without having music being blasted over speakers all the time. The trick I found is to look for places where people want to hold conversations in public; I often see Arab immigrants gathering to converse, local meetings proceeding, retirees conversing, and people conducting business at this location -- the defining feature is that nobody is really under the age of 30-35 usually if they use the venue for social functions. It changes from city to city, sometimes it's a local hipster cafe or a random 24h chain where interesting things happen outside the purview of what is mainstream.

Gordon Ramsay is one of the most experienced and successful restaurateurs ever, and has had numerous failures along the way.

Before he became TV famous, he worked in his restaurant every day until 1 AM, and back to it 6 hours later...every day, for many years. People vastly underestimate the time and dedication needed to run a restaurant. If you aren't built for it like Ramsay, you will regret it.

For a lot of owners, it's a really good way to earn not a lot of money for a massive amount of work.

Right and with that much work you know how to fix a menu so your food cost is managed. You know how many servers you probably need for that day of the week and how likely they are to disappear. You know how your staff will steal your booze, pocket the tips, or kill you clientele with a food allergy. You know how many people will complain and you will have to comp their bill. You know you should stock pile supplies because the vendor will run out. For an industry that is terribly easy to get into as a bus boy/server, prep cook, its amazing to me that more people don't just start there. Or maybe they do, but they don't write hand wringing articles about how they failed.(hopefully because they'd didn't and are too busy working). I once heard a story about an area for wine production in USA that you could buy for reasonable amount of money. Every few years, a 50 year old man would come and buy it, and start to work it. After 10 years about the time he might be getting the hang of what it all entailed he would be tired and sell it to the next 50 year old. The locals just watched the same story play out over and over again...

Same with the craft brewery folks as well.

And the fixed costs upfront, not to mention the legalities!

I always thought Gordon Ramsey was a douchebag from a cursory glance. But after watching his shows and reading his books, he is pretty awesome. I think he is justified in being annoyed by amateurs asking for help then arguing/ignoring his advice.

> I think he is justified in being annoyed by amateurs asking for help then arguing/ignoring his advice.

Anyone who is an expert in their field should feel justified in being annoyed by people asking for help then ignoring or arguing with said help. Happens to me on a regular-enough basis that I can usually predict how a request for help is going to turn out. Not alway, but often enough.

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