Hacker News Reader

Comment by abeisgreat | Hacker News Reader

This whole article feels like they're trying to brew trouble that isn't really there. They compare cost per sqft of rental space in a food hall, which they admin includes many extra things related to running the surrounding food hall (including build out, sanitary maintenance, etc) to renting empty business space and claims the food hall is expensive. They admit that many vendors found the food hall to be productive for their businesses, yet focus on the ones that failed without citing any comparison to success / failure rates of similar opportunities like food trucks or traditional restaurants. There's also vague criticisms about a misalignment between how the hall is marketed to visitors (creative, artisan) vs the pressures put on the vendors (simple to produce foods, low time-to-table), but this is nothing unique to food halls. Every restaurant wants high-throughput with the appearance of top quality food. Overall, strong meh from me.

View on HN

The fact he has a sweetheart deal from the city and is allowed to own the only bar in the hall and keep all its profits has the real risk of him making all the money at the expense of all the other stalls.

He's also paying 5k per month to lease the building and collecting almost 10x that much in rent from the others. A better solution might be to form some kind of collective/group to lease the facility at no profit. Like a condo association of sorts.

It's obvious these people are working for someone else.

But the issue is that putting together a collective to lease the facility at no profit plus take over everything else he's doing (finding insurance, handling janitorial and maintenance work, marketing, etc.) is a lot of work, and it's work that aspiring chefs don't necessarily want to focus their time on. That's why they come - he's providing a lot of value. Whether you think the amount of value is worth what they're paying is up to you, but the fact that he's still able to find tenants says that a lot of people think the tradeoff of not having to worry about all those ancillary things is worth the money.

The group could hire people for some of those things. The other guy certainly does.

Most dentists have had to figure out how to run a business. At some point these chefs have to decide weather they are owning a business or just cooking. This situation allowed them to confuse the two.

This is what stood out to me. Margins on food are not spectacular, and this place's $4.5k/mo minimum on rent is very high. Alcohol's margins are high enough to where that's where a good chunk of the actual money is made - the landlord is making an absolute killing here given his fairly low rents to the city, and very much at the expense of the profitability of the tenants.

My main takeaway was that booming food courts lead at least some naive would-be restauranteurs to think that opening a stall is straightforward and many don't do nearly enough up-front planning and thinking.

I do suspect the whole upscale food court trend is probably overheated right now but most of them do seem to still get a lot of traffic.

> This whole article feels like they're trying to brew trouble that isn't really there.

And generalize from a few vendors at one food hall to all vendors at all food halls.

The primary issue is the sweetheart deal New Orleans gave to Donaldson. The rest is just information asymmetry that this article will serve to correct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com