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Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

Occasionally I'll walk in and order food from these places--the people working there always seem surprised that I'm not a DoorDash driver. One place I went had seemingly everything on the menu: Indian curries, fried food and burgers, pasta, bibimbap, donairs, salads, Chinese food. Which to me raises the question: if this is a sustainable and profitable menu for a restaurant to have, why don't we see bigger menus in established sit-down restaurants?

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My mum was a restauranteur and I used to crunch the numbers for her on excel when I was a kid. Sit-down restaurants have more operating expenses because they have to pay more for labor for like waiters. People usually only buy certain products (a lot of profits came from some items like dumplings and also wine) which actually bring major profits to a restaurant. It is a lot harder to maintain selling many dishes at the same time because you need to hire more chef/cooks skilled in those dishes and also buy more ingredients and manage those ingredients' lifespan so its much easier to be profitable with a small menu of very profitable dishes or at least easier to cost manage.

That’s why I always wonder why Asian restaurants have like 100 items on the menu. Maybe the dishes are identical but still seems wierd

Those restaurants have a fixed set of ingredients but many ways to combine them.

Take protein, take vegetables, take carbohydrate, take sauce--cook.

That gives you an explosive number of combinations.

The best dishes at the Chinese restaurants, though, tend to be the ones that aren't in that mold. If the restaurant keeps a dish that isn't a "combinatorics" recipe, there's a reason it stays on the menu.

That is part of it. A lot of Chinese and Southeast Asian cooking is based on the wok (cut things into small pieces and stir fry at high heat). This lets them cook an entree fast. Others are partly cooked and finished when ordered. Lastly, they work, work, work.

You can actually see this in action at a Japanese togo place I frequent. They precook the chicken and then finish on the grill. The difference between Korean and teriyaki chicken is the sauce they finish it with.

Sweet and sour <insert protein> at Chinese restaurants has the protein cooked first and then finished when ordered with the sauce.

With fried chicken, you fry them earlier and when someone orders it, you fry it again. It’s great because double frying actually makes it crunchier and taste better.

You can mix and match as makes sense (bake chicken then grill them to finish).

If you want a whole <insert animal> it is going to take longer and cost more unless you go to a banquet place. Those banquet places are optimized for that by precooking and by have a few family dinner sets. If you order something outside that, it is going to cost you and take longer to reach your table.

A big chunk of what chef Ramsey does on a show like kitchen nightmares is cut down the menu to fewer higher quality items.

Right. And I learned a while back that the bigger and more varied a restaurant's menu was, the more likely it was that the food would suck.

The main exception I would note is American Chinese food, though that's because those menus tend to list every possible combination of a handful of core proteins, sauces, and side dishes.

Matrix menus like that are a clear "menu smell" as well: there's no way random combos like satay salmon actually taste good. In China itself, restaurants are so competitive that they tend to specialize in only a few items.

Another exception is probably classic dutch fast food restaurants. Almost everything is either fried or grilled straight from the freezer.

Have you ever been to the cheesecake factory?

Or a Greek Diner in New Jersey?

The CF seems like the in restaurant version of the 'ghost kitchen' by associating a combination of related kitchens under the kitchen sink, one stop shop to please everyone, option.

There are some core variations that only require an extra spice mix or a variation of pasta that's easy to keep stocked and share common cooking methods and ingredients with other items that I can get regularly. The salads are where I've personally noticed the most turnover. At least, pre-pandemic when I was still willing to get a salad from them because they were close to the office.

Storing fresh ingredients for all of those items takes a lot of space; a typical restaurant can't do it. Diners and do it by using canned ingredients from sysco.

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