Hacker News Reader

Comment by buggythebug | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone touched upon it on previous comments but:

You want to be a business owner first - and a chef second.

If you just want to be a "chef" - that's equivalent to being the head programmer at startup and not getting any equity and makes no sense.

View on HN

This goes against Bourdain's experience per his book Kitchen Confidential.

Most new businesses fail, especially in the restaurant industry, where the equity will be worth 0 (maybe even less).

There will always be a constant stream of new restaurants needing a chef and will pay (cash) for their services.

Change restaurants for startups and chefs for programmers.

Food truck or popup / shared restaurant seems like the sweet spot for risk:reward.

Or ghost kitchens.

Possibly, depends on location, niche, and various other factors outside of your control like if there's going to be a pandemic that forces restaurants to close. Plus it's still a big risk in the upfront investments you need to make.

The upfront capital requirements and lock-in to choices seems more flexibly balanced with those approaches, vs a traditional "heavy" brick and mortar restaurant. Or as we say around here, better to fail small and quickly.

It's unclear what benefits a high-capital restaurant would have these alternatives, that would merit the increased risk. Fancy service? Nobody cares anymore. Economies of scale? Maybe, but seems dubious. Building a brand? Useless when your landlord is fine with selling the building for conversion to residential on any given year.

Liquor, and the ability to sell it. So many places would go under if not for their ability to sell you marked up beer/cocktails. Now, depending on local it may be hard to get a liquor license (shout out New Jersey!!!) for a building and in others you may be able to sell drinks from a truck. But that's one major profit center advantage that building have over trucks.

> Most new businesses fail, especially in the restaurant industry

The rate of restaurant failures is lower than the average for all new businesses.

And it's possible to have hit after hit in the restaurant industry. Most restaurateurs are just shit at business.

Source?

Come on, this is a startup news board... Failure rate of startups is 90%, restaurants 60%. Both well known facts. You can verify in 2 minutes on Google.

Wasn’t an attempt at debating validity…just wanted to know more.

Asking "Source?" on a topic where some prerequisite knowledge should be required is a lazy Reddit tactic. But here, since it took me 30 seconds to find:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2017/01/29/no-m...

There's other sources too covering different timeframes. It's all information in the public sphere. Stats Canada for example tracks a ton of stats about various businesses.

I wasn’t attacking the point, just wanted to read more specific info :)

(Also, sorry to inform you I am not a Reddit user)

Thank you for linking an article.

Hello there. I can't speak to everyone, but I can speak to my personal journey. In my late teens I was working in food service, both of my parents had run restaurants or been bartenders/servers. I had seen the issues that came from that, and when I went to culinary school in my mid-20s, on the first day they asked everyone "Why are you here, what is your goal?" Most people said "I want to be a chef-owner, I want to open my own restaurant, etc.". My answer: "I want to work in an industry where there is always demand and never open a restaurant on my own dime". And that's what I did.

I worked at some of the best restaurants, with some massive multi-unit restaurant groups, and some of the shittiest dives. I loved the work, and the fact that I was never the one scrambling to figure out where the build-out money would come from. I could go to work and focus on making great food.

My point is, it doesn't make sense for you, but there are thousands of people out there right now running restaurants they don't have an ownership stake in, and being happy with that choice. Jobs are different things for everyone. Some people want control and power and to show the world their vision, and some people just want to convert time into cash in a way they don't hate.

Head programmers at funded startups earn very lucrative money -- unlike the vast majority of chefs.

But are they as fulfilled?

/s (?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com