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Tinkeringz

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.

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> 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.

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.

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