Lessons learned from the restaurant across the street | Hacker News Reader

Lessons learned from the restaurant across the street

blog.reamaze.com

21 pointsvsloo7 comments

Hijacking this thread but...

"Plentiful for the cost" is an oxymoron to "great restaurant"

Okay maybe that's a little bit flippant but seriously, judging a restaurant based on quantity of food for cost is apparently a very American thing and one of the reasons food is so bad here in general

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0767920562 had a chapter on how different cultures think about food. Having lived in a different one for several years that valued flavor over quantity I wish there was some way to influence America's culture more in that direction. It might also help our obesity issues. I'd much rather have a small scoop of unique and delicious ice cream than the tubs that some of the most popular American chains dish out

Assisting with hijack, I'm not sure it's only an American thing... Trawl Urbanspoon for Australia and you'll find plenty of restaurants (particularly fine dining) reviewed with a bitch about how much they cost compared to quantity delivered.

Non-hijack: I'm not convinced that this restaurant has a "strategy" that involves being under the radar. Indeed, their marketing appears to go as far as telling people who walk past that it's open. They don't even appear to have a name. That's not being a tricksy "invite only" place, it's just not having any branding. At all.

Relevant: http://xkcd.com/993/

That's basically Muji(rushi Ryouhin)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muji

The name literally means Unmarked Good stuff.

I think this doesn't quite fit what Muji actually does; their products often lack obvious "forward" branding (of the sort that too often gets fetishized), but are definitely "branded" in the store, and often on the products as well ... (e.g. notepads / pens / etc come with obvious labels that are possible to remove, but people typically don't bother). There are certain attributes associated with Muji products, and that's why people shop there.

A much closer fit (for the xkcd strip) is the short-lived early-'80s "generic products" fad in the U.S. You'd get stuff like beer in plain white cans with "BEER" written on them, on ordinary supermarket shelves.

I wonder if the xkcd guy knew about that, or whether it's just convergent evolution ... :]

Corner of Williams and Saratoga in San Jose!

I've thought about visiting that restaurant, but always wondered if it would be a disaster. I guess it's time to pay a visit...

This isn't an entirely unique scenario, as there are other establishments not unlike this one that, once they achieved critical mass in awareness, simply gained intolerably long waits.

This could be viewed as either an inability or unwillingness to scale. ("Inability" could be inherent in the effort, as in there is just not a feasible means to scale effectively.)

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