I keep on hearing in posts that defend chain restaurants that they may not be great but at least they’re consistent and, when you’re in small town America, taking a risk on an independent restaurant more often than not means an awful experience.
I don’t get it though, if an independent restaurant is crap and a decent chain restaurant is in the same town, how does the independent stay in business? What would drive people to eat at a restaurant that’s even crappier than a chain?
Inertia.
Or they, unlike the out-of-towners, know not to order the fish. Or whatever.
It’s also possible that the restaurant is just being used to launder money for another “business”.
‘Independent’ is treated as a virtue in itself by a lot of people. So no matter how mediocre, or even actively bad, the food, no matter how overpriced the food, no matter how surly the service, it’ll get people going there, because it’s not a chain, and is therefor good.
Normally it takes a while for them to go out of business. They could be horrible but only open for a month and close a month after your visit.
Drug money!
Two Examples
I grew up with a family favorite Chinese restaurant. Just a local place, locally owned. We loved it. It was an event place, it was always crowded.
Then I went away to college. Graduated, lived a while in Hawaii and San Francisco where I was exposed to a wide range of Chinese food. Eventually on a family visit back to where I grew up we ate at this much loved Chinese restaurant of my childhood. It was truly awful, but it was still great to everybody who’d lived with it for years.
Second example. My granmother makes a chocolate upside cake that everybody in the family loves and is a must have for any event. I have not yet introduced it to anybody who didn’t grow up with it who likes it.
My point? Sometimes the quality is in the relationship to the food and not in the food itself.
Some independent restaurants are completely family run. The entire staff is part of the same family which means they might not be getting paid in the traditional sense. That saves some money.
Also, what do you mean by crap? Do you mean the food is inedible? Spoiled? Or just not to your liking? Ethnic restaurants may be creating food that is very authentic but not tailored to American tastes. Their customer base may be the ex-pats from that country.
And chain restaurants, however bland the food, can be cheaper. They have less overhead because they can buy in bulk in a way that small family-owned restaurants can’t. It’s not just restaurants, all the mom-and-pop stores are drying up because they can’t compete on price with the huge chains.
EDIT: Oh, whoops, I think I answered the wrong question. I answered why do they fail, and you asked why do they survive.
Maybe it’s the “neighborhood restaurant” and the only local option if you want that kind of cuisine. (Breakfast diner, Italian, Chinese, whatever.) It could be helped by being in easy walking distance of various businesses with few other nearby options for lunch/graveyard shift.
People like to go there because they’re not crowded.
Chances are they make one thing very well and ride out their reputation on that.
The question is how do they stay open if they serve crap. That depends on your definition of crap. The food may seem strange to you, but perhaps it’s what has been consumed in the region for a long time. The family who runs the eatery may have lived the the area all their lives and they know what the locals will buy. And they know when the locals will buy it.
In small towns in West Texas they may be open early for breakfast and close right after lunch (around 2:00 p.m.) because the locals eat supper at home.
On that note, if you ever find yourself in a small West Texas town and want a meal after 2:00, you need to find where the local Dairy Queen is.
One town has a local restaurant that stays in business, because it’s the only one in town and it’s eat there or have nothing. Put in a couple of the same bad quality and they still have business. Put in a good one and the others eventually die.
Tourists are in the position of eat bad food or starve. Even if there is one good restaurant they can’t necessarily get in if they know about it.
That’s like the Chinese restaurant in the town where I grew up. It used to regularly win the “Best of” reader polls from the local independent weekly newspaper. But my family went there last week and they said it was awful. Perhaps it’s worse because it changed hands, but perhaps the restaurant has also been skating on its reputation for a while.
Basically, they’re blinded by love and able to get money somehow to stay afloat.
Often, the owner doesn’t know they’re serving crap or even that the business is circling the drain. More than half of all new restaurants are out of business within two years.
There’s a *huge *emotional attachment associated with realizing their dreams and opening a restaurant, and they’re blinded by love - in this case, the romantic notion that they can rent a building with a kitchen and some tables, open up the recipe box and cook their mother’s pot roast or whatever and people will beat a path to their door.
It’s the lucky ones that run out of their limited funds sooner, forcing them to abandon the business sooner. Then, they can go back to their corporate job and support themselves.
The unlucky ones keep plugging along and spending the kids’ college fund and raiding their 401(k) from their old “corporate” job and maxing out credit cards and taking out loans and borrowing money from every family member and friend they can find. When they fail, and they will, they owe huge amounts of money and emerge financially ruined. All too often, their whole family is ruined and broke.
In all seriousness, I would imagine that there is more of this that actually goes on than most of us would ever dream of. (not just in restaurants but in all manner of small independant businesses across the country)
Here in SLC there have been several small businesses busted for money laundering over the past few years.
…is this really all that common? In the small city I live in, the independent restaurants are:
Three or four decent places that are substantially better than any chain restaurants and have stayed in business by being, well, decent.
A few cheap, greasy homestyle / diner places. The sort that in the Chicagoland area tend to be called “Greek restaurants,” not because they serve Greek food but because many are owned by Greek families. These places stick around because sometimes you want cheap comfort food, they’re unassuming, and if you know not to order the “Boston Whaler Sandwich” or the cheesecake you’ll probably leave without serious stomach parasites.
“Ethnic” restaurants. One or two each of Thai, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, etc. The quality of these places can vary greatly, but sometimes you want some pad thai even if it’s not all that amazing.
Crappy places that seem to spring up and only last a couple years before bellyflopping. Most sell generic “diner” food, terrible Mexican food, or generic “red sauce” pasta and bad pizza.
There’s only two or three really lousy places I can think of around here that have lasted very long. One’s excuse is purely location – they’re the only sit-down restaurant within walking distance of the local college campus. The others mystify me, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they’re selling drugs to help make ends meet.
I’ve seen more better-than-any-chain local restaurants fold around here than I’ve seen worse-than-any-chain restaurants stick around.
I people don’t know it’s crap then the restaurant will do fine. I was at a conference last week, and I went with a large group to a locally noted deep dish pizza restaurant in Chicago last week named Giordano’sthat was touted as the best thing since sliced bread by the locals taking us there, and the Pizza was well… OK, but hardly revelatory or an awesome taste sensation. It’s all about what you are used to.
I’m not sure I’d qualify Giordano’s as a smal ma-and-pop type restaurant–they’ve got over 35 locations in the Chicago area, and a few more in Florida. I agree with your impression–it’s pretty mediocre, but a decent enough example of the stuffed variant of the Chicago deep-dish pizza (which in and of itself is a pretty love-hate style of pizza.)