In my experience independent restaurants don’t do well, especially in this economy. My fiancee is a skilled chef and has worked for three restaurants in the past year… they all go out of business because everyone flocks to the neighborhood Applebees or Chili’s.
There are a few that have survived. The obligatory greasy spoon diner (well two, in my town. One on the east side, one on the west), a very small handful of amazing and very authentic ethnic restaurants, a few more less than amazing and not as authentic ethnic restaurants, and a few “local institutions” that have been open forever. Other than that, good luck keeping an independent restaurant open.
In my experience it’s because 1) the restaurant itself has been around a long time; 2) it’s family-run, which means the owners/neighbors know each other; and 3) it’s “safe”, familiar. The public in general dislikes change, so they’ll keep patronizing the business, no matter how awful the food.
[sub]We have two such restaurants within spitting distance of Chez Kiz. We don’t patronize either one anymore because of the food quality, but that evidently hasn’t stopped many of our neighbors.[/sub]
Yup, definitely not a small family restaurant. And I’ve only eaten deep dish pizza with people visiting our city, who sought it out. (Pizzaria Uno/Due does it better, I think, and Lou Malnati’s isn’t bad.)
In the Anecdotes are not evidence category, our little shopette down the road has an independant italian restaurant and a local Bar n Grill that are doing fine, while the Blackeyed Pea and Applebees in the same location shuttered.
Zippy’s in Honolulu considers itself “the Denny’s of Hawaii”. My gawd, how do they stay in business? We stopped there because we were in a hurry…it would’ve been better to go to 7-11 for one of their hot dog monstrosities.
In my experience, “can they fry eggs over-easy without congealing the yolk” says a lot about a restaurant. Thus some of the popularity of Chicago’s “Greek restaurants,” since breakfast can sound tasty 24-7. In addition to that quality, typoink’s suggestion that you are unlikely to catch salmonella there is a selling point.
Decades ago people, mostly owners of hash houses, bemoaned that McDonalds was killing their business. I ate at those dumps and what Mac’s mostly sold was a reduced likelihood one would be poisoned while eating there.
FTR: McDonald’s wouldn’t know “over easy” if it bit me in the ass, but I won’t die eating it.
I’d guess some really small restaurants can stay in business because their overhead is so low, they only need a few steady customers to make a profit. I’m talking about strip-mall establishments with say, just half-a-dozen tables.
They told me “Eat where the truckers do, they have hearty appetites” But it turned out the truckers just ate where the lots were big enough to park their rigs.
When I was about 12, for some reason (someone recommended it?) my parents ordered a pizza from a downtown tavern. This bar was in one of a series of grubby brick buildings - it had a one word name in a small neon sign in one of two tiny windows. And it had been there forever, though I never once met anyone who had ever been in there (and I lived in that village most of my life). No one was sure who owned it, either, until later… I was sent in to pick up the pizza at the bar and the handful of men in there stared at me as if I had two heads. Maybe because it was 12 year old girls didn’t ordinarily walk in there. But I had the creepiest feeling, nonetheless, even at that age, that the place was not what it was purported to be. There was a definite bad vibe. (and the pizza, BTW, was just about inedible, so we never went back for more.) Some years later, there was an enormous dramatic raid on the place by the police, involving gambling, money laundering, and possible mob activity. It was a combined “social club” and “pizza” place - with really bad pizza . Strange.
Another possible factor…where I live (Boston, MA area), there are a lot of people who prefer large portions of mediocre food-at low prices. This why a lot of bad neighborhood joints survive. If the owner ons the building, and his costs are low, he can give you an enormous portion of bad food, for a cheap price. a lot of people like this. Nera where I live is a diner, that seres greasy breakfast food-if you arder eggs and bacon, you get a pound of homefries with it. That is what the locals want, so he survives. these people wil not pay high prices for high-quality food-they are this guy’s target market, and he serves that market.
There are any number of restaurants who have a strong clientele that refuses to go anywhere else. For example, a restaurant with little else to recommend it may stay in business because a local club meets there, and the club’s members tend to eat there out of loyalty, even outside of meetings.
There are also people who, out of principle, don’t eat at restaurants that aren’t locally owned. Some may be civic boosters who support local business, and some who just don’t eat at chains; there are some threads right here in CS about that.
So the crap stays because people will eat it for reasons other than quality.
I was working in Cambridge, Mass back in the late 90s, and the dining choices were pretty miserable. I chalked it up to most of them catering to two very non-discerning groups - college students and tourists. Reportedly, things have improved around there, but the only really good meal I had in six months was when we traveled to the South End for Italian food - one freshly made canoli (shell just out of the oven, cool filling) sold in a little shop counts as possibly the single best thing I’ve ever eaten.
In Kansas City, there are some really miserable places that still seem to inexplicably keep drawing a crowd. Waids is the prime example. I have no idea why it’s still around. I had eggs Benedict there once, and the Hollandaise sauce was brown, like it had been left out so long the eggs had rotted. But the place is packed with pensioners every morning.
Huh. I’ve lived in KC almost all my life and I’ve never realized until your post that Waid’s was a KC-exclusive restaurant. Not that that encourages me to go there because, like you, I find the food to be mediocre at its best.
My example would be Villa Capri over on Metcalf. Can’t screw up Italian they say? They’ve never been to this restaurant. Growing up as a kid who non-adventerous in his eating and not at all a foodie, I still thought this restaurant was terrible and us kids would beg our parents not to go there for dinner. It’s just all around awful food…yet here they are, still in business after at least 20 years that I can personally count.
There was a restaurant in Texas where I used to live that was like that. They were famous for their spaghetti and meat sauce and garlic bread. But everything else on their menu was soggy greasy spoon fare that made Burger King look like haute cuisine. Yet, they managed to stay in business for decades.
They often serve a niche clientel. In the City of London and in Canary Wharf I can think of a dozen “resturants” which survive because at lunch time the workers want to eat at a place which is not McDonalds or EAT or Pret Manger.
Well, two of the local independent eateries–and I use that term loosely–are skilled at screwing up breakfast in every possible way.
The only reason I can see for anyone to eat there is that it’s cheap.
This, I think, is the biggest factor. Just off campus, there’s a place that’s been a restaurant for as long as I’ve been here… But it’s been five different restaurants, in ten years. None of them have ever been all that great, which partly explains why they haven’t lasted (that, and that there are a number of other well-established and better quality eateries in the vicinity), but at any given moment, there’s always a restaurant there that just hasn’t gotten around to failing yet.
Not that that’s necessarily a sign of bad quality - there’s a place near here that has had the same thing going on - it’s been at least 2 different pizza places, 2 different burger places, and an Indian place in the last 10 or so years.
Both burger places, the Indian place, and the pizza place that isn’t in there right now, were all quite good. (I haven’t tried the new pizza place.)
As we were driving by…he points out a store. The store is very small. It has a broken sign.
All the business is…is selling golf balls and room out back for 2 people to wack at balls into a net.
That’s it.
They gross $6 million a year.
Pure money laundering. The reason my friend knew about them is that while they wanted to launder money, they decided paying the taxes was a bit too much. :
(Pizzaria Uno/Due does it better, I think, and Lou Malnati’s isn’t bad.)