A couple of years ago, a cute little café opened in my neighborhood. 5 tables, IIRC. I took one look at the menu and thought “Oh crap, they’ll be out of business in 6 months.”
Why??? I don’t think the owner understood the concept of planning menus around ingredients.
They had lots of different specialty sandwiches. Every one featured a different type of cheese. One sandwich had Muenster. Another had Provolone. Other sandwiches had Mild Cheddar, Sharp Cheddar, Swiss, Asiago and Jarlsberg. Dude, you don’t want to have to stock 7 different cheeses especially when you’re building your customer base. You could’ve made do with 3.
And don’t offer pulled chicken AND pulled pork AND pulled beef every single day. Pick one or rotate the BBQ sandwich offering.
And most people are going to order beef or turkey burgers anyway. A veggie burger is nice but your menu doesn’t need a veggie burger, a lentil burger AND a falafel burger.
And then they had a full menu juice bar, guaranteeing that they had to stock every fresh fruit the produce market offered - and not that many people would be ordering juice. Not in a 5 table restaurant, no matter how much takeout and delivery you get.
Place didn’t last long. It was a shame, the food was good and they got decent business for a new 5 table restaurant in an area that wasn’t a shopping or business district.
If we’re talking about established places that have been around for years, then yeah, I’d think obvious cost-cutting would be a sign that they’re not doing well. Things like deferred maintenance or cleaning, lesser ingredients or smaller portion sizes as well. So do things like less convenient hours, under-staffing, etc…
However, things like lesser ingredients can paradoxically mean unexpected success, if they’re due to supply issues- for example, I can see a pizza place moving to part-skim low moisture mozzarella if they can’t get enough fresh mozzarella, or a burger place moving away from double-frying their own fries as they expand/get popular. Chili’s did that sometime in the early 1990s as they expanded with their fries, most likely in the name of consistency and economy of scale.
As for new restaurants, I usually try and see what they do that’s different than everyone else around. Very few restaurants are really that much more awesome than their established competition, or all that innovative, and that’s why so many fold so fast. For example, to open a successful burger joint, you have to do more than just cook a tasty burger and fries. Anyone can do that, and do it at home, no less. You have to provide the tasty burger and fries, as well as atmosphere, entertainment , or kid-friendliness, or something else to distinguish you from every other burger joint in your city.
My wife’s family tends to frequent the smaller family-style restaurants. I’ve noticed that a few of them were noticably empty during what should be the dinner rush. Sure enough, one of them closed, and there’s another one I’m sure isn’t long for this world. Shame too, because they have an excellent Polish combo. (The first place had nothing special about it.)
If my favorite restaurant started getting chintzy with the salads, I would definitely take that as a sign that the place is in trouble. If you can’t afford a can of chickpeas and some black olives, you’re in deep doo-doo.
Come to think of it, it’s actually very simple. You need only ask two questions: First, is the place less than two years old? If so, then it’s probably going to go out of business soon, no matter what the other indicators. Second, if the place is older than that, is the original owner dying and/or retiring? Then it’ll also probably go out of business.
When a place that has been open for lunch in an area with lots of government employees and tourist traffic starts making patrons late returning from their lunch hour and gets part of the meal wrong, it’s a bad sign.
This is a biggie. There used to be a Greek restaurant in my town that, from what I heard, was very good. But I never applied to work there, because I had noticed after a couple of years that they almost constantly had an ad for cooks or servers in the newspaper’s Help Wanted section. I guessed that there was probably some very good reason that they couldn’t keep help, so I crossed it off my list of potential jobs.
Eventually, I started discovering coworkers who had worked at that place, and every one of them had the same story to tell: Greek husband & wife owners who believed that Americans are stupid and treated their employees accordingly. Insane micromanagement coupled with inconsistent, conflicting directions. One server told me that, if she waited near the door to greet and seat customers, the wife would yell at her to stop “standing around” and go stock supplies or tidy things up. If she busied herself stocking supplies and tidying up, the wife would yell at her for not being near the door to greet and seat customers. Cooks told me that the husband was just as bad.
I’ve thought of another one, though the restaurant in question is still open – the addition of ads to the menu. This restaurant added several pages of ads for various local businesses; each ad was about the size of a business card. I haven’t been to the restaurant in years, so I don’t know what the menus look like now, but they appear to be doing OK.
The only one I’ve personally encountered was when the staff couldn’t be bothered to give us the same size glasses as everyone else had (without saying anything), the meat tasted old, and the dishes didn’t quite look clean.
This was in another town, and when we drove by a month later, it was completely boarded up. It was one of the few times I felt schadenfreude and didn’t feel remotely ashamed.
There used to be a Lee’s Famous Fried Chicken near where I went to college. It went out of business, and was converted to a Schlotzky’s. We loved it while it lasted, though.
Last year on a trip to Kentucky, I found a Lee’s Famous Fried still opened. I went there, and the food wasn’t nearly as good as what I remembered. The potato wedges were undercooked, and the pieces of chicken seemed smaller. But what really made me suspect they were in trouble was that there were no napkin dispensers. You had to ask for extra napkins at the counter. For a place that specializes in fried food generally eaten with the fingers, that looked like a death spiral to me.
Funny, though, I later found almost the same situation happening at a local Church’s Fried Chicken. Scrawny chicken, no napkin dispensers. But I haven’t seen it boarded up.
Hmm. Dictionary.com says you’re right, but it’s clearly from the Latin victuālis. The word’s passage through French (Middle French vitail) may explain the pronunciation, but how would such a transformation, which came with a similar change in spelling, become attached to a spelling closer to the Latin original?
What I’ve seen with a few local restaurants is they fire their executive chef. One example in particular, the restaurant had been opened awhile but wasn’t gaining much traction. They hired in an awesome chef who revamped the menu and started turning out amazing and unique food. The restaurant began receiving all kinds of PR and business was growing pretty well. But the owner was a poor businessman, wasn’t paying taxes, wasn’t managing the money coming in vs. out, payroll wasn’t being paid, etc. and although on the surface the business appeared to be thriving and was very popular it was on the verge of collapse.
So to try to cut costs and save the business, he fired the executive chef and brought in a “young” (translation: cheap and inexperienced) chef to take over. When the previous executive chef left, many of the people he brought into the kitchen left (or were let go) as well. Naturally the food quality dropped because the talent of the chef DOES matter. The business is now rapidly swirling the drain. Everyone now pretty much expects this place will go out of business before the end of the year.
For the same reason we spell it receipt and debt but say /rəsit/ and /dɛt/. Someone in the 1500s felt it needed to look closer to its latin origin but the addition of the C never managed to filter down to speech. It remained a purely orthographic conceit.
Hah. The entire reason I decided, as a child, that I didn’t like “Chinese” food was that every “Chinese” dish I ever saw in a “Chinese” restaurant was full of pieces of limp celery. And I hated celery (still do).
Fortunately, as an adult, I’ve discovered there’s a lot more to Chinese food that chow mein, chop suey, and sweet & sour.