There was a place in Palo Alto maybe 25(?) years ago called Dagwood’s. Similar to a salad bar in that you handled all the innards to build your sandwich… The only employee on the floor was the cashier. You paid by the ounce.
I was only in there once soon after it opened and it only lasted a few months.
Christina Tosi, one of the supposed judges on Master Chef USA, runs a “restaurant” called Milk Bar. She serves such delicacies as “cereal milk”.
Well it has worked for him, but I think it is a combo of consumer stupidity and ignorance.
Cheesecake Factory. Not that there’s anything wrong with the food- except maybe the prices.
But the owner wanted to make his restaurants appear more in demand and exclusive than they really are.
So, customers are forced to wait extra time so there’s always a line and a wait. :mad:
There’s Rustic Burger where you more or less order your burger like Soylent Juicy & The Other Waldo Pepper describe. Great burgers, but I see many customers confused.
All you can eat buffets cant & dont work in San Francisco. There might be a couple (there’s one Indian place that does it for lunch) but a common variant is the buffet where you pile your plate with whatever you want and pay for it by the ounce. weird.
I don’t know if they still exist, but in LA there was a chain called “Mongolian BBQ” where you selected the oriental-style ingredients yourself, put them in a bowl, then gave the bowl to the chef, who stir-fried them on a large, circular grill. He circled the grill, turning the batch continuously and when he arrived back at the starting point, put the now-cooked ingredients back in the bowl and gave it to you. That, plus rice and a beverage, was the entire gimmick.
I liked it.
Tallywacker’s in Dallas.
Concept: A male version of Hooters.
The owner (who from what I’ve heard had little restaurant experience and was a shady character) thought the gimmick was genius and a moneymaker.
The location: Just two blocks north of the “gayborhood.”
The staff: A bunch of dancers from local gay clubs, most of whom had little, if any, experience as servers or busboys. There are countless stories of people who waited 30+ minutes to get a drink, and more often than you’d think, the drink would be wrong. One bartender had to ask what was in a Jack and Coke. One waiter, when a customer (my co-worker) complained that their vodka and soda was actually a vodka and Sprite, took a drink of the person’s drink from the straw, said “Oh, maybe it’s not mixed right” and used his finger to stir it, before setting it back on the table.
And did I mention all the staff was shirtless?
The food, allegedly, was overpriced and sub-par.
And, addressing the fact that “that corner” doesn’t exist as a restaurant graveyard, I can tell you that the location where Tallywacker’s was has been home to 5 different restaurants in as many years. A parking lot of 12 spots, and they choose to make it valet. If the parking lot is full or you don’t want to pay to park, you have to park at least a block away and cross a busy main street.
I think the owner thought that he’d get a bunch of gay clientele, not realizing that they could eat a decent meal somewhere else, and go to the local bars to see those same waiters once they were done with their “day job.” It became a spot for bachelorette parties, and had very few repeat customers.
It unceremoniously closed one morning, when the staff came to find a note on the door saying the owner decided to shut down. Nobody had any advance notice.
Seriously, read the reviews on Yelp. They’re funny, if not disgusting.
Actually, now that I re-read Chefguy’s quote and notice the Kramer reference, no, it’s not the same thing. I was thinking of “build your own” pizzas a la Blaze and MOD Pizza. (Which, when I think about it, really isn’t all that much different than a standard pizza place since, really, you “roll your own” pizza at most joints here, too. Looking at menus for local places, the only “prebuilt” pizzas I see are cheese, maybe sausage, and a “special” with mushrooms, sausage, onions, and peppers (or a combination of three of those). Otherwise, it’s select your ingredients.)
Yep, still around, but not as many.
More of a strange experience: I worked in a small town near where I lived and found a new/nouveau Thai/Asian place I liked. It had a spacey, purpose-built building - almost but not quite googie, if you know the style - and was stylish as all hell. Modest pricing, very good food.
Nearly all of the staff were fit younger men in black slacks and white shirts, with small headsets. For no reason I could ever tell; my waitress was usually one of the young women who are like waitresses everywhere.
Anyway, this was the place where I told them to keep making the chicken dish hotter, until my instruction to the (tiny woman) cook was “try to kill me.” She had almost succeeded when the place shut down and became some chain thing.
I never have figured out the weird vibe or the guys in secret service dress.
Granted my experience is limited but that’s what they’ve done at every Mongolian BBQ I’ve been to.
I think you are mostly right. But not entirely. In San Jose there seems to be what would be a great location for a casual restaurant- easily visible from the 280. But eatery after eatery has failed there. Having been there, it seems to be a combo of freeway noise and a 'you can’t get there from here" situation, it’s actually rather difficult to get to the easily visible restaurant.
So, there can be a location which looks good, or even is good for a bit then traffic patterns or demographics shift and no restaurant will do well.
Look at the remnants of Rte 66. Once the freeway bypassed them, many failed.
To my mind that’s the definition of Mongolian BBQ.
It can be as subtle as expanding an intersection so that it’s just a little more difficult to turn into the parking lot with perceived ease or safety.
Yes, in the SJ location I mentioned, you had to do a U turn to get there from the frwy- after driving past several intersections with NO U turns allowed. Then it was super easy to drive past the parking lot entrance- requiring two more U turns. :eek:
We’re already seeing some of that around here with the food truck craze.
This story reminded me, oddly enough, of the volunteer-run coffee shop at a hospital where I used to work. We got 30 minutes for lunch, and it wouldn’t be unusual to be handed your lunch as you were getting ready to return to work, even if it wasn’t busy. 
And that’s if you were lucky. I actually thought of this when I heard about the recent Pixar movie with the sloths working at the DMV. 
I found out that a woman at my church volunteered there, and she told me, “We promote a relaxed atmosphere.” :rolleyes: I told her, in no uncertain terms, that there is a difference between a relaxed atmosphere, and wasting people’s time. :smack:
The only reason employees patronized it was because it had longer hours than the cafeteria, and they could pay for their meal there by swiping their badge, unlike the vending machines which did require cash and/or change.
That’s great for a few laughs, some really nauseating “ideas” though. Luckily (for me I mean) most of the offenders seem to be located across the pond.
Do customers put the ingredients on the pizza themselves or do they just select the ingredients and the staff put it on?
Holy Crap! :eek: I remember eating there once on a family trip to Florida. Thanks for the link. 
I imagine the customers put them on the pizza the pizza themselves; otherwise what would be the point? *Every *pizzeria that makes made-to-order pizza allows customers to select the ingredients then have the staff put it on.
Yeah, I guess so… but back when I was working customers always put too much on their own pizzas - especially cheeze, which caused excessive oil-runnoff and it was messy. I am heartened to think that people have become wiser.