Setting aside the chain restaurants, which have a team of people doing market research and beaucoup advertising dollars, etc. which are the successful DIY restaurants?
Certainly the most prolific must be the Chinese restaurants. I’ve noticed in these places, it’s almost always a family affair. They have the kids pitching in and I’m sure that free labor helps their chances at making a profit.
Once a restaurant survives the first year or two, maybe they’re established and don’t need more than word-of-mouth. I think kitten would have a better chance of success since she (?) already has a following. The problem I see with that plan, though, is that you’d be paying for a space that you’re only using for breakfast. You’d need to be hugely successful with breakfast to afford the space. And that’s probably the key. You can be a damn good cook/chef, but if you don’t understand business—accounting, especially—you can end up screwed.
Perhaps there’s a lesser measure by which a person can hedge bets before taking the plunge. E.g. I used to work in a factory that had closed down their cafeteria facility. They allowed a truck to come on the grounds at lunch and sell hot sandwiches etc. With a setup like that, you wouldn’t be paying for restaurant space, chairs and tables, printing menus, advertising, etc. The guy seemed to be making money hand over fist.
By the way, the ending to that story is that one day, he was just gone. I think the official line was that he wasn’t making enough profit because operating the truck etc. cut into his profit too much. So duh, raise the prices a bit—they were very reasonable and we’d pay an extra quarter for the sandwich, you know? This would have been circa 1985 so gas prices weren’t off the chart.
Rumor had it that he’d been booted when the company discovered that the operation was a front for selling drugs. That made a lot more sense.
Recently, the NY TIMES had an article about the elderly owners of diners (those streetcar shaped small restaurants), which are common in NE, trying to retire. basically, a large number of these places are owned by greek immigrants, who ran them as a family business 9many were very successful). the problem is now, they are difficult to sell-prospective buyers don’t want 14 hour workdays.
As has been stated, restaurants offer backbreaking conditions, and long hours. There are not many people willing to do this today.
So, i suspect a lot of these diners will wind up disappearing
What’s funny is here in NJ there are many places that are for breakfast / lunch only. Bagel shops, little delis, and places like that.
And no, I currently don’t have a following. I made those omelettes when I was 16, so unless I can find all my old customers, I think I’d have to start fresh.
Luckily, I am very, very good at business. I was a personal assistant a few years back and my boss used to run all his old business decisions by me before implementing them. And he would come to me when he needed new ideas. He made a killin’ because of me. So I don’t think I’d have a problem with that part of the business.
Again, I have nada saved up for this business venture so it doesn’t really matter.
My grandparents owned a restaurant. My mother and her brothers worked there after school and on weekends, doing everything from cleaning to waiting tables to helping with the bookkeeping to working the line.
The only time they sat down together was a family was during Sunday dinner because it was the only day the restaurant was closed.
On the average my grandparents worked 18 hours a day, 6 days a week. When they weren’t helping, my mom and her brothers fended for themselves, particularly when they were in grade school.
A family friend owned/operated a restaurant while I was growing up. I spent a good chunk of my adolescence/young adulthood there doing everything except bartending.
I was almost never home for major holidays save Christmas. I didn’t have a social life. I didn’t care because I loved the atmosphere and the fact that I made people happy for the most part.
My husband occasionally brings up the idea of my owning a restaurant. He has absolutely no idea what it entails. And frankly, thanks to age, the physical/mental energy to be “on top of your game” all the time is a bit lacking.
As far as investors go, there are quite a few men with money who’d like to back a restaurant (or occasionally a magazine) so they can have somewhere to show off. Honestly, they know they won’t be making money, they just want somewhere to take ladies where everyone will be showing them mad respect.
Around here, we have doughnut places…and they’re all owned by Asians, so again there’s that “free labor” aspect.
Just reading all the posts here is pretty depressing, innit? I remember back in the day, when taking some godawful cross-country drive for a family “vacation,” we’d stop for a meal and we didn’t know what we’d get. The chain restaurant concept hadn’t taken root yet and most places were mom-and-pop, so you might get some of the best food ever, or maybe not. It isn’t just that we have chains now; they’re stratified by how much you’d like to spend, and an indie starting out has a boatload of competition.
Another thing that bears mentioning: a woman I know has a friend who’s a high-end chef. He says when times are good financially, people are willing to spend money for an excellent meal. When times are bad, they start rethinking and decide that maybe a bucket of KFC is more than they want to spend. Living it up = microwaving a Banquet Fried Chicken Dinner.
[lobotomyboy63 takes half a nanosecond to consider whether times are good or bad financially right now.]
Let me make this clear: It may seem to the average American/Canadian that Chinese people have some kind of racial affinity for restaurants, or South Asians for gas stations/7-11s, etc. This is not the case. Businesses such as gas stations and restaurants are extremely shitty operations which require long hours, a great deal of discipline and acumen from the operator in return for disappointingly low returns. The upside for this is that with a relatively small amount of capital, ANYONE can get started in one, and relatively little in the way of contacts, local “networking” or documented accreditation is required. Generally speaking, native born folks with this amount of discipline and acumen are already successful doctors/lawyers/accountants. The immigrant operatiors of these businesses WOULD be lawyers/doctors/accountants if it were possible, and in fact many of their children go on to become lawyers/doctors/accountants or otherwise respectable WASP careers.
The bottom line is that generally no one is in these businesses because they enjoy cooking Chinese food or slinging smokes and candy bars.
Ha! That’s the thing, you see. That dumbass will either steal from you, be incompetent, or be so incompetent they leave you for greener pastures. My aunt and uncle ran a Papa’s Pizza To Go franchise, which is a small chain. They did quite well because they’re in a small town and know everybody. The thing is, they always had to be there because they could not get reliable managers. They steal, they’re stupid, or they move on.
If you think my post was racist or something, I apologize but it wasn’t meant that way at all.
Factually, what I posted is accurate. Every time I’ve stopped in this community for doughnuts, the places are run by Asians and they’re family operations. I wasn’t drawing any conclusions from it except to say that by having their kids working there it adds free labor to the equation and helps them survive and thrive. I wouldn’t be surprised if Senegalese or Brazilians or Australians or anybody else in a foreign country would use the family to help survive economically.
In fact, the one four blocks from here, which has jalapeno pigs in a blanket at cinnamon buttermilk doughnuts that I adore, is owned by a family and from what I can see they’re driving cars that cost $25K and up. I have no idea where they live, but the cars indicate they aren’t starving for sure. The greenbacks in their pockets don’t spend any differently than those earned by a doctor.
If doughnuts are an Asian thing that I don’t know about—wildly popular in Seoul or Bangkok or elsewhere—I don’t know about it. But I don’t look down on them or anyone else for what they do. Although I’m college-educated, I don’t look down on anybody for what they do. There are definitely Asians who are successful (I remember some of them blowing the curve out of the water in college), but not all of them come from a background where they can scrape together the tuition.
Besides, that would be like shitting on my blue collar parents.
Yeah, I wasn’t disagreeing with you, what I was getting at was that while to the casual observer, it may seem like immigrants have an affinity for this kind of work, as shown by their disproportionate representation in this sector,
A) For most people, small scale retail operations such as restaurants are really crap ways to make a living, as has been alluded to by others in this thread.
B) Many immigrants get into them because they have no other choices.
Funny, innit, how bad immigrants can make natives look? Step on US soil not knowing a word of English in some cases and through sheer will, they succeed.
The next generation at the doughnut shop may be doctors.
According to the book Kitchen Confidential, those places generally go out of business pretty quickly.
There’s more to running a restaurant than being a good cook. You need to know how to manage a business. You need to know how to manage people who likely are not in that job by choice and would as soon steal from you as show up for work. You need to deal with suppliers, health inspectors, utilities, etc. You have to manage payroll. Do you want to trust all that to some high school dropout?
Anyone who has any interest in the reality of restaurant ownership/operation must watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. It’s absolutely brilliant and serves as a harsh wake-up call to those who are naive to the restaurant business. Gordon Ramsay is simply mesmerizing as he lays down the tough-love like a drill sergeant in his attempts to rescue people from themselves as they hurtle down the path to financial ruin.
I worked in the industry for 15 years and learned that in order to float a restaurant, one must have food costs and labor costs and overhead costs and good food and good prices and a good market to survive. If any one of those factors is lacking, it’s over.
