Are there boringly profitable restaurants? My impression is restaurants are always skating on the edge of bankruptcy. It's wildly competitive because everybody thinks they can run a restaurant (and a hefty number of them actually can), there is significant regulation because of food safety issues, and the labour force is ill-paid and therefore not entirely reliable.
Yes there are. As dismissive as I am of a lot of hospitality related posts on hn(and comments), it is actually possible to have a good (and profitable ) restaurant that is nice and boring(there is bothing" wrong with that).
Unfortunately, there are 20-30 high risk/let's give this a go/I wanna say I'm an owner style restaurants that pop up for each one.
If you focus on quality food at a good price with consistency and quality control, and in a good location, you have a good chance. You would have to run it yourself though (best chance is to be in the kitchen). These are far and few between though.
As a chef, there isn't much more I enjoy, than to go to a family owned restaurant, have a great meal and to talk to the owner.
It really is a special experience, especially when I have spent so much time in the industry. To be invited into someone else's kitchen, see their ingredients and how much effort they out into it? It's amazing.
But it isn't something that I have ever seen done with a owner that doesn't work there. Ever.
To put my above into context, my job for 4 years was being paid to goto a restaurant and fix the problems. I cannot begin to explain how bad some of the things I have seen at some of those places.
But I have also seen owners who really want their restaurant to succeed. Only one, that I went to, whose owner didn't have hospitality experience, is still open. And she put so much effort into learning (infact she still emails me to ask for advice and information), that I believe she could succeed at anything.
But on the flip side, you could purchase an existing mom+pop business, but without an amazing manager who is willing to work for peanuts+, you're screwed.
+If they were that good, why are they willing to do that instead of working a larger site for more money, or opening their own.
The cliche about McDonald's is true- Use the restaurant as a mechanism to pay for the real estate it's on. My brother did that with a burrito place and now a bbq place. He learned it from the father of a friend, who had done with with several Dairy Queens. Instead of rent, you're building wealth with your lease payments (to yourself).
Of course, now you have to qualify for the mortgage too, which is hard starting out, but once the machine gets running for you, it's not too bad to expand it to other locations.
> and the labour force is ill-paid and therefore not entirely reliable.
Or just in college.
Tbh, I believe age (read: maturity) is the best predictor of reliability. When I worked food service (we all made ~$10/hour) you could bet the adults who had kids to feed would show up. Same with the girl who was busting her ass to go to law school. The college kid living at home? Coin flip. High schooler? Same.
Not too long after I left, the store got bumped up to $15/hour. According to both a family member and former coworker who both work there, they're having the same problem—only worse.
I don't wanna sound all high-and-mighty, because I was in college too. But man, if you make $15/hour, live with your parents, and can't be reliable at work it's not the pay...
I'd really like to know this as well. I have the same impression, but recently someone here on HN, who had experience owning a restaurant, wrote that the opposite is true.
Slightly off-topic, but this article reinforced the impression that there is a serious shortage of decent pastry bakers in the US. The guy was paying $1.25 wholesale for croissants? The consumer price in France is around $1.05-$1.25, and that's a country with very high labour costs.
It's an interesting dilemma - Croissants have a shelf life of a few max, so they can't be imported. I'm guessing immigration rules + cost of expatriation would make it hard to fly in french boulangers-patissiers? Then I guess the money would be in opening "viennoiserie schools" in the US...
Damn there is a shortage of pastry chefs everywhere.
Biggest issue is, as apprentices (in general), they have to be at work at 2am. (Situational I know, but in general their hours are rather inverted).
I had the option to specialise in pastry when I was an apprentice, but the hours looked so bad.
Now I'd give my left trsticle for a decent pastry chef(well before I left hospitality), so I guess that's karma.
Also croissants - you can get rather high quality par baked fairly cheaply, you can import/export them, as long as they are snap frozen(and most people can't tell the difference). - yes there is a difference before anyone tells me off, I'm just pointing out an alternative
I always wondered why pita bread is so stale/bad in middle-eastern restaurants in Germany and Austria, being that baking pita bread is not that difficult (almost every falafel/shawarma place in Israel have decent pita bread and they can't all be genius bakers).
