Yeah that place is where I had my first bison burger.
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The steaks are cut on site and most (all?) of the sides are made from scratch, and somehow they can do that for under $15. There is one close to me that seriously has this special one night a week: 8 oz sirloin (with smother) and two sides for $9.99.
I actually know a guy (not well, heâs married to someone my wife knows, but well enough to chat once in a while) who does exactly this for a living in Toronto. He owns a minority chunk of a few different places where he pools his money, the chefs money, and some silent partner money to establish equity. Then he runs all the operations and logistics and the chef worries about the kitchen. Itâs worked out pretty well, but itâs a lot of work. He gets some of that sweet entrepreneurial upside with all his collective equity though. I imagine Covid has been a major blow.
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Your friend is an example of the golden age of the freelancer I keep going on about. There are third party services for almost anything you might need in a business, and while thatâs nothing new the quality of those services absolutely is.
Yes some third party operations are about being the absolute lowest cost thing out there. Thatâs the business segment they are going for. They cut every corner imaginable to get costs down so that they can generate maximum profit. There are also plenty who do well because they do great work at a reasonable enough price. You can cut corners and still do great work but those corners have to be selected with a lot of care.
If you have a meaningful operating role at a major corporation managing a high volume of important decisions you are almost certainly either grossly overpaid or grossly underpaid. If youâre grossly overpaid congratulations do nothing! But if you make sub 100k for a lot of hours and headaches that you had no role in the origination of thereâs a very good chance youâd make a lot more as a freelancer⌠if youâre actually good. I mean that too you actually have to be good. You canât be average or below average, those guys go broke on this road.
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I looked at the Sacramento menu and prices seem slightly higher than this, but if the ribeye is good then $25 bucks is still cheap.
Kinda local for Sacramento/NorCal people, but pre-COVID19 there was a $50 family feast at Buckhorn Steakhouse in Winters which is by far the best deal Iâve had. They are a mini-chain i think so itâs maybe on topic just barely.
Texas Roadhouse and Outback are two of my favorite data points that fit the Lawnmower_Man Fundamental Theorem of Advertising, which is that ad spend is inversely correlated to quality.
Yeah I assume itâs more than national average in like CA and NYC.
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Yeah I actually met the franchise owner several times because he lives in san diego and my feeling was that he was really good at building brand new panera breads and finding the right locations. Also the franchise had really high standards and good trainers and auditors. Like I said their training program was really good and the franchise specific checklist and manager booklets that everyone had worked really well even when we were barely using them properly. The guy has been doing this for 40 years now and sold a dozen mcdonalds and moved to san diego after probably getting the rights to open panera breads in southern california and has bought up several different random panera bread franchises throughout the country and now owns over 100.
Yeah that guys is going to be fine in the right franchise system LDO.
There are a couple of franchisors with really healthy franchisee relationships that have made it work. All I know about Panera is that they are successful and relatively recent. If they are running a franchise operation Iâm sure it makes some level of sense or they wouldnât be doing as well as they are doing.
I know that Dunkin Donuts weirdly has one franchisee that owns so many stores that they basically run the franchisor (and I believe they own a lot of the equity in the parent as well). Those guys apparently were just really really good at finding good locations on the east coast, were really aggressive about keeping operating costs low, and were willing to devote their entire lives to the expansion of Dunkin Donuts. Takes all kinds I guess.
I canât objectively say whether Panera is good or bad; they bought a local chain (Paradise Bread Compnay) that was basically a far better version of Panera and slowly turned them all into Paneras. All I know is itâs worse than Paradise was and a current local chain that still exists so I pretty much refuse to eat there.
The biggest Panera franchisee (Covelli) is a well-known psychopath and scumbag. OHIO, as always.
Discrimination lawsuits/settlements, unpaid overtime class-actions, etc.
Iâll add a data point to Carabbas being trash. I went once and ordered a chicken dish. The chicken literally came out raw, covered in the mushroom sauce or whatever it was. I was probably 18 at the time, and looked much younger. When I grabbed the waiter to mention that the chicken was raw, he said âoh no thatâs just how it comes, its fineâ without even looking. Just totally disregarded me like I was a little kid who knew nothing. So I walked over to a manager and had him come look. He was horrified when I showed him a completely raw chicken breast on my plate.
Never went back. They closed a few years later.
Wow thatâs incredible. The manager should have been horrified because the manager is the one who does the expediting at those places. If raw chicken left the kitchen itâs pretty much 100% on him. No excuse for that.
Fwiw I canât think of a single time I saw food sent back at the one I worked at. That was the whole point of having the managers expedite.
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Ya Saber is crazy asshole for sure and he used to host a bible study every week in the fucking cafe I worked at where multimillionaire business owners from the richest church in san diego would complain about the problems and pray for everything to turn out ok. Then he would treat the people who worked there like crap. One time we opened late because of overnight cleaning and I made his bible study wait outside just to fuck with them until he showed up and let them in and chewed me out haha
Just know that if you go to a panera bread in southern california some of that money will go towards the ownerâs dipshit sons fake rap career and for him to live in a custom home near the beach in north county that he got while in college.
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I suspect the group that regularly sends back food is relatively small but also particularly vocal so we end up hearing about it and emphasizing it more than necessary. When I worked at the rib place, I distinctly remember one customer whose steak we could not get right no matter what but the main problems were people being just rude or generally trashy. I remember one guy who wanted me to bring him as many wet naps as I could take from the back; I grabbed him a handful and he was like âCome on itâs not like they make you pay for them!â Whatever.
Also people vastly overestimated how many ribs theyâd be able to eat. I canât tell you how many times someone would ask what the record was (it was an all-you-can-eat place) and then end up eating one rack and one reorder, which was around four more ribs. Theyâd also frequently accuse us of using âdifferent ribsâ for the reorders as if there are some sort of secret, additional lower quality ribs on the pig. For the most part customers were fine and the worst thing that happened was leaving garbage tips.
I find it curious that the people who actually worked in restaurants say that it is a small percentage of people that send their food back.
People who did not work in restaurants think that people go to applebees just so they can punch down on people.
I mean I think heâs right. Thereâs not going to be fewer restaurants in five years, new ones will spring up after covid is all over.
Sure. This doesnât mean the pain the current business owners are doing through doesnât matter. If you take ths stance that nothing matters thatâs not public policy, its nihilism.
Just saying that Daleâs attempted gotcha doesnât actually make any sense.
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I donât know, in the context of everything we know about Trump his assertions that there are no actual consequences to anything (the virus will just go away, all these restaurants will just be replaced by other restaurants) are frustrating and he should be criticized for that. Not everyone has their dad hand them an astronomical amount of money to squander, not everyone gets to âfail upâ for decades and never suffer consequences.