It’s technically a location that shut down. I’m not sure what happened. Out of 20 or so steak n shakes only 2-3 in a 50 mile radius are open still.
But it would still be brutal.
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Of all the places in England to have to spend a week you would be pushed to find worse than Wolverhampton
Wasn’t a choice, but hey, they have a Nandos
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Pasta with meat sauce or marinara sauce and meatballs or Italian sausage is pretty good as well. The more elaborate the entree you get at the OG I think the worse it is. Your veal parm probably did come from the freezer, but the soups are apparently made from scratch, amazingly enough.
My tentative early retirement plan is to get a job in the kitchen at the OG so I can eat for two dollars a day, staff get one dollar soup, salad and breadsticks.
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Being a Chick Fil A indentured servant errrrr franchisee seems like a horrible deal. The hours have to be awful and as I understand it they cap your income potential and ban anyone from “owning” more than 1. Not to mention all the religious bullshit.
It can’t be that bad there’s a waiting list of rich white people a mile long. My guess is that it’s fine for the kind of work it is.
Are you implying that rich white people dont make idiotic investment decisions?
In 2020?
In America?
My understanding is they specifically recruit/select people who are broke (and love Jesus).
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Looking into this a little bit more and holy heck they dont even give you equity in the one store you’re allowed to “operate”. This whole arrangement reeks of duping people that want to “be their own boss” into an arrangement where you get all of the downside of entrepreneurship without the upside.
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I worked at a Panera Bread for 2 years and although it was a horrible experience they ran the business pretty well and I learned a ton. They put me through a really good 3 week manager training program and then exactly 6 months after I got promoted I applied for a better job somewhere else and quit. Once I got to my next job I was pretty shocked to find basically no rules or check lists or closing routines and everyone was just straight up winging everything despite me getting a job at a fancy upscale restaurant. So ya say what you want about chains but I definitely trust a multi billion dollar restaurant more than some random place for sure.
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This is all true, but the amount of stuff that the big chains do well that is proliferating out to the smaller operations (particularly the bigger local restaurant groups that I was discussing back in the COVID thread) is pretty crazy.
There are definitely downsides to true mom and pop operations in food service.
This is a great observation. In my experience standalone restaurants, especially those that are “upmarket”, are run by people with a passion for food. Corporate restaurants are run by people with a passion for Net Income.
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should i try texas roadhouse?
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Yeah it’s the GOAT chain steakhouse and it isn’t super close.
It was a very competitive low margin industry. Those types of businesses don’t have big safety nets. Trucking just got absolutely clobbered to the point where enough people went out of business for the market to actually balance… and now that that has happened it’s pretty good again.
My guess is that the survivors in the restaurant business are going to get back everything they lost in 2020 and more when things reopen… and that’s on reduced competition.
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This, to me, is an argument for people with a passion for food finding partners who are good at the stuff that matters for Net Income. That is to say food safety, logistics, purchasing, real estate, and HR.
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I don’t recall the details but the last time I looked into it, from what I remember the initial investment was really low, something like $5k? But yeah you were basically just a glorified manager from the way it looked. They even owned the building. And it seemed like they insisted on building a new building most of the time, except in unusual cases such as when they moved into mall spaces and the like.
Yeah, it’s one of the few chains I’m willing to enter because I know how the sausage gets made. They have meat cutters on site that make between 30k-40k. Don’t get the porterhouse–it’s the only one shipped in. I really dislike the theme/decor.
My favorite CHAIN pick is Ted’s Montana Grill, although there aren’t too many of them.
Ted’s Montana Grill is an American restaurant chain. The company was founded by media mogul and bison rancher Ted Turner along with restaurateur George McKerrow Jr. with the help of corporate chef Chris Raucci as a for-profit effort to stop the extinction of the American bison.
All bison served is National Bison Association-certified; the menu includes several other kinds of meats and vegetables. As part of the restaurant’s unusual but aggressive approach to environmentalism, it “re-introduced the paper straw” which has not been produced in the United States since 1970 to avoid using plastic. They have also eco-friendly bathrooms, using dual flush toilets and eco-friendly soap.
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I also liked Chopt, which is another east coast chain I think.