
San Francisco Is Losing Its Great, Inexpensive Restaurants - lnguyen
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-05/michelin-guide-san-francisco-is-losing-inexpensive-restaurants
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solatic
Who in their right mind moves out to SV anymore for less than a quarter
million in compensation?

If you have a family, your costs are astronomical. Mortgage, daycare, multiple
cars, school-related fees.

If you're single, you're dealing both with the gender-imbalanced dating market
(the imbalance hurting both men and women), as well as the difficulty of
saving for a SV mortgage. If you plan ahead of time, coming into SV, that
you're going to leave SV eventually because of the high cost of living, then
that future move is going to come at the cost of most of the professional and
personal networking that you built up and will have to say goodbye to, and
build all over again after you move.

Sure, SV is the mecca for professional networking and VC funding, but a) you
don't _need_ to be in SV to be successful (counter-examples abound) and b) is
it really worth it?

The death of cheap eats in the Bay Area is just a symptom. You're either
making enough money not to care, or you're wondering anyway whether it's worth
it to live there.

~~~
tome
> the gender-imbalanced dating market (the imbalance hurting both men and
> women)

I'm curious about how an excess of men can hurt women in the dating market.

~~~
velodrome
Agreed. If there are more men in the city, women should have more selection.

However, the diversity of men may be limited (e.g. they are all software
engineers...). It would be like going to Baskin-Robbins and all they had was
various types of strawberry ice cream.

~~~
jorvi
The old saying women have about dating at a technical university or
engineering school still rings true: 'the odds are good but the goods are odd'

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saimiam
Mildly offtopic:

Why does everything perfectly ordinary and expected in any other city have to
become "Great" in an American city?

Across the world, restaurants, from the very basic to the very high end, arise
around every agglomeration of people but here Bloomberg headlines these SFOs
restaurants "Great". What makes them "great" that a decades old Irani
restaurant in Mumbai cannot hope to match?

I can think of only one other place where "great" gets applied to very very
ordinary things - Great Asian Cities when referring to Asian mega cities like
Mumbai or Manila.

~~~
tetromino_
The English word great has two distinct senses when describing a quality:

1\. One of the best, truly magnificent (Michelangelo was a _great_ artist.)

2\. Better than something you would describe as "good". (How are you doing,
Bob? - I am doing _great_ , what about you?)

In modern American culture, "good" is often seen as normal and expected. Which
means "great" turns into merely better than normal or expected. I think that
is the sense in which the word is used in the article.

In some other cultures or languages, the same notion might be described as
"not bad".

~~~
saimiam
For want of a better description, the American vernacular lends itself to
clickbait?

~~~
WorldMaker
Or perhaps the American vernacular has been long shaped by the advertising and
news trends that have lead us to the world of clickbait?

For a class project once I was encouraged to skim advertisings from the late
part of the 19th Century through the early 20th Century and there certainly is
a case to be made that American media have been drowning in hyperbole and
fantastic claims for a long time now.

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DonHopkins
I miss Sam Wo's, which had excellent food, was open late at night till 3:00
AM, was quite inexpensive, and had extremely insulting and abusive staff. It
was the home of Edsel Ford Fong, the world's rudest waiter, and was featured
in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Kids love the Sam Wo Mystery Room.
And there's absolutely no fortune cookie!!!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Wo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Wo)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel_Ford_Fong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel_Ford_Fong)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnrs6Hzp6Kg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnrs6Hzp6Kg)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es0-GnG8qGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es0-GnG8qGs)

[https://tinyurl.com/ybuwn5jn](https://tinyurl.com/ybuwn5jn)

At least the Tamale Lady is still delivering her scrumptious blessings to late
night denizens.

[https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-tamale-lady-san-
francisco](https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-tamale-lady-san-francisco)

~~~
thecity2
You didn't hear they re-opened Sam Wo in a different location? I've been once,
it doesn't have the same charm as the old place, but it's alright. Still
cheap!

[http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/diningout/article/Res...](http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/diningout/article/Resurrected-
improved-Sam-Wo-serves-Chinatown-6730163.php)

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notyourday
It is always amusing to read pieces like this or comments by those who either
cannot understand or dislike it.

Here's the simple truth: there should be no such thing as an excellent,
inexpensive restaurant for more than a flash in a pan. Why? Because if a
restaurant is excellent and is inexpensive, then it underpricing its offerings
the same way as an excellent software developer making $50k a year should not
exist in Bay Area for longer than a flash in a pan because that software
developer is underpricing his offerings.

Say I have a successful restaurant. For the sake of the argument it seats 40
people and does fixed price brunch and is only open between 11am and 4pm on
Sunday. Brunch costs $20. It is amazing. I have a line out of the door. People
wait for hours for tables. What should I do? Well, it is simple, I am going to
raise a price for $30. Am I still packed? Are people still waiting? $50 it is!
Holy crap, still a line? $100! I'm charging a hundred. Oh look, the line is
smaller but I'm still doing the same number of covers I did before. $150! I
really have no line but the number of covers now is right around what I can
do. Excellent. $150 it is.

What does it mean? It means that before my restaurant was excellent,
inexpensive and mispriced. Now it is just excellent and priced correctly.

Lets try it again: same setup. $20, i have a line and a wait list, and people
outside clamoring for the brunch. Ok, I raise price to $30. Line is gone. I'm
doing as many covers as before but there's no real line. I decide to hold at
30. Two months later I have half of the tables empty because people moved on.
I drop prices to $20 and nothing changes. Still half of the tables are empty.
What happened? I discovered I did not have an excellent and inexpensive
restaurant, I just had an inexpensive restaurant and as soon as it tripped
into not so inexpensive category it was over.

P.S. There are tons of cheap eats in Bay Area and SF. They are just not the
kind of "cheap eats" that the people who make $150k/year like to eat.

P.P.S. Comment of the owner of the restaurant that tech companies are taking
away the talent because they pay more, give full benefits and have 9-5
schedule is pure gold: pay. more. money. That will solve the problem. The
owner do not deserve to make money for her services any more than Jack The
Dishwasher deserves to make money for his.

~~~
dagw
_People wait for hours for tables. What should I do?_

Or you could do what the restaurant down the road from me did when they found
themselves in a similar situation. Buy out the place next door, build a huge
outside patio area, quadruple the number of tables you have, have the quality
of your food and service completely collapse under the strain of trying to
serve this many guests and lose your reputation is a great restaurant.

~~~
notyourday
That's the quickest way to go out of business.

~~~
dagw
'Fortunately' they're in a fairly tourist dense area so they seem to have
managed to limp along.

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jpswade
Just visited San Francisco. There's over 7000 restaurants.

The 67 restaurants on the list this year hardly seems to touch the surface of
what's available.

Breakfast or lunch seemed to be about $30-40 for two. Evening meals were
easily double if not triple that, depending where you go.

If you go fancy, you'll get a fancy bill too.

LA was no different.

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d--b
> “The issue is that the tech companies have million-dollar kitchens and
> budgets, they’re taking all the great talent and offering benefits and
> 9-to-5 hours. Meanwhile, the restaurant business is a grind, and the cost of
> doing business is insane in the Bay Area. Independent operators are getting
> pushed out. I cook accessible food, and you have to charge accessible prices
> for that.”

Wow, I wasn't expecting the restaurant business being affected by tech
companies running their own canteens.

~~~
dsr_
The usual rule of thumb for a restaurant: lunch pays your rent, dinner pays
for labor and profit.

If you don't have any lunch business because everyone eats at work, you're
done.

If your dinner seatings are empty before 8PM because nobody leaves work until
6:30 and the traffic is terrible, you're done.

If the rent keeps going up because the real estate market says so, you're
done.

What survives: takeout, with low service overhead, small footprints and fast
turnaround. High-end, where the money from a few tables each night pays for
everything.

I think SV and SF are heading for a Shoe Event Horizon.

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pjc50
You can't have cheap food in expensive real estate. The rent for the floor
area of chair and table occupied by the diner becomes prohibitive.

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jbaudanza
Cafe Zitouna on Sutter and Polk falls into this category. It's a family owned
Tunisian/Moroccan restaurant. It's inexpensive and the food is top notch. It's
been in the neighborhood forever. Go check it out and order a Breakfast
Falafel Wrap, before it turns into a condo building.

[https://www.yelp.com/biz/cafe-zitouna-san-
francisco](https://www.yelp.com/biz/cafe-zitouna-san-francisco)

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dnautics
I have thought this since I moved here. If you want great and inexpensive, San
Diego is the city to go to.

~~~
bsder
LOLWHUT? San Diego is _horrible_ for this. San Diego has a massive number of
overpriced, aggressively mediocre restaurants. Yes, you _can_ dig your way
through the Chinese and Mexican restaurants to find good, cheap ones, but it
requires real persistence.

For people coming from Pittsburgh, Chicago, or Houston, the San Diego
selection in cheap food is laughable.

Houston Chinese food used to be _terrifyingly_ cheap--we would hit our
favorite dumpling house with something like a dozen people and the bill would
be less than $40 for an absolutely enormous quantity of great food. Once we
all graduated and were earning money from jobs, we would go back and we would
leave tips of double, triple or more of the bill just because we never wanted
them to go out of business.

~~~
cvsh
>Yes, you can dig your way through the Chinese and Mexican restaurants to find
good, cheap ones, but it requires real persistence.

Or, you know, just talking to a local who has already done the legwork

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thecity2
You can get cheap dim sum on Clement. Half the reason I moved to the Inner
Richmond. lol

