
I poured my blood, sweat and life savings into my restaurant. It ruined my life. - moonka
https://torontolife.com/food/restaurant-ruined-life/
======
smogcutter
The first big red flag for me (besides that the whole thing pretty obviously
started as a mid life crisis) was how little time it sounds like he spent
working at his friend's bar in the three months he needed to put in to qualify
for the liquor license. How could he not take that seriously as an opportunity
to learn about the industry? I would bet money that the answer is he was
afraid to learn that running a restaurant is actual work, not an episode of
chef's table.

His lack of preparation is mind boggling, but completely deliberate: the less
he knew, the more room there was for fantasy. Beware working with people like
this, who want to skip straight to the end.

~~~
retailbuyout
Yea, it doesn’t take long working a kitchen or bar to see how fast you can
bleed money, employees, reputation—you really have to enjoy the work. You’re
going to to into debt, you’re not going to get vacation, you’ll have constant
employee turnover and drama (mood issues? Drug issues? Both common in a
kitchen.), you have to do shady shit to pass inspection (throw the food out
and hit the lights to scare the mice, the inspector is in the lobby!), you’re
battling bitter customers who find your food fine but can’t get your accent so
they give you a two star yelp review and call you rude—it’s fucking endless.

That said, the community is to die for. I can’t recall ever being close to my
coworkers in that way since moving into tech. Nothing tastes as sweet as a
cigarette, liquor, and stories after your shift. Kind of necessary with the
hours you work!

~~~
cbsmith
You won't go into debt if you have enough capitalization.

Of course, you almost never have enough capitalization.

~~~
retailbuyout
Right, i should note that not all the things i’ve seen are smart.... avoiding
going into personal debt is fairly straigtforward.

But, I frankly can’t imagine a restaurant business not taking on some debt in
some seasons, at least at first.

~~~
cbsmith
Whether you go in to debt or not is about how much money you start with. ;-)

------
wil421
A bit of advice from someone who was in the restaurant industry for 7 years.
Don’t start a restaurant especially if you work in tech. 80-100 hours a week
for managers and owners is mandatory.

Tech is easy money compared to what it takes to create a profitable restaurant
from scratch. The author made the same mistake I’ve seen people make before.

This guy did no research at all and sadly this is extremely common.

~~~
muzani
I've done both restaurants and tech. I had to think for a really long time
which one to focus on. It just so happened that the startup hype kicked in
around that time.

Tech is mentally exhausting. Really short but painful hours. Food & beverage
is not exactly tiring, but the hours are very long. With tech consulting, you
might be working 4-6 hours a day, with restaurants, expect around 14
hours/day. One involves a lot of slow, deep work, the other involves lots of
rapid, shallow work.

With tech, you can get away with 0 employees, and everyone you hire is smarter
than you. With restaurants, you regularly hire idiots who sleep while at work,
don't show up, can't read simple instructions, steal from the charity jar.
It's highly frustrating. It also drains a huge cut from your daily sales,
which might seem like a lot until you look at profits.

It's really tempting to do a restaurant, because it's sort of "stable" source
of income. But tech is much better and once you get tired of it all, you can
just sell everything off at a higher price.

~~~
farnsworth
> With tech consulting, you might be working 4-6 hours a day

... huh? Which tech company is this?

~~~
enraged_camel
Most software companies. And 4-6 hours is optimistic. Actual _productive_ time
for most people is more around 3-4 hours per day.

------
toomanybeersies
> At work, I had trouble concentrating on spreadsheets and instead found
> myself scribbling menus on graph paper

Funnily enough, if he wanted to be successful, spreadsheets could've been the
key to his success. He would've known his Cost of Goods Sold, he would've
known his staffing costs, his rent, and how much money he had and could spend.

~~~
saosebastiao
I know what you mean, but it’s only part of it. Plenty of restaurants fail
despite excellent bookkeeping. Personally I’d posit that the ability to
create, measure, and manage operational processes is far more important,
because operations are where the (often invisible) opportunity costs wreak
havoc on restaurants.

~~~
toomanybeersies
The fact that he managed to run out of money before he even opened shows that
he had no idea of the cost involved in opening and running a restaurant. He
then reinforces this by telling us that he was selling his food too cheap, so
he was running at a loss.

It seems like he actually did have his processes in order in the end, he got
to a point where he was running a bit of a profit, and was on track, until he
decided to close for a week, which managed to quickly suck his funds dry and
plunge him back into debt. This could've been easily avoided.

Obviously that wasn't his only problem, but it's one of many. The fact that
the restaurant succeeds today, without him, is interesting, because it sort of
proves that he was the failing factor in the restaurant. Often it's external
factors that doom a restaurant, poor location for instance.

~~~
mgkimsal
> until he decided to close for a week

And it was the week before 'the slow season'? They came back to the start of a
slow period. It's almost comical how little thought/planning he managed to put
in to things, and after getting a 4 star review, and things picking up, he
decides to close things down "for a week"? Closing down during a known 'slow
period' \- that makes sense. I know seasonal/tourist places that do that. This
was just... yet another misstep that, as you said, could easily have been
avoided.

It became painful reading this. And it makes me think... this whole notion of
'80% of restaurants fail' stuff is partially due to just really poor planning
or non-critical thinking ability by people up front. Of course, more planning
and analysis up front may just stop people from opening in the first place,
which may bring the % rate of failures down, but the overall numbers would be
lower too. It's hard not to read this and think "I'd be smarter than that - I
wouldn't make those mistakes" (having worked in restaurants, I wouldn't make
those mistakes - I'd likely make other ones!)

------
acchow
> We had started with $60,000; after six weeks, we were down to $3,000, and
> there was still so much to do.

I don't think he did nearly enough research into how much it costs to start a
restaurant.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
Approximately how much would you say it costs? Could he have gotten a small
business loan?

~~~
binarymax
An order of magnitude higher than 60k, if your goal is to compete in the
market he was targeting. For 60k he could have opened a pizza or sandwich
shop.

~~~
bduerst
You'd have a hard time even opening a Subway with $60k

~~~
drewmol
They recommend at least $30k in liquid assets, but I'm sure that depends on
the market. $80-$310k minimum net worth. I agree with your statement, though
this was interesting.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-costs-to-open-a-
subwa...](http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-costs-to-open-a-
subway-2015-3)

------
dahart
Having started a software business with too much optimism and too little
business knowledge myself, and failed, I seriously have no idea how people
start successful restaurants at all these days. No matter what mistakes he
made, I feel for the guy, and the thousands of people every year trying to get
a restaurant off the ground and ending up bankrupt. Aside from marketing, the
initial costs of getting a SAAS business running are almost nothing; people /
dev time is far and away the main cost usually. The economics and risks and
up-front costs of opening even a small restaurant are staggering to me, I
doubt I'd ever attempt it. But I'm glad some people do, and make it.

~~~
vmarsy
> Having started a software business with too much optimism and too little
> business knowledge myself, and failed

I'd say trying in itself can be seen as a partial success, hope you didn't get
too financially impacted.

Is there any books/resources you (or other HN readers who also started their
businesses :)) wish you had read before starting? Or that you did read and
consider essential?

~~~
dahart
Well I (and my family) was hugely financially impacted, as a result of my own
choices, but I also had the best few years of my professional life. I made big
mistakes, but I don't really have big regrets, if that makes sense, aside from
losing angel investments and scaring my wife. I hope to do it again some day.

There are some great resources here and in books, but I can't think of
anything I wish I'd have read earlier, and nothing I know of that would have
changed my course. It might be out there, but I haven't read it yet. ;)

My team wasn't balanced enough, and we underestimated how much marketing we'd
need. We were conflicted about raising VC money, so we wasted time dithering.
We didn't figure out the right business strategy and our market until it was
too late. All the books say to pay attention to this stuff, but none can
really tell you how to do it in your case.

Great books I read include "Early Exits", "The Startup Owner's Manual", "Lean
Startup", "Pitch Anything". I think I learned more about startups reading HN
than in those books, but it's all good stuff. Seek out a wide variety of
conflicting advice, find the best team, and go for it! ;)

------
kbos87
I grew up working at a very successful family owned restaurant and landed in
tech after college. The two can’t be any different.

Owning a restaurant is a lifestyle in ways that working in tech never would
be. There is no free time, there is never a day off, there is no exit in
sight. It’s 80-100 hours in per week, small margins, and frequent turnover.

Can it be profitable? Yes. But it requires as much, if not more domain
expertise as anything else, including doing a startup. And, there are far
fewer people out there talking about the valuable details of doing it
correctly - very different from the startup world.

~~~
marak830
The reason people like me don't talk about the valuable details is, it has
taken me 17 years to learn those details, and I sell that expertiese :-)

------
sersi
Between this article and the article on people too poor to retire, I sometimes
think we should have classes on financial planning in high school. A lot of
the mistakes he did came down to poor financial planning. He even gave a raise
to his employees when he sold his home. As he describes it, there's no way he
was counting, looking at his benefits, costs of goods, etc... Basic stuff but
too many people seem to not know how to manage their money at all.

~~~
apersona
This isn't just lack of experience with financial planning. This is lack of
common sense. You can't teach common sense.

------
johan_larson
Sounds to me like he started his restaurant with way too little experience. He
was an amateur cook who had never even worked in a restaurant. Even a bit of
experience as a cook or waiter would have helped by giving him a sense of how
things work. And ideally he would have had some experience on the management
side too, maybe as an assistant manager.

------
photoJ
Running a restaurant is hard and unsurprisingly its even harder if you never
have run one before. Staffing, food cost, vender management and health code
malarky: these are some of the first things that make or break a restaurant.
Then maybe location. Quality of food clearly doesn't make the list, at least
not disconnected from price as Dominos, McDonalds and Starbucks succeed with
high probability. Sad to see a vanity project eat up someones life.

~~~
mattnewport
A point that Gordon Ramsay makes is that consistency is more important than
peak food quality for a restaurant. Occasionally serving bad food does way
more harm than occasionally serving amazing food does good since many
customers will not return after one bad experience and you won't establish
regulars if your quality is not consistent.

What McDonalds and Starbucks do well is produce consistent (though not
particularly high) quality at a price people are willing to pay and with staff
who are not coming on board particularly well trained or talented. They also
systematize / automate a lot of the other things you mention.

~~~
Cd00d
I'm taking (off topic) issue with the notion that Starbucks is not
particularly high quality. Before Starbucks the options for coffee were almost
universally limited to weak or burnt and stale bland Columbian beans.
Starbucks is excellent at consistency (that was in the manual actually; I
worked as a Starbucks barista for a year after college), to the extent that
they replaced their skilled/training-required espresso machines with push
button devices, but that does not diminish the overall more-than-acceptable
quality.

~~~
ctchocula
Starbucks may be consistent at making coffee, but coffee elitists would claim
that their coffee beans are over-roasted in order to hide the generally poor
quality of the beans and used to burn out a lot of the flavors. If you buy a
bag of coffee beans of freshly roasted coffee beans from a local coffee shop,
and a bag from Starbucks, then make yourself a cup of coffee the difference is
enormous. The predominant taste of the Starbucks coffee is bitterness, but the
local coffee will taste fragrant.

Starbucks is much better than the average Folgers-type diner coffee (in that
it's not both totally burnt and weak), which was the previous point of
comparison for most Americans. At best, a cup of Starbucks is merely strong.
However, it's not remotely as good as something from a coffeeshop which
tailors the whole process to highlight the quality of the ingredients and
attention to detail in the process.

Of course, I perhaps do not appreciate the challenges of managing a global
supply chain and making it scale to the size of Starbucks, but I would agree
with gp's assertion their coffee is not particularly high quality.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Starbucks-considered-bad-by-
cof...](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Starbucks-considered-bad-by-coffee-
purists-Why-do-people-hate-sneer-at-Starbucks)

~~~
Boothroid
Agreed. I don't have a sophisticated palate and even I can tell that Starbucks
is inferior to competitors.

~~~
myaso
Agreed again. Starbucks coffee being over roasted is a common complaint, also
I find the atmosphere unappealing usually. Most coffee shops I frequent have
to hit the sweet spot of having decent coffee + price and being a pleasant
place to work while having access to reliable wifi -- for me that turned out
to be the local supermarket, I get real ambient noise as well without having
music being blasted over speakers all the time. The trick I found is to look
for places where people want to hold conversations in public; I often see Arab
immigrants gathering to converse, local meetings proceeding, retirees
conversing, and people conducting business at this location -- the defining
feature is that nobody is really under the age of 30-35 usually if they use
the venue for social functions. It changes from city to city, sometimes it's a
local hipster cafe or a random 24h chain where interesting things happen
outside the purview of what is mainstream.

------
megy
> so I doled out $3,000 to hire a lawyer to oversee my incorporation. He later
> told me that I could have done it myself online for a couple hundred bucks.

This guy is so raw that he is even missing basic stuff.

> We can barely afford the place, but I wanted my daughters to have their own
> rooms

And he doesn't learn.

~~~
icedchai
most lawyers don’t charge 3k to incorporate. He got taken advantage of, plain
and simple.

~~~
vkou
From the sounds of it, his lawyer gave him a bit more advice then just how to
incorporate. I'm more surprised that he didn't give him the advice that the
corporate veil will not shield him from outstanding sales tax receipts.

------
jimmywanger
One thing that's interesting is that there's a factor a lot of people don't
consider.

The more appealing a lifestyle seems, the more hard work probably has to go
into it, because there's so much more competition.

For instance, in the story, he had a fantasy about having a hunting rifle next
to the stove and going hunting whenever he damn felt like it. Who the heck
doesn't want that?

Once he gets a taste of what it's like to peel several dozen potatoes, he
doesn't take it to heart. He writes it off as an outlier. Anything cool takes
a lot of effort, because so many other people want to do it also. But he still
thought he could pull it off, because he "loved cooking". Does not matter. If
you can't do the 1001 other things required to run a business, you're hosed.

------
synicalx
I've known two chefs who've gone on to start their own restaurants over the
years, and the one thing they have in common (other than smoking) is they are
REALLY highly strung. I don't just mean a little anxious/fidgety - they quite
literally don't seem to be able to sit still even for a few seconds. Even
little actions like pulling out a chair to sit down happens as fast as they're
physically able to do it. Noisiest people I've ever known!

Neither of them have actually worked as a chef in years, and one of them
hasn't set foot behind the counter at a restaurant since 2004. I can't even
imagine the constant time pressure chefs, and undoubtedly restaurant owners
must feel for this type of behavior to manifest and basically never go away.

~~~
iKlsR
You ever seen Gordon Ramsey when he's demonstrating or standing in place
gesticulating, dude is like a jackrabbit on meth, he can't keep still.

~~~
synicalx
Yes! That's pretty much what they're like.

------
rodgerd
I don't want to sound mean, but... he has a well-thumbed copy of Kitchen
Confidential and did this anyway? Because one of the things I remember most
strongly from that are the stories about people who imagine fondly they'd like
to own a restaurant, and it always ending in tears.

(Also I'm bemused as to why the opener suggests red tape was a problem.)

~~~
photoJ
Seems like he kinda missed the point.

------
bookmarkacc
I am surprised by the lack of up front number crunching that he did, seeing as
his previous job was as an analyst.

------
Mz
_My role was largely symbolic anyway, and after a few shifts stretched over a
three-month period, I checked off that box._

I am reminded of a college class where everyone but me was solely concerned
with getting a good grade and enthusiastically encouraging the professor to
curve the grades and skip parts of the curriculum. I was the only one who
expressed the concern that we might actually need to learn the course
materials in order to actually be prepared for higher courses or even, god
forbid, a _job_ at some point.

------
briga
This is really something everyone who opens a restaurant should be prepared
for. An overwhelming majority of restaurants go out of business within a few
years. It's a really difficult profession to be a part of, and if you want to
be successful you've got to make some serious sacrifices--even then that might
not be enough.

~~~
waqf
And yet it sounds as if his restaurant wasn't totally nonviable, he just
didn't have nearly enough runway for all his first-time mistakes. He might
even be successful next time with what he's learnt, if he had the stomach for
another go … and another $200k starting capital …

~~~
wolco
Please do not encourage him. He lacks the proper budgeting skills. He starts
thinking about expanding shuts down the place for a week and then everything
falls apart.

------
nubbins
Every so often one of these articles comes out about someone's dream
restaurant or coffee shop that failed and I'm starting to think that maybe
there are lots of just soft, naive people out there who just got by in life
checking off the boxes and being responsible enough to get an easy office job
(they're usually decent at writing a dramatic article though). Unless you get
lucky making anything stick in the real world is very hard. Having succeeded
and failed in business before most days I can't believe how easy my office job
is.

------
Mz
I think one issue with restaurants is they aren't usually conducive to an _MVP
and iterate_ model. But that isn't always true. Velo Burrito started as
delivery only two days a week,then turned into a restaurant.* I wonder if a
template for how to do this more successfully could be developed.

* [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/07/this-tiny-bu...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/07/this-tiny-burrito-shop-has-legs.html)

------
AndrewKemendo
Pretty much every restaurant owner I know is in the same situation - maybe not
quite as bad - but generally they have at least one total nightmare horror
story about a restaurant they owned that burned down/got shut down/went
bankrupt.

I find similarities to being a founder in a super risky high tech startup -
but with higher possible payoff.

Yet, I don't hear a chorus of bar backs, dish washers, servers, hosts and
chefs complaining about not having a life outside of the restaurant or needing
"work-life balance." What gives?

~~~
umanwizard
The tech industry is basically printing money, so we workers can afford to be
picky about the conditions we choose to work under.

Restaurants are ultra-competitive and have very thin margins, so people who
work there can't.

~~~
vkou
Also, a lot of the people working these jobs have very few other options in
life. Back-of-house food prep is one of the few industries that won't bat an
eye at a felony on your resume.

------
siliconc0w
I like to visit local neighborhood restaurants to give these places hope
because I hate seeing another retail location taken up by a franchise or worse
of all - banks which are just basically dead space. To digress - they just
opened another WF near me so there are now five total. Each is essentially a
huge empty building with a huge empty parking lot. It's like the city decided
they didn't want any useful commerce happening in this area and zoned it
entirely for banks. Sad.

Meanwhile within walking distance there are like two restaurants and a coffee
shop and I count myself lucky I even have that and visit all of them at
frequently because I so treasure them. Even if their food isn't that amazing
they at least somewhat contribute to the community of their surroundings.

------
bps4484
I've often wondered about the selection bias of the "80% of restaurants fail,
they're the worst investment" because I had a suspicion that many people start
restaurants thinking essentially, "My Mom's pasta sauce is so good, people say
they would pay for it. I should open up a restaurant with her recipe." and
then proceed to fall flat on their face.

Reading this article, I think I'm right. I wonder what the success rate is of
a restaurant is when the owner has even a basic idea of how the various
positions in a restaurant work and the important business metrics.

~~~
Danihan
Yes, you're mostly correct. Most new restaurants fail because they don't
handle the fundamentals properly.

To be fair, it's not that easy to learn all the fundamentals without doing the
whole process and failing at it.

------
Waterluvian
I wonder if some suffer from the same mistake people doing entrepreneur IT do.
I fix computers at home, how hard can it be? I cook at home, how hard can it
be?

~~~
sjg007
Yep..

I ran a business out of high school / college summers networking up college
kids in dorms. This was before computers came with ethernet cards by default
and while dorms were being wired. My biggest mistake was not charging enough
and not doing enough marketing. The university offered a similar service for
3x more than me.. I offered a flat rate including the card (which I got
cheap.. easy drivers etc..) but I should have offered a choice of cards (fast,
faster, fastest) and charged way more than I did as well as up sell (or sell
an extended warranty or something...) It was a flash in the pan business only
viable for 2-3 summers.

To follow up I also did computer IT consulting.. later and I still charged too
little!! I guess one issue is that there is a ceiling on what you can charge
(since you can just buy a new computer) unless it's in regard to recovering
some important data... even then and nowadays you can just take the hard drive
out and stick it in a usb enclosure, tell them to buy a new machine and call
it a day.

------
jroseattle
"What I lacked in experience I could make up for in enthusiasm."

So many startups are based on this very premise.

Reminds me of this poster:
[https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/incompe...](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/incompetencedemotivator.jpeg?v=1403276021)

~~~
rconti
Or worse. See: "We have a great team, funding, want to start a startup, but
have no idea what to do".

It would be like wanting to start a restaurant because you like to eat, but
don't know how to cook or what kind of food you should focus on.

------
ufmace
I had a few more thoughts after thinking about this one for a bit. It's easy
to laugh at the boneheaded mistakes, but can we say anything deeper about
this?

The author's actions seem to be motivated by an almost childish level of over-
enthusiasm. That the word childish occurs to me makes me wonder - are we
making it too difficult for kids to try things? Not actually opening a
restaurant, of course, but something moderately ambitions for their age. Big
enough for them to fail badly at when they're insanely, blindly hopeful about
it. It would be good in a way to experience that sort of failure at an age and
life situation where you don't destroy your finances when you're 3/4 to
retirement and with kids of your own to send to college. Maybe if he had
experienced that, then he could chase after his next dream with a little more
realism and self-control and a little less blind optimism.

------
damontal
maybe start with a food truck? seems like a less risky way of getting into the
business. if you are successful and make a name for yourself, you could parley
that into a restaurant.

~~~
scott_karana
No kidding. When he learned (to his _surprise_ ) that he could barely afford a
food truck already, that should have been a red flag.

------
m3kw9
You all would be surprised how many people will operate and act like him in
worse ways. He’s putting it in business, however it looks dumb for what he
did, people gamble in casinos, what would you say to that? He had a dream, was
dumb, reckless but attempt to fulfill it. Hard life lessons learn the hardest
of ways

------
Animats
Well, duh. This is such a cliche that it is a plot point on "Hawaii 5-0". Most
new restaurants fail.

------
RestlessMind
I read the whole article end to end - this guy looks like he had a real
interest into cooking, was willing to work hard and was able to contribute to
the society in terms of a nice highly rated restaurant. It doesn't look like
he wanted to draw millions of dollars from day 1 nor that he wanted his
restaurant in the fanciest of the places. This should be a very normal thing
to do and such people should succeed. Why is our modern day society arranged
such that following this straightforward path doesn't help you make the ends
meet?

Something is very very wrong.

~~~
dagw
If you read the whole article you'd see that it was perfectly possible to
succeed, just that you cannot go in completely blind and just expect things to
work by magic. Once a guy who had some experience in the restaurant business
and wasn't completely naive about the whole process took over the place it
started turning a profit.

------
wheresmyusern
ive always liked the idea of automated restaurants. weve seen what automation
has done for car production, so its interesting to imagine what an automated
restaurant might be like. since the food is the product of very exact
expenditures of energy, time and resources, you could forecast, resupply and
otherwise manage your output and resource levels in a much more accurate way,
for one.

and of course, you could make the food a lot faster i would imagine. and you
could make it perfect every time. and you wouldnt have to pay people huge
amounts of money to make it. i would also advocate for automating the delivery
of the food to the table but that might be off putting to customers, so you
could just build a system that would automate most of the mental load of
managing tables and just use your human employees as meat puppets for the
delivery software. perhaps something like google glass could be used. i bet
you could reduce your serving staff very dramatically by doing that.

and as for ingredients, you could even grow some of them. ive seen videos
about restaurants in new york that use roof top aquaponics systems to grow all
their vegetables. whether on the roof or off site, one would need to run both
production and processing and delivery in order for uniform quality to be
achieved. the quality of the ingredients is supremely important -- i went to
sauls in the bay area and their cheese burger literally gave me pause. if you
want to know the difference between average ingredients and good ingredients,
go try the cheese burger at sauls medium well.

even outside of automation, there are so many improvements to be made. i used
to work in a restaurant and they would cook food on these large woks. i would
guess more than a third of the energy from the flames below simply go around
the wok and up out of the vent hood. automating the heating of the food would
probably make it much easier to capture and use all of that thermal energy
instead of half.

~~~
averagewall
Perhaps it can't scale up enough to make automation economical because the
customers have to be located nearby. You might make enough of a particular
dish to satisfy the whole neighborhood in your delivery radius but still be
too small a scale for robots to be cheaper than humans.

I suppose TV dinners are made like you say, but they can be frozen and
transported to allow higher volume production.

------
mathgenius
Seems like this was his life's dream to do, and he got to do it. So, I'm not
sure it was entirely a bust. But certainly it was a very expensive dream to
follow. And how many really ambitious people fail and fail again, before
finally succeeding at something? It is a common story. Not that failure is any
guarantee of success.

------
tarr11
Reminds me of this story (sadly similar)

[http://www.wweek.com/restaurants/2016/09/30/heres-what-
happe...](http://www.wweek.com/restaurants/2016/09/30/heres-what-happened-
when-i-opened-a-restaurant-in-portland/)

------
exabrial
This sounds like a lot of startups, insufficient market research, poor cost
management, chasing hip trends...

------
wheresmyusern
most of the time i read a story like this, the infamous statistic of 90 to 80
percent new establishments failing is referenced, and then the person goes on
to explain how they barged into the business like a belligerent, drunken bull
in a china shop. this guy did zero research. zero thought was put into the
costs involved. i am frankly amazed that this guy made it as far as he did. i
remember the last time a story like this was posted, the guy got fooled into
paying to renovate the building he was renting. i have a feeling that most of
these restaurants fail because they are started by complete idiots.

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didip
Hard as it is to read it, I am glad that he wrote the article.

His journey is a cautionary tale on how difficult it is to start a new
business (including tech startups). There's so much work to be done and a lot
of them are non-glamorous.

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stretchwithme
Peter Thiel uses restaurants as an example of a super competitive industry
that you don't want to be in.

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joshuaheard
FTFY: I poured my blood, sweat and life savings into a business I knew nothing
about. It ruined my life.

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purplezooey
A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks here.;)

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Lazare
> In 2011, I applied to operate a booth at the Toronto Underground Food Market
> [...] my fingers cramping so severely from peeling 100 pounds of potatoes
> that I almost called 911. [...] I lost money

So his first experience was extremely painful, almost landed you in the
emergency room, and you lost money on it. What valuable lessons he learned
going forward?

> I didn’t care.

None.

> Eighty per cent of first-time restaurateurs fail. I knew this. Opening a
> restaurant was the least sensible, dumbest thing I could do. My wife,
> Dorothy, a daycare worker, was coasting toward the end of a maternity leave,
> and we had two kids to feed.

It's so rare to see people _brag_ about being reckless, irresonsible, and
wasteful of resources they cannot afford to waste.

> “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “I don’t think you know what
> you’re getting yourself into.”

Friends who knew what they were talking about tried to warn him off.

> My shifts consisted of a few leisurely hours chopping veg and prepping salad
> dressings.

Any opportunity for experience is to be strictly avoided. "The law says I need
to know how a restaurant works? I know better!"

> My role was largely symbolic anyway

No it wasn't.

> As it turns out, no one invests in first-time restaurateurs, no matter how
> mind-blowing they think their cooking is.

Man, I wonder why? More to the point, it's clear he never did.

> I realized it was far from the downtown foodie scene [...] Admittedly, I had
> an ulterior motive: the place was a 10-minute walk from my house and close
> to the girls’ school

He purposefully chose a bad location, knowing it was a bad location, because
it was convenient for him.

...I've got to stop reading, this is actually enraging me. It's so _dumb_ ,
and he seems so _proud_.

~~~
tw1010
I think his behaviour is already well described by Carl Jung. His world view
is skewed by mythology (like movies and hero worship) instead of by rational
thought.

~~~
jancsika
So was the world view of Richard Stallman in Richard Stallman's Sedentary,
Physically-Debilitating Quest for the Gnolden Treasure.

I'm not saying that you imply his wasn't equally skewed. Just that when I read
about Stallman or other people who rightly attract admiration this truism
tends to be conspicuously absent. But the mythology is just as strong there
too-- a rational person would not take years to find out from a specialist
that their chronic hand pain was due to repetition caused by an unreasonable
amount of typing[1].

[1] [https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
Plenty of us dorks complain about Stallman's worldview and philosophy. I won't
complain about the contributions he's made to computing, or even the world in
general, but striking it lucky doesn't make you philosophically pure.

------
X86BSD
I could have saved him the trouble has he asked before doing this on quora.
Seriously the culinary world is full of the worlds rejects. Junkies,
alcoholics, thieves and the mentally unstable. I took a break from IT to
pursue a culinary career. It was a great lesson in life. It taught me you
don't get paid anything but slave wages even though you are working 15 hour
days. Your body gets wrecked. You get no respect. You work with the people who
couldn't get a job anywhere else for the worst reasons. It's repetitive AF.
There are not a lot of good reasons to try and live that life. No matter what
glitter and rainbows crap food tv makes it look like.

