If I were to start my own fast food business, I would make my food cheap as fuck and deliberately target locations that have:
A sixth form or university campus nearby. Students are a big market.
Nearby pubs or nightclubs. Doesn’t have to be a city centre, could be a local high street. The main intent would be to target the late night crowd.
People care about speed, cost and not eating something that will give them food poisoning, not gourmet food. The luxury market is oversaturated and we have anything but the luxury to do that often.
Also, if it’s a sufficiently large eat-in location like a diner, maintaining toilet facilities that don’t look like they’ve been vandalized is important too.
There’s a reason why premium fast food has spread so much.
By the time you’ve paid your business rent, your staff and your own rent, you can’t keep prices cheap and still make money.
And at a price point that covers your expenses, people won’t buy your “cheap and simple” food.
So you make your food “premium” cause a hipster burger doesn’t take more time or skill to prepare than a normal one, the cost of better ingredients doesn’t make a difference compared to your other expenses, and all you need for people to be satisfied with the experience is a couple thousand extra initially for interior design and marketing.
They usually aren’t happy when I take a shit inside our local food trucks. They keep telling me it’s unsanitary but I always insist that a restaurant must allow its patrons fair use of their toilet facilities.
I hate how this society has turned something as deeply emotional as cooking and turned it into a factory farm where people think burgers and hot dogs just magically appear with fairy magic.
It’s annoying that you can either choose between having a weedy shit burger that’s mostly lettuce and has to be held together with a stick, or eating a really expensive one and have to look at a load of wanker tat on the walls.
Also, you can stick your brioche buns up your arse. A brioche bun is not a load bearing bun. It dissolves in contact with moisture.
Hold on, a brioche bun can totally work! Toast the bun, put a little mayo on it, put the veggies on the bottom (at least the lettuce), and a regular-sized burger will hold up just fine.
Not saying it can’t go wrong, especially in a place that just wants the decor and the food to look good on Instagram even if it’s disappointing when you bite into it. But for burgers I’ve made, a brioche bun can be a nice option. :P
“if i pay $50,000 for this hanging piece of flare, and only stay open from 4-10pm we can siphon money from money with our money from the people who have money. But our waiter? minimum wage, cameras in the back our head chef is a wanker from out of state who pretended to be something they are clearly not, and the wine? straight from my vineyard, with minimal staff, green card only workers and an ever living hate for anything that shows compassion or empathy. that’ll be $18 a glass of home wine and $38 for alfredo pasta add $8 for broccoli add $10 for chicken. what…what’s wrong this is just business.”
Question for the audience: what city do you most associate this style with? For me it’s Seattle, because that’s where I live, and ugh, it’s everywhere.
Came here to call out Seattle too. Those chairs especially show up in any style of restaurant it is wild. I see this some in Spokane (or I did when I was there last don’t know if there are more or fewer of them in the last few years).
I don’t associate this with any particular city, but with the rich neighbourhoods in every city, particularly the recently rich neighbourhoods built from gentrification and forcing the existing poor residents out. An upscale “urban eatery” is a sure sign that the neighbourhood is destroyed.
Winston-Salem, NC. This looks like 3/4 of our downtown hipster spots. Except everything here is also a microbrewery. Soooo many different IPAs. I didn’t realize that there were so many ways to make beer that tastes like shit.
Are IPAs somehow cheaper to make or something? Like the whole microbrewery scene has devolved into “We make nine IPAs, whatever the fuck a cucumber lager is, and a stout.”
I was gonna say SF, but now that I think about it the burger places there tend to be a bit more quaint and definitely don’t have the live laugh love shit everywhere. At least I’ve never seen one, but it’s a big fucking city so there’s almost definitely at least one.
And you just know that this is the type of restaurant to throw out still edible food in a dumpster and then call the cops when starving people try to take stuff from the dumpster.
Same. They’re both perfectly valid opinions. If it’s 4 in the afternoon and I want a burger before a night of hard drinking, keep your damn egg to yourself. If it’s 4 in the morning after a night of hard drinking, a runny yolk on a greasy bacon breakfast burger is just what the doctor ordered. But for me hard fried or scrambled just don’t feel right.
Because he’s some provincial jackass who thinks anything outside of his personal norm is an unjust and unfair imposition on his right to act as if his experiences are the only thing that dictate what reality is.
He’s the same kind of circus clown that gets angry when you correct him on a factual matter, or on grammar, or if you criticize a popular movie he likes.
He and people like him are extremely self-centered, arrogant, know-it-all crybullies who think they are smart because they are adults. They are clearly not.
Yeah, honestly sounds like something you’d try when you have no shame. Not that I’m judging, just there’s a certain low you have to sink to to be the first one to try that…
I told the server that I couldn’t eat it, so she took my plate off the table and slapped the bill down in front of me, charging me for it without offering any alternatives while my lunch mates slowly enjoyed their good burgers and I got to sit there watching, hungry, and sixteen dollars lighter in the wallet. Worse, I was about to catch a plane, so I was fucked on getting any other food.
I got the rolled eyes treatment when I paid and didn’t tip.
I’m not bitter about that experience. Not one bit.
Your order being fucked up or undercooked, or having an allergic reaction is a valid reason to have your meal comped, merely not liking the food is not a valid reason. It sucks you didn’t like it, but it’s no fault of the restaurant. That’s what you ordered. It doesn’t matter you only took two bites of it, all the restaurant can legally do with it is throw it in the trash, so it’s still a loss for them.
Cool your jets there. I don’t mind that I paid for it.
There was an aggressive, “well fuck you, pay me and get the fuck out then,” demeanor from the server.
I never raised my voice, never asked for a comp. All I did was response, “I can’t eat this,” when she asked how everything was. That was it.
I would’ve paid AGAIN if she’d offered to let me order something else because I was so god damned hungry and knew there would be no food for many hours ahead.
But no. She grabbed that plate, stormed off, and slapped a check in front of me. The end.
Sorry i hurt your service industry feelings.
I NEVER send food back and I NEVER ask for a comp. Never have, never will.
But you want to be shitty to be about it, I’ll pay for the food, and that’s all I’m gonna pay for.
In a similar situation this past summer, I told the server I didn’t care for the food and she immediately asked if I wanted something else. I politely declined and told her to charge me for the food, that it wasn’t her fault, and tipped her somewhere in the 25% neighborhood.
These two incidents are the only two times I can recall not being able to eat what I was served. I have, however, been witness to a number of other people getting pretty vocal about wanting everything for free, including everybody at their table, claiming they didn’t like the food they had consumed in its entirety. On that front, you and I are united, I’m sure.
It was messy, but I still loved it. Them my body spontaneously became allergic to eggs. A tragic loss to my taste buds, especially since a lot of the Asian foods I love like to include eggs (Ramen, fried rice, Omurice, Kimbap, oyakodon, etc etc).
I suspect it’s also so the rich assholes can pretend to be in touch with society by occasionally “getting the poor people eating experience” (at a premium of course). They emulate classic burger joints and diners while being ten times more expensive with none of the charm.
I despise that kind of lighting because it’s so fucking dim at nighttime. The places that still have physical menus apparently expect everyone to pull up their cellphones’ flashlight to read it.
One place I went last year also had some boardgames, but only opened at night and only had that shit dim yellow light. Reading anything was nearly impossible and even the colors of the game pieces were blending together, “is this red, pink or orange?”
Gentrified takes on junk food with gratuitously expensive ingredients that are a slightly more subtle equivalent to just sprinkling everything with gold leaf like in 1990s Moscow or somewhere (“Our Southern-fried hog jowls come from rare heritage-breed hogs sourced from a tiny family-owned farm in the Outer Hebrides”)
My daughter begged us for a year to take her to a place called the Sugar Factory. It has really fancy and overpriced milkshakes. So we finally relented. They have the monstrosity below for $150.
I can’t speak for how that tastes because we weren’t willing to pay for food there, but the drinks (my wife and daughter got milkshakes, I got an appletini) were not good. Fun to look at, but pretty mediocre. I’m guessing the burger is more of the same.
Funnily enough here the prices of fast food chains have risen so sharply that the fancy hipster burger places are now priced the same or even cheaper. Like a double cheeseburger at a McDonalds is 5.50 euros but a local burger joint with burgers twice as big, filling and so much tastier are 6 euros, it’s a pretty simple choice.
I would 100% patronize a restaurant that had full transparency and decent no-frills food. They publicly post all their expenses and how much profit they make. Charge a table/dine-out fee, then actual cost of food and prep on top. Pay their workers in full, so no tipping required. Explain things like dining hours that help the business keep down costs.
I would too. Unfortunately I’m pretty sure most places that check even half those boxes still fail in the market. You often have to drag consumers kicking and screaming towards something more equitable and less exploitative, even when they’re the ones being exploited.
Add comment