No Unskilled Jobs: the Restauranteur

Chatting with a restaurant owner outside Reno last night.  The food was great but the house was a bit thin.

-- Business slow?

He shrugged.

--First couple of days after the weather changes.  Everybody is in shock, they stay  home. Same in the spring, first time temperature goes over 90 they all say oh by, we better stay inside.  Not to worry, they'll be back.

On the Economics of Chinese Food

I meant to comment before on Carpe Diem's post pointing out that by some measures, Chinese food is more popular in the United States than big-market franchise food (link). It's an interesting factoid and I take it mostly at face value. CD draws the moral that "Globalization is good," though what that has to do with the price of chai in China I have no idea (but then, the lesson CD draws from everything is that globalization is good).

But what I'd like to know is more about the internal structure of the Chinese restaurant biz. Note tht the menus, the decor and the outside signs bear an impressive similarity from one end of the country to the other. When you stop and think of it, this is hardly surprising. It isn't plausible that some Chinese family in, say,Wichita, will just say "hey. gang! Let's start a restaurant!"--and then go and invent the whole process from scratch. Sooner rather than later, they will stumble onto somebody who will want to "help" them with the benefit of his/her experience or knowledge. Might be a "restaurant consultant." My guess is that it is likely to be the equipment supplier, whose main job is to get the highest price he can squeeze for that high-BTU stove they will need,* and who finds himself morphing into a restaurant consultant whether he intended such a result or not.

And then--what? I suppose there is no megacorp to which mom & pop must be royalties (unless you count the monthly payment on that stove). But what about the mob? Tony Soprano understands that the best way to squeeze the profits out of a restaurant is to control the towel concession--an excellent index of marginal revenue. Isn't it fair to assume that somebody in the beef & broccoli circuit has figured out the same strategy.

None of this is meant to contract CD's point--as I suggested above, I'm not sure exactly what the hell his point is, anyway. It does suggest that life closeup is usually more complicated than it seems to be from a distance.

*Afterthought: One of CD's sources offers an enlightening mini-history of the Chinese restaurant in the US. But it includes an odd bit of cultural blindness:

...home cooks may use the Chinese wok pan for simple stir-fry dishes. Authentic Chinese cuisine usually calls for a level of heat unknown in Western cooking. The quick flash fry, on a high-BTU restaurant stove, seals in flavors in a way almost impossible to match in a non-professional kitchen.

Whoa, big guy, you never heard of a pizza oven? I think I make a pretty good pizza if I do say so, but I don't dare crank my kitchen oven above about 515 degrees. Unless I'm willing to spring for something like this, I'm not likely to get any better. Of course, not having a the fancy oven, I always have an excuse for not achieving perfection.

Restaurant Marketing Note: Oyster Bar

My friend Ignoto is lately back from DC where he stopped at an oyster bar. As they were blissfully composting their lunch, a server showed up with a try of little chocolate bits and said, "we don't do dessert, but these are on the house."

Say, what? It's an article of faith that dessert (next to booze) is where you make the money in the restaurant trade. What gives with giving it away?

Best guess? There's so little work in preparing an oyster that the oysters are a profit item all in themselves. The chocolates are to get you out of there. Like the waitress in bobby sox who noisily refilled your coffee cup to get you to say "no thanks, I've had enough."

Learning How To Run a Great University

Dinner tonight at the Great China, a 24-Zagat just downhill from the Berkeley Campus. It’s a fine place in a fine location, but I can never stay in a house like this very long without thinking of what a god-awful lot of work it must be to run a restaurant. Everybody running every which way, lots of things to trip over, to spill on yourself or (worse) the customers. I don’t see how the boss gets home before midnight, and somebody must be hitting the produce market again at 5 a.m.

My thoughts then turned, as they so often do in this situation, to Harold Tafler Shapiro, former president of Princeton University. As I recall, Shapiro’s first grownup job was working as manager of Ruby Foo’s, Montreal’s most expensive Chinese restaurant, owned by his family. It was only after Ruby Foo’s that he went back to get his Ph.D. But it occurs to me: for running a great University, I can’t think of any better preparation than running a Chinese restaurant. You’ve got a million jobs to do, you have got dozen constituencies to keep happy, you have to make the cooks (=professors?) think they are special, and you have to make it all look like fun. Anyway, high marks for the double skins and the greens with duck egg.

And yes, I’ve got wifi.