It's a "dead dove do not eat" feeling, but I kind of hoped I'd open the HN comments on this one and _not_ see a bunch of engineering solutions.
They all miss the point of the story, which is crushingly relevant to startups:
If you build a company with people you like and love, and circumstances outside of your control force it to scale in a hurry, those people you like and love are going to get hurt in the process.
That's not an engineering problem to fix. Stanich's didn't need an algorithmic order filling solution, it needed to lose the people that made it Stanich's. It was doomed no matter what. It was unscalable; it's unscalability is what imbued it with what Alexander liked about it.
The story begins and ends with Stanich's parents and the reason why they started the business in the first place for a _massive_ reason, one that seems to have gone over the heads of most HN commenters (and I'll bet also most people reading it via HN), and that's at least as depressing as the story itself.
Yup. I have a startup that was full of people who expected it to stay the way it always was before it grew to millions of annual revenue, and that ended up hurting them when it turned out that I was running a business.
It bothered me some, but I always knew this was potentially in my future. They didn't. This will happen to everyone who runs a startup that has family or close friends involved, especially if they are your customers. Such is life.
"Anecdotally, I went to Stanich's a few weeks before the shutdown. They certainly weren't getting overrun with customers at that point. The place was maybe a quarter full on a Friday night, and it was filthy. Dust everywhere, dishes left on tables, stains on the floor, the crust on the ketchup bottles indicating it had been at least a week since anyone bothered wiping them. We watched our food sit at the pass for five minutes before a waitress could be bothered to serve us. The place had all of the hallmark signs of a restaurant going under."
"Did Kevin Alexander hurt Stanich's business by giving them the press? Maybe. But Kevin Alexander isn't responsible for running the restaurant. It isn't Kevin Alexander's job to clean the tables or the floor or the dishes or the ketchup bottles. Stanich killed Stanich's."
It's hard to blame Kevin Alexander for this, because Steve Stanich played ball with the review, like most restaurants would. If he wanted to, he could have asked not to be featured in the list, and Alexander probably would have complied; otherwise, he could have done other things to make it clear to his customers that he wasn't interested in fulfilling the role the ranking carved out for him.
We see this effect in Chicago regularly, as I'm sure people in NY and LA do as well; there's a biennial ritual of naming the new "best burger" in the city (it's Kuma's! no, now it's Au Cheval! no, Au Cheval is franchising, time for something fancier --- Mott Street! no wait, the Loyalist†). It definitely "ruins" the restaurant, in the sense that it becomes basically impossible to eat there anymore. But it's hard to fault the businesses for going along! They're there to make a living for themselves.
To the commenters saying Stanich should simply raise its prices: there's a price ceiling for that burger. It's not a fancy chef burger; it's a standard burger shop burger executed well. It seems like the only real scaling option Steve Stanich has, if he's not willing to piss off part of his clientele (a reasonable option!) is to partner and franchise.
† I'm particularly irritated about Loyalist because their bar has one of the best amaro collections in Chicago
There's an easy solution to having too much business : raise prices. I think this is one of A16Z's big insights into most businesses[1]: they don't charge enough.
If you look at the best restaurants in America like the French Laundry in Napa, they charge astronomical ridiculous prices and they still have reservations for months ahead of time. The oldest restaurant in Paris requires you put down a 400 euro deposit just to make a reservation! That these burger joint owners shut down instead of raising prices seems like a huge business mistake. They could have put 50% off coupons in the local newspaper or something if they wanted to make the place available to locals at reasonable prices.
This is a classic humans are rational actors and spherical volumes in empty space economic answer, which entirely misses the point.
The restaurants we love, we love for the entire experience, and price is part of that experience. Even for people who can happily afford the higher price, it still results in a different experience. The people around you in the restaurant will be different. Your perception of the value of the meal will be different. Your willingness to try more adventurous items on the menu will be different. The whole thing is not just quantitatively different, but qualitatively different.
A $20 burger is not a $10 burger, regardless of how the two are prepared. If the former is not the experience the chef wants to create for their customers then, no, just raising prices doesn't "solve" the problem.
Raising prices would reduce the volume of customers, so the restaurant could maintain its quality standard, but Stanich felt his mission was to give back to the local community of regular diners. He didn't want to price out regular, repeat customers from the neighborhood and have only tourists eating there.
They live in a community. If they raise prices such that their friends and neighbors can not afford to eat there, they will become social pariahs. It would be very difficult to do, and it would alienate the very people they probably wanted to be serving.
If you’re a restaurateur, you probably don’t even live near that restaurant. But this advice is tantamount to: tell your friends and everyone who helped you get where you are that they’re too poor for you, now.
Years ago I worked at a place downtown that was blocks away from a Thai restaurant that had a line out the door every day. The place was frenetic, like a zoo. The staff in the kitchen were running around like maniacs, making food as fast as they possibly could. The pictures on the menu above the register were all faded with age.
The food was merely okay. The story was that it was cheap and decent, not good. But as I stood looking at the staff I couldn't help thinking that it would be better for everyone if they raised their prices $2 a plate and just slowed down.
Yes, but if you read the article that wasn't the problem:
And then, in a quieter voice, he started to explain why it wasn’t just two weeks. He asked me not to reveal the details of that story, but I can say that there were personal problems, the type of serious things that can happen with any family, and would’ve happened regardless of how crowded Stanich’s was
Yes, this is the classic gentrification problem. Now you've turned a restaurant that locals can visit into a purely tourist attract that only the upper class can enjoy. This solves the problem of the restaurant owners having to close down, but for all the locals the restaurant might as well be gone.
P.S. And then when the next "top N burger joints in America" list comes out that everyone goes crazy for and all the burger-tourists start going somewhere else now you've lost your local customer base and you might go out of business regardless. Raising prices works well if you're a fine dining establishment in a dense metro area and that's the kind of business you expect to run. It doesn't work so well for burger joints or BBQ shacks elevated to a bizarre level of temporary fame.
I would do it like this: I would create a yearly --- no, make that lifetime membership pass which can be obtained for $30 or whatever. The locals would get this for free. With the membership pass, you would go to a separate lineup which has priority over the regular line up. Then I would work the the same relaxed pace as before, not caring whether 3 people are waiting or 300. The membership pass could make users and their guests eligible for a discount, like 15-25% off. Nothing too drastic.
Then this prices out the neighborhood locals who made the place successful in the first place. These are people that the owner and workers know and care about. I think he could care less about the tourists that come in once just to Instagram their "best burger in America".
That poses a substential risk to the business. You are changing your entire customer base over night. If you are a small restaurant like the one in the article, it is unlikely, that your earlier customers will book month in advance, even at half price.
Your old customer base was hopefully working, but your new customers expect the words greatest burger. Can you deliver on that hype?
The owner above payed month of utilities for an empty restaurant and has to make a sizeable investment to cater to that new customerbase.
Unless you didnt have a functioning business model beforehand, this is a real curse and puts your livelihood at stakes.
It seems to me that Steve was serving a ton of one-time customers and if he did that he would turn off the regulars that helped him get to where he was. You're right in that the technically correct solution would be to raise prices but I can empathize with the owner about how he would probably feel about that.
One of the sad things about this sort of list is that it's literally just one guy's opinion. Sure, he tried all the burgers. I'm sure all the burgers in the top 100 are good burgers, but there's probably very little separating them except some personal preference. For example, I probably wouldn't have rated this place as high because I don't care for grilled onions on burgers; I would much rather have raw onions.
The only reason anybody cares about that reviewer's opinions are because he has a platform and people are desperate to belong to something, anything.
Way back in the '80s, I worked in the kitchen at a little ice cream and lunch counter place called Great Midwestern. Ronald Reagan visited, and declared the blueberry ice cream "best ice cream in America" (to be fair, it was really excellent). This led to a big boom in business - and more importantly, mandatory visits by GOP presidential candidates in 1987 Iowa, with all the press circus that involved.
The owners took advantage of their good fortune and sold the business to someone else, who immediately started to "cut costs" by cheapening the ice cream. We went through two or three other owners, eventually landing on an out-of-state mega-dairy that just repackaged the cheap ice cream they sold in grocery stores - still sold as "best ice cream in America", the Ronald Reagan seal of approval.
Luckily, I could at least maintain standards in the kitchen, continuing to deliver all-vegetarian made from scratch soups daily and a nice selection of cold sandwiches made to order. But eventually, it died of neglect.
I'm a local. I've eaten a burger at Stanich's, way before any of this happened (apparently? I'm just now learning about it). It was fine, but calling it the best burger in America is extremely overselling it. Oregon has a law that you need to serve some kind of food if you sell hard liquor, and that's pretty much what their burgers felt like, an afterthought to fill OLCC regulations.
It was a place for old dudes to get a Budweiser and watch the basketball game, which perhaps made it one of the more authentic places in town (if that's all it takes, I know dozens of places in Minnesota you'll love), but definitely not the best place to get a burger.
If you want a much, much better burger in Portland, go to the Super Deluxe, or go to Yakuza and order theirs, or even Killer Burger, or really just about any other place. Portland is an extremely competitive food town that regularly has burger competitions (http://www.portlandburgerweek.com/), and there are dozens if not hundreds of places where you can get a burger that will be better.
I understand that the article isn't necessarily about this, but I'm having trouble walking away from what I know from direct experience is a ridiculous decision. To give a perspective on how ridiculous this is to me, if I was asked to name just Portland's 50 best burger places, I'm not sure Stanich's would be on it. It's not negligent because he unleashed the internet hordes on this place, it's negligent because the burgers there just weren't very good.
"Too much love will kill you, just as sure as none."
It's an interesting reflection on the effect of the internet hordes that can be called up by a careless article or tweet. A similar thing happens to restaurants that receive the Michelin stars and to single individuals that end up being in more popular demand than can be sustained (this happens to some consultants). Not all of the typical defenses are available all the time, such as raising your prices or other ways of limiting the influx. Besides that not being fair to your original customers.
Hard problem, the internet mob is like a bunch of locusts, they devour that which they visit and leave it devastated.
Enjoyed the article. This reminds me a lot of what Groupon used to do to restaurants in the early days. They would just get slammed by hundreds of crabby people looking to one and done them for a half priced meal. Obviously as Groupon became more ubiquitous this lessened, but I do vividly remember going to a hot dog and burger place and finding the two owner-operators absolutely miserable as a line of 20 people formed out their door.
Back to the article: seems this is why Shake Shack succeeded and prospered with one store being inundated by customers. I'm sure this place has a lot of smart money wanting to use their name and recipe. Maybe not such a bad outcome?
This reminds me of Anthony Bourdain's visit to Venice and a local restaurant that only accepted being filmed if he didn't tell anyone the name or location of the place. It can definitely kill the business.
Off-topic question: how does a submission gets front page with just 3 points?
There is a local barbershop I have been going to for the past 4 years or so. Recently, they wanted to increase some business, so they were asking customers to leave a review. Loving the place and wanting to give back, I left a good review on Google. Fast forward a few weeks, and received emails from google saying my review has been viewed 100s of times. I used to be able to call and get an appointment the same day, or same afternoon even, but now it's difficult to be seen the same day. It's a bit of a bummer, and I'm not really sure how to solve it. It hurt me as a long time customer, but the shop is doing a ton more business now. Now I'm hesitant to do this for any other business I enjoy, even knowing this is a selfish feeling.
This reminds me of the first thing everyone asks when you tell them you just got back from Maui: "Did you go see the sunrise on Haleakalā?"
And, no I have not, because I don't want to wake up at 5:00am while on vacation and drive to a crowded parking lot to watch the sunrise in the cold with 80-100 strangers.
Why is it that we all have to have the same experiences?
Vox Media just published a video about the negative impact of Instagram and photo geo-tagging on nature sightseeing. The "Leave No Trace" organization now recommends that people not geo-tag their nature photos so as to limit the number of visitors to remote or sensitive nature areas.
Who waits for 5 hours to get a hamburger? That's just silly. Either limit the hours in which burgers are served or hand out tickets allowing the holder to buy up to, say 4, burgers. The total amount served would be based on what the staff can reasonably prepare over a certain amount of time without going crazy. If you don't get a ticket, sorry, come back tomorrow. If you don't want burgers, you get to skip the burger line for a seat at the table where you may order anything else off the menu, just no burgers. After awhile, the hassle will cause people to stop trying and the crowds would be reduced to a sane number.
Reminds me of a Nathan For You episode that lampoons the idea of ranking something as subjective as a burger.
Nathan convinces the owner of a burger joint in LA to go on a popular local radio station and promise that he has the best burger in LA, and offer $100 to anyone who eats there and disagrees. The comedy in this is apparent to pretty much anyone, but people will still refer to different restaurants as 'the best'.
They need to introduce a 'Local VIP' card. Basically if you are regular you get a card; if you aren't a regular they recognized and you are a semi-regular local, you show your drivers license and they can decide if you warrant a local VIP card.
If this doesn't solve it, then raise the price. Still too many people, and long waits - what a great problem - get a loan and open a second location or expand the first.
Franklin's BBQ in Austin has hours long lines. It's very good brisket.
The hill country of Texas is FILLED with equally good brisket joints that don't have lines.
People who wait in line for 4 hours won't admit this. Cognitive dissonance kicks in, and Franklin's is unique and better than everyone else in their minds. Try telling a person that their Bose headphones are overpriced and overrated, and you will see this in action.
Lists are indeed stupid, but only because people aren't rational decision makers.
Just to add a little subtlety to your comment, Franklin (no s) BBQ revolutionized Texas BBQ when it first opened. Nowadays, there are several places that can go head to head with it (Micklethwaite and La Barbeque for example), but at the time, there was nothing even close.
Many of those famous places in the hills or even, gasp, Lockhart, really weren't that good once we had Franklin BBQ. I've noticed a lot of these old-school places have had to up their game in recent years and are now competitive again.
That said, waiting in line at Franklin is sort of an event of itself. Most people bring coolers of beer and turn it into a tailgate-like atmosphere. You're right though, I haven't waited in the line for years because I can get something similar much easier.
I'm with you 100% on the Bose headphones comment though. Those things are a ripoff.
Yes. My Bose headphones are absolutely overrated and overpriced. They're 2-3x as expensive for being maybe 10%-20% better than the competition.
But they're still 10% better. They're the best consumer grade noise canceling headphones available. None of the offerings from Sennheiser or the like have both a comparable comfort and the same or better noise canceling. So, for me, there just isn't anything else that solves the problem of having to do high-concentration work in an open office for hours at a time.
I've been to Sukiyabashi Jiro, in Tokyo, four times. The Ginza location twice and the Roppongi Hills location twice. Lunch and dinner service at both locations. These are Michelin 3 and 2 star restaurants, respectively, and it is actually quite challenging to get in to the Ginza location as a foreigner, especially the dinner service. I don't mean to say anything to discredit Jiro or his sons or their apprentices. They are absolutely amazing chefs of the highest quality and they are serving some of the highest quality sushi you can get. It is the best sushi that most people could ever hope to have and the food service itself is worth the experience. But... This place was made famous by Anthony Bourdain and then a documentary.
All of that said, I've personally had sushi that is comparable in quality out in the Japanese coastal countryside at an essentially random michi-no-eki. It's also significantly cheaper and they have pieces of sushi that you won't find in the larger cities that are unique to the region or town.
I think the internet caused a lot of this. It's easier for everyone to herd to a SINGLE point. I don't remember this sort of line size discrepancy being nearly so common twenty years ago.
The most confusing thing about the line at Franklin's is you can just order it to go and skip the line entirely. Granted, you have to plan ahead a bit, but who's deciding at the spur of the moment to go eat lunch at Franklin's anyway?
That's because we are not satisfied unless we feel we have the best. Second best just doesn't cut it, and making it measurable is a great way to focus all the attention on the #1 spot. Same with music rankings, movies, books and so on. It's what powers best sellers: best sellers will sell more because they are best sellers!
I live in Austin and I've made the exact same point to people before.
Q: Which BBQ place should I go to in Austin?
A: Most are good. I've even enjoyed the brisket served at the UT dining halls. (This is blasphemy to some.) You probably would do well to pick any well established BBQ place without a line.
Agreed. For me, most restaurants fall into good/so-so/not good buckets, so I dislike ranking them and selecting a best, however folks love top 10 lists.
I mean, you are a local, right? You know all those places. If I am in town for a few days for work, WTF am I going to do? Go to the one place someone told me about or I saw on a list? Of course.
Right I've seen hipsters in the Bay Area lined up for hours just to eat ramen noodles! What's wrong with these people? Even great noodles aren't much better than average noodles. I really can't understand it.
I eat at a few other particularly popular Portland restaurants where they don't take reservations and the wait can be several hours. Fortunately they will put your name on a list so you can go do something else in the meantime. It's easy to say this sitting behind my computer, but I think the only thing I would change if I were in the owners shoes, is to handle the crowds at the door better. Just because you have a long line doesn't mean you have to change anything about your business, go faster, be more stressed, etc. You would have to convey that to your employees as well.
There's a BBQ place here in the warehouse area south of the Phoenix airport similar to the described. Every day, at open, there's already 45-90 minutes of people in line. I've been by several restaurants that face similar issues.
In my mind, no restaurant is worth an hour wait before you can even get an order in. I'd just assume go to the #2/3 on the list over facing that.
On the one hand, it's nice when you find a place with really good food that makes it into your normal rotation. And you're really happy when they're always busy. But it's when you get a line out the door and around the block that you start to look elsewhere, and sometimes you miss it.
The Chino Bandito on 19th and Greenway was a bit like that at lunch for a long time... Of course I discovered the mediterranian place right next door to it (man, it takes nerve to open a restaurant right next to a hot spot). But the food there is really good (one of the better options in phx) and it's usually not too busy.
Of course I've seen the reverse too. A place with incredible food that you love that never seems to find it's regular footing. Often due to an awkward location more than any other reason I can think of. Just as often as I'd see a place I love blow up, I've gone back to a place I haven't been to in a year or two (usually in an area I'm just not near very often) only to find it's gone.
I don't know what the answer is, as commercial interests will usually corrupt what starts out really cool. I still use yelp, but the horror stories about their pushy sales really leaves me wondering.
[+] [-] trynewideas|7 years ago|reply
They all miss the point of the story, which is crushingly relevant to startups:
If you build a company with people you like and love, and circumstances outside of your control force it to scale in a hurry, those people you like and love are going to get hurt in the process.
That's not an engineering problem to fix. Stanich's didn't need an algorithmic order filling solution, it needed to lose the people that made it Stanich's. It was doomed no matter what. It was unscalable; it's unscalability is what imbued it with what Alexander liked about it.
The story begins and ends with Stanich's parents and the reason why they started the business in the first place for a _massive_ reason, one that seems to have gone over the heads of most HN commenters (and I'll bet also most people reading it via HN), and that's at least as depressing as the story itself.
[+] [-] icelancer|7 years ago|reply
It bothered me some, but I always knew this was potentially in my future. They didn't. This will happen to everyone who runs a startup that has family or close friends involved, especially if they are your customers. Such is life.
[+] [-] navinsylvester|7 years ago|reply
I think this article is a great advise to people running startups. The review is akin to raising outside money.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] joezydeco|7 years ago|reply
https://www.metafilter.com/177718/Sometimes-its-better-not-t...
"Anecdotally, I went to Stanich's a few weeks before the shutdown. They certainly weren't getting overrun with customers at that point. The place was maybe a quarter full on a Friday night, and it was filthy. Dust everywhere, dishes left on tables, stains on the floor, the crust on the ketchup bottles indicating it had been at least a week since anyone bothered wiping them. We watched our food sit at the pass for five minutes before a waitress could be bothered to serve us. The place had all of the hallmark signs of a restaurant going under."
"Did Kevin Alexander hurt Stanich's business by giving them the press? Maybe. But Kevin Alexander isn't responsible for running the restaurant. It isn't Kevin Alexander's job to clean the tables or the floor or the dishes or the ketchup bottles. Stanich killed Stanich's."
[+] [-] tptacek|7 years ago|reply
We see this effect in Chicago regularly, as I'm sure people in NY and LA do as well; there's a biennial ritual of naming the new "best burger" in the city (it's Kuma's! no, now it's Au Cheval! no, Au Cheval is franchising, time for something fancier --- Mott Street! no wait, the Loyalist†). It definitely "ruins" the restaurant, in the sense that it becomes basically impossible to eat there anymore. But it's hard to fault the businesses for going along! They're there to make a living for themselves.
To the commenters saying Stanich should simply raise its prices: there's a price ceiling for that burger. It's not a fancy chef burger; it's a standard burger shop burger executed well. It seems like the only real scaling option Steve Stanich has, if he's not willing to piss off part of his clientele (a reasonable option!) is to partner and franchise.
† I'm particularly irritated about Loyalist because their bar has one of the best amaro collections in Chicago
[+] [-] narrator|7 years ago|reply
If you look at the best restaurants in America like the French Laundry in Napa, they charge astronomical ridiculous prices and they still have reservations for months ahead of time. The oldest restaurant in Paris requires you put down a 400 euro deposit just to make a reservation! That these burger joint owners shut down instead of raising prices seems like a huge business mistake. They could have put 50% off coupons in the local newspaper or something if they wanted to make the place available to locals at reasonable prices.
[1] https://a16z.com/2016/08/13/pricing/
[+] [-] munificent|7 years ago|reply
The restaurants we love, we love for the entire experience, and price is part of that experience. Even for people who can happily afford the higher price, it still results in a different experience. The people around you in the restaurant will be different. Your perception of the value of the meal will be different. Your willingness to try more adventurous items on the menu will be different. The whole thing is not just quantitatively different, but qualitatively different.
A $20 burger is not a $10 burger, regardless of how the two are prepared. If the former is not the experience the chef wants to create for their customers then, no, just raising prices doesn't "solve" the problem.
[+] [-] mujoco|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilrain|7 years ago|reply
If you’re a restaurateur, you probably don’t even live near that restaurant. But this advice is tantamount to: tell your friends and everyone who helped you get where you are that they’re too poor for you, now.
[+] [-] hinkley|7 years ago|reply
The food was merely okay. The story was that it was cheap and decent, not good. But as I stood looking at the staff I couldn't help thinking that it would be better for everyone if they raised their prices $2 a plate and just slowed down.
[+] [-] throwaway5752|7 years ago|reply
And then, in a quieter voice, he started to explain why it wasn’t just two weeks. He asked me not to reveal the details of that story, but I can say that there were personal problems, the type of serious things that can happen with any family, and would’ve happened regardless of how crowded Stanich’s was
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|7 years ago|reply
P.S. And then when the next "top N burger joints in America" list comes out that everyone goes crazy for and all the burger-tourists start going somewhere else now you've lost your local customer base and you might go out of business regardless. Raising prices works well if you're a fine dining establishment in a dense metro area and that's the kind of business you expect to run. It doesn't work so well for burger joints or BBQ shacks elevated to a bizarre level of temporary fame.
[+] [-] kazinator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LargeWu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cf498|7 years ago|reply
Your old customer base was hopefully working, but your new customers expect the words greatest burger. Can you deliver on that hype?
The owner above payed month of utilities for an empty restaurant and has to make a sizeable investment to cater to that new customerbase.
Unless you didnt have a functioning business model beforehand, this is a real curse and puts your livelihood at stakes.
[+] [-] Yhippa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LargeWu|7 years ago|reply
The only reason anybody cares about that reviewer's opinions are because he has a platform and people are desperate to belong to something, anything.
[+] [-] beat|7 years ago|reply
The owners took advantage of their good fortune and sold the business to someone else, who immediately started to "cut costs" by cheapening the ice cream. We went through two or three other owners, eventually landing on an out-of-state mega-dairy that just repackaged the cheap ice cream they sold in grocery stores - still sold as "best ice cream in America", the Ronald Reagan seal of approval.
Luckily, I could at least maintain standards in the kitchen, continuing to deliver all-vegetarian made from scratch soups daily and a nice selection of cold sandwiches made to order. But eventually, it died of neglect.
[+] [-] FiveSquared|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyledrake|7 years ago|reply
It was a place for old dudes to get a Budweiser and watch the basketball game, which perhaps made it one of the more authentic places in town (if that's all it takes, I know dozens of places in Minnesota you'll love), but definitely not the best place to get a burger.
If you want a much, much better burger in Portland, go to the Super Deluxe, or go to Yakuza and order theirs, or even Killer Burger, or really just about any other place. Portland is an extremely competitive food town that regularly has burger competitions (http://www.portlandburgerweek.com/), and there are dozens if not hundreds of places where you can get a burger that will be better.
I understand that the article isn't necessarily about this, but I'm having trouble walking away from what I know from direct experience is a ridiculous decision. To give a perspective on how ridiculous this is to me, if I was asked to name just Portland's 50 best burger places, I'm not sure Stanich's would be on it. It's not negligent because he unleashed the internet hordes on this place, it's negligent because the burgers there just weren't very good.
[+] [-] jacquesm|7 years ago|reply
It's an interesting reflection on the effect of the internet hordes that can be called up by a careless article or tweet. A similar thing happens to restaurants that receive the Michelin stars and to single individuals that end up being in more popular demand than can be sustained (this happens to some consultants). Not all of the typical defenses are available all the time, such as raising your prices or other ways of limiting the influx. Besides that not being fair to your original customers.
Hard problem, the internet mob is like a bunch of locusts, they devour that which they visit and leave it devastated.
[+] [-] admn2|7 years ago|reply
Back to the article: seems this is why Shake Shack succeeded and prospered with one store being inundated by customers. I'm sure this place has a lot of smart money wanting to use their name and recipe. Maybe not such a bad outcome?
[+] [-] goshx|7 years ago|reply
Off-topic question: how does a submission gets front page with just 3 points?
[+] [-] Altaer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerbilly|7 years ago|reply
And, no I have not, because I don't want to wake up at 5:00am while on vacation and drive to a crowded parking lot to watch the sunrise in the cold with 80-100 strangers.
Why is it that we all have to have the same experiences?
[+] [-] cpeterso|7 years ago|reply
"What happens when nature goes viral?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itjc14Fm-gs
[+] [-] GNOMES|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sizzzzlerz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harbie|7 years ago|reply
Nathan convinces the owner of a burger joint in LA to go on a popular local radio station and promise that he has the best burger in LA, and offer $100 to anyone who eats there and disagrees. The comedy in this is apparent to pretty much anyone, but people will still refer to different restaurants as 'the best'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A-wUs-fofs
[+] [-] evo_9|7 years ago|reply
If this doesn't solve it, then raise the price. Still too many people, and long waits - what a great problem - get a loan and open a second location or expand the first.
[+] [-] JPKab|7 years ago|reply
Franklin's BBQ in Austin has hours long lines. It's very good brisket.
The hill country of Texas is FILLED with equally good brisket joints that don't have lines.
People who wait in line for 4 hours won't admit this. Cognitive dissonance kicks in, and Franklin's is unique and better than everyone else in their minds. Try telling a person that their Bose headphones are overpriced and overrated, and you will see this in action.
Lists are indeed stupid, but only because people aren't rational decision makers.
[+] [-] jabb0r|7 years ago|reply
Many of those famous places in the hills or even, gasp, Lockhart, really weren't that good once we had Franklin BBQ. I've noticed a lot of these old-school places have had to up their game in recent years and are now competitive again.
That said, waiting in line at Franklin is sort of an event of itself. Most people bring coolers of beer and turn it into a tailgate-like atmosphere. You're right though, I haven't waited in the line for years because I can get something similar much easier.
I'm with you 100% on the Bose headphones comment though. Those things are a ripoff.
[+] [-] torstenvl|7 years ago|reply
But they're still 10% better. They're the best consumer grade noise canceling headphones available. None of the offerings from Sennheiser or the like have both a comparable comfort and the same or better noise canceling. So, for me, there just isn't anything else that solves the problem of having to do high-concentration work in an open office for hours at a time.
[+] [-] scruple|7 years ago|reply
All of that said, I've personally had sushi that is comparable in quality out in the Japanese coastal countryside at an essentially random michi-no-eki. It's also significantly cheaper and they have pieces of sushi that you won't find in the larger cities that are unique to the region or town.
[+] [-] majormajor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jt2190|7 years ago|reply
Yep. Even The Salt Lick at AUS is decent.
For those coming in from out of state, take a look at Texas Monthly's BBQ section to get some ideas: https://www.texasmonthly.com/bbq-home/
[+] [-] jacquesm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btrettel|7 years ago|reply
Q: Which BBQ place should I go to in Austin?
A: Most are good. I've even enjoyed the brisket served at the UT dining halls. (This is blasphemy to some.) You probably would do well to pick any well established BBQ place without a line.
[+] [-] batbomb|7 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how much better Franklin's would be, but I'm not sure I would care all that much either.
[+] [-] et-al|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_ndrsn|7 years ago|reply
We would have been better served going anywhere else, and will be sure to do so the next time I'm down there!
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] siphor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stagger87|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnuser355|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
In my mind, no restaurant is worth an hour wait before you can even get an order in. I'd just assume go to the #2/3 on the list over facing that.
On the one hand, it's nice when you find a place with really good food that makes it into your normal rotation. And you're really happy when they're always busy. But it's when you get a line out the door and around the block that you start to look elsewhere, and sometimes you miss it.
The Chino Bandito on 19th and Greenway was a bit like that at lunch for a long time... Of course I discovered the mediterranian place right next door to it (man, it takes nerve to open a restaurant right next to a hot spot). But the food there is really good (one of the better options in phx) and it's usually not too busy.
Of course I've seen the reverse too. A place with incredible food that you love that never seems to find it's regular footing. Often due to an awkward location more than any other reason I can think of. Just as often as I'd see a place I love blow up, I've gone back to a place I haven't been to in a year or two (usually in an area I'm just not near very often) only to find it's gone.
I don't know what the answer is, as commercial interests will usually corrupt what starts out really cool. I still use yelp, but the horror stories about their pushy sales really leaves me wondering.