You know, at the risk of heaping on the negativity, I read their Yelp ratings and while some are excellent, others are genuinely a sign of a restaurant in crisis.
Consider the gentleman from New Zealand who made reservations via an email to the owner five weeks in advance, spent the afternoon walking around downtown LA to avoid rush hour traffic, and then showed up only to be told that they were closed for a wine tasting. Or, there was the reviewer who got the point of the restaurant, but still found the flavours rather difficult. Or heck, consider the endless comments about how poor the service was.
I take a couple of things away from this:
- No matter how interesting your product is, you still need to please your customers.
- When you're emotionally invested in something, it is tempting to set aside criticism as being gratuitously negative. But, sometimes your critics are your best advisers.
I don't think that actually speaks against the story, though. The story is: we started small to do our own thing, then a national review blew us up and we couldn't handle the stress in order to scale the business. A lot of the yelp reviews sound like scaling issues, especially since the great reviews are interspersed with the bad: they were capable of delivering great experiences just not consistently.
The second paragraph says "the restaurant was never, ever full." So it seems like they expected to handle more business, and in fact the lack of business shut them down. Maybe they had problems with the growth, but if they were never full then they really shouldn't have. Restaurants with growth problems need to serve food quickly so they can get people in and out to make room for more people, this restaurant apparently never had those problems.
The negative reviews could be why it was never full. I wonder if there are consultants in the restaurant business that can help places like this through the wave of people that are more interested in eating at an acclaimed restaurant than trying some small new place that opened up nearby.
Reminds me of a local restaurant here. First time I went, shortly after they opened there where hardly any people there and I had one of the better meals I've had at that (low) price point. I promptly told everybody how awesome the place was and they got a glowing review in a local paper. A few month later they had tripled the number of tables they had, where packed, and the food and service was dire. Haven't been back since.
A "not full" restaurant scenario can be a scheduling algorithm issue -- "we need a 4 top at 7:30 pm;" meaning everyone who comes in between opening and 7:30 pm sees it empty. Multiply across the entire space, and you can get bad utilization while "100% booked."
Yeah. I mean, loving to do one aspect of the business is a huge advantage when running that business... but it's not the whole of the business. there's still all that other bullshit.
And... my experience? when you are small, if you are really good at that one thing you do, it's mostly okay that you suck at the other aspects of the business. As you scale, this becomes less and less true, you need someone at least minimally competent in the other business stuff, and "just hiring someone" is a lot harder than it sounds, when you are hiring for a skillset that you don't have. Scaling is hard to the point where it sometimes make sense to set a limit and try not to scale above a certain point.
I've generally been growing to the idea that I want to hear all criticism towards my projects, whether it's good or bad, whether it's constructive or not. People suck at communicating, but when they leave criticism, there is always a reason somewhere at the core. It's the old saying that it is apathy, not hate, that is the opposite of love.
So when people are heaping hate on one of my projects, I am now starting to think of it as a failure of messaging on my behalf. If someone says something like "don't reinvent the wheel", it's because I've failed to explain my constraints that prevent me from using existing systems. Maybe one of those constraints is "I don't like that particular system". But whatever it is, it probably needs to be explained if someone is bitching about it.
I might rather people hated my projects than completely ignored them. Getting ignored sucks a lot. Receiving hate tells me people were actually excited by the idea and I was on to something, but that I didn't do something right. I can't figure anything out from getting ignored. It's just blowing in the breeze at that point.
On your homepage seanmcbeth.com the javascript (or whatever does the animation) is totally choking my Firefox (latest) running on a Mac Pro Desktop (latest). Infact when I tried to write this comment it was literally like 300 baud until I closed your website page.
(All of this is to your point and ironically..)
Btw it looks cool but if I can't easily scroll your homepage you have lost me as a potential client.
This is indeed a defect, so your criticism wasn't negative or unwarranted :)
Filing a defect report is one thing, complaining about the very idea of having an animated background, yelling at me for being a "typical front-end dev, doesn't test in Firefox" or something like that, that's the sort of negative criticism I'm talking about.
My point was, even the people who are engaging in dismissive, negative criticism need to at least be a cause for consideration. You might not take them at their word, but it should trigger a process of introspection.
People hate animated backgrounds for the reason you just mentioned, it causes a slow experience. But I didn't know it was causing a slow experience for you. You are correct that it is better to not have a slow experience than to have an animated background, but maybe I can have both. I wouldn't have known there was a problem until you complained (not that I don't test my projects, just that particular site is not very high on my priority list because it is not and has never been a source of business for me). So now I get to make the choice of either improving the animation or removing it entirely, just because someone complained and I didn't just dismiss it as "haters gonna hate".
Thanks. I don't know if I have a good attitude about it all the time. I do still get upset by it and I do still end up making my own dismissive comments sometimes. It's a daily struggle. I just hope I can learn more lessons than I miss, and not let egotism get in the way of "success". Do what is important, not what you want. Telling the difference between the two can be hard.
I tend to be in the same boat, but I feel there's an important caveat: the person providing the criticism needs to be reachable if the criticism itself lacks substance. A complaint just for the sake of venting does no good.
Take, for example, a recent review on my iPad app:
As a creative professional I can tell you that this is junk. Today I had an important meeting and this app acted up to the point the client laughed hard for how bad it was. Stay away!
There is nothing specific in there that I can use to improve the experience. Not one user in thousands of daily active users on this version has reported anything I could possibly assume might be what the reviewer is talking about. Further, because it's on the iOS App Store, it's impossible for me to reach the person.
That's one of the best parts of the google play store; the developer can directly respond to a review. It's pretty handy, and to me, as a user, it says the app is actively being worked on.
Totally!! People giving you negative feedback are giving you the keys to their heart. They're telling you how to make a product they'd love! If I sell anything on Amazon, I or someone on my staff will be writing responses to every single piece of feedback we get on Amazon. It's obviously important to address the unhappy people, but you should appreciate the positive feedback just as much!
EDIT: Anazon->Amazon. Feedback to Apple: Really? Really?
> So when people are heaping hate on one of my projects, I am now starting to think of it as a failure of messaging on my behalf.
I tried that, but I got really burned out.
Someone writes a one-liner "I hate byuu's idea for X", and I write up an article explaining my motivations and rationale, spending three hours on it, listing a dozen cases where I explain why what I am doing is essential, and not just whimsical fancy. They ignore my response. And two weeks later, I see the same person with the same one-liner posting it somewhere else.
I find most people don't want to understand your reasoning. They simply want things exactly as they want it, or they're not happy. I never get anyone willing to have an open dialogue where they're actually open to trying new things, even though I am open to hearing any true criticisms that go beyond appeal to tradition (we'd all be using DOS if that were a valid argument.)
Very thankfully, in my case, I'm not selling a product, and I'm not funded by advertisements. And as such, I can get away with choosing to ignore certain types of criticism. I'm very empathetic to those who can't.
I have a very good friend who quit his job in finance three years ago to focus on photography. (It's been a significant improvement to his health and happiness, but that's a story for a different day.) He has been doing a lot of very abstract photography, lately. He shoots and develops his own film in a pinhole camera he built, and the imagery is intentionally motion-blurred. He gets heaps of praise from other photographers, and tons of vitriol from randos on the internet. It's all of the very predictable, "this is bullshit, anyone could do this," kind. That's not true at all, the images are much harder to make than you would think. But he has not replied to the critics directly. Instead he works on making the images more obviously about the sort of dream- or ghost-like qualities he's chasing.
It is so easy to just dismiss a critic. "They don't understand what I'm trying to do." What's harder is building that explanation of what you're trying to do in what you're trying to do. It makes us better to not completely dismiss the critics.
And you do it for the next person. You've pretty much lost a person forever if they get to the level of vitriol. Don't bother with replying to them.
For me, I have a project that I care very much about. I want to make it work, because it has things in it that I want in my life. I haven't ever cared about my side projects as much as this one--which has more to say about this particular project than my past projects, I cared very much about some of them. Which is why I have to be honest about it. I can't delude myself about it, because I certainly won't be able to delude anyone else about it. I don't have that kind of social media power.
I don't think he builds his own cameras, but he definitely tweaks the hell out of them. I can't really understand most of what he says about it, but he clearly knows his stuff.
> What's harder is building that explanation of what you're trying to do in what you're trying to do.
Oh, definitely. I have a really hard time with explaining my intentions in a way that promotes their strengths without it coming off as arrogance. And dealing with negativity only seems to amplify my desire to stress the strengths, so it's kind of a negative feedback loop.
Nonetheless, I gave it a shot and tried writing up another article about my niche. We'll see how it goes I guess.
Perhaps the New Zealander reviewer wouldn't have invested so much time and preparation into one meal if he didn't have high expectations? Sure it's bad if they didn't respect his reservation, but you don't reserve a seat at McDonalds that far in advance so you don't have the opportunity to suffer that problem.
Then you talk about an example where they forgot to cancel a reservation, and one where the restaurant was closed and a customer didn't call ahead to check before driving for an hour (why is driving for an hour through rush hour something that reflects on the restaurant?). Then one guy who didn't like the food style.
None of those point even remotely to a restaurant being in crisis, so let's look at your last piece of evidence - claims of poor service. Is the service poorly rated on average compared to other similar restaurants? How did you check? Based on how much more poor their service is compared to other similar restaurants, how did you determine that it is a sign of crisis rather than a weakness of the restaurant? (There are many places with good food, but weaker service, which we do not call 'in crisis')
Why would you call ahead? It's a reservation! By definition, you have already called ahead! I have never in my life heard of anyone calling ahead to check on their reservation.
Depends on how far in advance the customer made the reservation. I sometimes call places to double-check, particularly if I placed the reservation weeks in advance.
Also worth noting is that I live in LA, where Alma is (was). LA is basically a "nothing is set until you call to confirm it" kind of town. It's the entertainment industry culture, and its effect on places like hotels and restaurants. There is always a danger that aomeone more important calls and bumps you off the list. Especially at hot restaurants. (Hell, I'd bet at least half the maitres d' in this city are on the take.)
Not saying I blame the customer at all in this case. I really don't know the circumstances. Just saying that reservations in LA are weird.
You're right I misread - I thought parent was talking about 2 separate occasions. Nevertheless, I am still waiting to hear about how them forgetting to cancel reservations means the restaurant is in crisis mode.
HN is usually pretty good about calling out founders who blame everyone but themselves for failings. This is exactly that, just in a restaurant context.
The problem is that Ari thought that Alma's humble origins mattered to people coming in for a good meal such that they would somehow obscure some pretty big problems with the restaurant. I can't imagine ever excusing a product's flaws simply because the founder had difficulty raising capital, and no other restaurant has these deluded expectations.
In this case, the founder didn't listen to his customers — instead, he chose to rest on his MVP laurels and never move beyond. We appreciate that you were able to open the place on $50k, but now that you're more well known, could you possibly stop ripping people off with Eastern European wine that didn't pair with any of your tasting menu? I understand that your approach required an "us vs the world" mentality, but perhaps you could improve service that was spotty bordering on rude. When your customers dislike the tasting menu because it lacks many standout flavors beyond the snacks that initially made you famous, it's advisable to step up your dishes, not simply change to an ala carte menu and start blaming the Yelpers.
From what I can tell, he raised his own funds to start Alma. Before that, he was fired from an internship at a James Beard award winning restaurant, worked unpaid at a community garden and few other places until he just up and left. The article notes that he's never appeared on any of the cooking shows or anything, and that he was about to have to start working in someone else's place before the permanent real estate "opened up" in Downtown LA (which makes no sense if you've been to the neighborhood).
Point being, it's easy to sound blasé about giving a fuck what other people think of your cooking, but it masks the fact that this guy has never had to answer to anyone about some very obvious flaws in his cooking and business skills. Instead, blame your customers and their "shit talking."
>could you possibly stop ripping people off with Eastern European wine that didn't pair with any of your tasting menu?.....Good riddance
Perhaps it's my disdain for wine snobs or anyone else that takes ridiculous things seriously, but I find your comment extremely distasteful - especially the quoted part. Unless he is actively misrepresenting the origin or brand of the wine, he isn't "ripping people off". He simply made a menu choice that you vehemently disagree with. If the negative Yelp reviews are similar to your rant here, he absolutely has a point in blaming the positive articles about the restaurant for bringing in the wrong kind of clientele with outlandish expectations and a penchant for publicly deriding others' lifework.
Eh, there are wines that go better with certain dishes than others. If you order a wine on your own and it doesn't go with the food, it's your own damn fault, but on a tasting menu with wine pairings it's 100% understood by the customers that the sommelier has spent some time identifying and selecting good matches for each course.
I can't tell from the grandparent comment whether he's grousing about a bad choice he made personally or some botched tasting menu pairings - but if he got the tasting menu with the wine pairings and the wine didn't match, then yeah, he absolutely got ripped off. Expecting two things the restaurant recommends together to actually go well together isn't an 'outlandish expectation' at all.
Taste is, by its very definition, subjective. A mismatch between the taste of this commenter's apparently very sensitive palette and that of the menu designer does not qualify as a "rip-off".
Oh, it's possible that the commenter had an unusual palate and he got some perfectly fine pairings that didn't work for him and him alone. Or it's possible that the pairings were selected lackadaisically or to reduce some inventory, and he really did get ripped off - which does happen. It's impossible for either of us to tell.
I am curious, though, why you seem so insistent that it's the commenter at fault, to the point of calling out his 'sociopathic tendencies'. Do you really think there's no way for a restaurant to screw up a wine pairing?
>Do you really think there's no way for a restaurant to screw up a wine pairing?
I guess I don't think it's that important of an issue regardless of whether it was screwed up or not - certainly not enough to publicly cheer the demise of someone's business. There are reasons that some restaurants should be closed. Food handling practices that endanger public health is one example. Serving wine from the wrong part of Europe at a restaurant where the food is critically acclaimed, however, isn't one - at least in my opinion.
If you were served some fresh lake trout, and the restaurant paired it with a rich malbec - you honestly don't think that sort of behavior isn't the sort of thing that you should warn other people to stay away from?
It's a tasting menu. The point of it is to taste good. You don't get to pick and choose, the restaurant picks everything. If they don't do a good job of pairing wine with the food on a tasting menu, customers won't be satisfied. If the restaraunteur responds to customers not liking the wine pairings by blaming them for posting bad Yelp reviews rather than changing the wine pairings, well, there's some natural consequences to that.
Any statement, taken to its (il)logical extreme, can be made to seem ridiculous. But no one has accused the food here of being "disgusting". In this case, OP said that he didn't like a wine pairing, and ended his comment with "good riddance". In other words, he was happy to see the livelihood of another human being destroyed because he was unhappy with the specific part of Europe that the wine he was served came from. The Internet exacerbates sociopathic tendencies, and there is no finer example of that than this.
Can we please have some perspective here? The business owner's livelihood was not "destroyed". His business failed. That is a risk every business owner takes when they start a business, and even that failure generally leaves them more equipped for their next effort. The article even explicitly talks about what he's doing next, which will almost certainly do well by him. He's going to be fine, and the OP of this thread has done and can do nothing to prevent that.
This kind of extreme overreaction to criticisms of people who have incredibly opportunities ahead of them no matter what they did wrong or failed at is just silly.
Bad Yelp ratings routinely destroy businesses (which usually function as the livelihood of the owner(s)). When OP said "good riddance," he was saying that he was happy to see the demise of this restaurant because he disliked the part of Europe his wine was from. IMO, that is the kind of "extreme overreaction" you are referring to.
That businesses fail because customers are unhappy is a bit tautological, don't you think? That we have some visibility into the grapevine doesn't mean the grapevine never existed or that the grapevine (now called yelp) is to blame.
Again, my point is that conflating the fate of the restaurant with the fate of its owner (as with any business) is the extreme reaction. The owner is fine, the restaurant is closed. Does it suck for the owner? Yes. Is it career ending or livelihood ending? Not by a long shot. Is it part of opening a business? Absolutely. Most businesses fail. And restaurants fail far more often than other businesses to boot. I have no doubt this owner knew all that going in.
I'm gonna go with stormbrew on this one. You say "destroy business" and destroy livelihood as if this guy is going to be kicked out on the streets because his business didn't work out. Give me a break - yeah, it's sad for him that his business failed, but I'm sure he'll find another upper-middle class job soon. Being a special snowflake founder doesn't excuse him from being criticized about running a fine-dining establishment badly.
We would all do better to break out of this 1950s idea that losing a job or closing a business is cataclysmically bad. It's disappointing for the founders, but everyone involved will most likely find something else just as good very soon.
Please, restaurant jobs are blue collar, working class jobs. Even operating a restaurant is long, hard labour. Most restaurant owner/operators I know work 12 hour days, 6-7 days per week, and if they were to go bankrupt, certainly wouldn't be able to just jump to the next project...
Capital doesn't simply line up for restaurateurs because there is no big exit. The most you can hope for is to make a profit by the time your lease runs out, and maybe pay yourself a salary.
I don't think anyone is arguing it's easy to run a restaurant, or even to start one. That's not the point. The point is that someone having a business that's failing, or losing their job for that matter, has not had their "livelihood destroyed". They have had one tool in maintaining their livelihood removed, it does not mean they have no more.
And while capital does not (and really should not) line up easily for restaurateurs, I would still argue that someone who can raise capital once has a well above average chance of being able to raise it twice, regardless of the risk of the venture. This also assumes the only choice a business owner has when their business fails is to start another.
Running a restaurant on a small budget is an 'upper-middle class job'?
I agree with you about the current problematic trope of losing a job = destitute for life, but at the same time we seem to have converted every small-businessperson into a '[startup] founder'.
I see this criticism as one of expectations. If you pair the dish with an Italian, French, or California wine and it flops, it could be considered a matter of differing personal tastes.
If you are going out on a limb and pairing with wine from a nontraditional region or using a uncommon grape, I expect an amazing pairing that could only be accomplished with this more unique wine.
Restaurants and tech startups aren't the best analogs. A lot of tech startups are trying to become the biggest thing they can be, and are therefore often designed in a way to be somewhat scalable. A lot of restaurant owners are happy being small, and would rather have a tight-knit community feel than having to become the Next Big Thing, with rich tourists from all over expecting to be pampered.
Eastern European wine that didn't pair with the food. Agree or disagree on the value of that criticism (never been there, wouldn't know a wine that didn't pair even if I had been), but don't turn the parent's comment into some kind of prejudiced statement about all Eastern European wine.
All this complaining about wine from this place or that not pairing with the food to me just proves the point that the expectations of the restaurant are too high because of the press. It was not supposed to be a world class restaurant, it was supposed to be a Denny's. You don't expect a similar experience in a Denny's or Olive Garden.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of them being a Denny's instead of a Michelin 5-star place, but then, you don't typically have wine tasting menus pairing dishes with selected wines at Denny's. If anything, it's more of a make up your mind about what kind of place you are thing. It's fine to be a Denny's, but you're going to have trouble if you try to court foodie attention and don't live up to the standards that that crowd expects.
Michelin only goes up to 3 stars, but still, it's rampant polarisation to suggest that there are basically only the two options to eating out. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a tasting menu and at the same time not trying for Michelin stars and having cloth on the tables.
I think a lot of the commentators here are missing his point. Namely, that he started Alma because he loved cooking, and that before being named the "Best New Restaurant in America," he enjoyed cooking for other people, but afterwards all the wannabe critics ruined his experience. So negative Yelp reviews aren't helpful if he didn't plan on becoming a world-famous restauranteur, but just wanted to run a small, local restaurant. In other words, in a world where Alma never won this accolade, he, his early customers, and all the negative Yelp reviewers would all have been happier (because they wouldn't have known or cared about Alma being overrated).
June 2015: "If you add another $18,000 a month in legal fees ... we just can't absorb it on our own."
October 2015: "We're still working with the other party to wrap up the lawsuit. But to maintain the restaurant at this point it would just continue to put us in a substantial amount of debt. [...] as small business owners, we won't be able to afford a trial, and we really can’t even afford to go through the proceedings leading up to a trail. The realization was that the only way to bring this all to a close is to dissolve the business and move on"
"... they offered to set up a payment plan to reimburse the money he had spent on the restaurant."
Which goes to show - it's a bad idea to do anything before terms have been put down on paper! It is quite amazing when you first start doing business by yourself (as a contractor, entrepreneur, or even chef it seems) how often people "go back on their word".
What happens is that both sides have a different idea of the deal, probably picking on whatever hints were in the conversation to interpret them in the most favorable light possible; and in some cases, it's just a case of one side last-minute-changing the deal because they feel the situation has progressed to give them more leverage.
In this case, the disagreement could easily have been avoided if they had typed up a term sheet and preferably some kind of legally enforceable shareholder's agreement BEFORE the payments were made.
Now begins the PR battle as both sides will try and influence public opinion to protect their reputation.
I ate there before it was named best restaurant in America. It was ok a bit pretentious with tasting style food and bare interior. I tried to go back months later with a date and the answering machine said they don't take phone calls during dinner service (but they were only opened for dinner) and just hung up. Went to another place downtown instead and drove by Alma, it was empty
There's a reason south park riffed on this in the latest season.
Everyone thinks their opinion is important because the internet has made it easy for people to broadcast their complaints to the world (and yes, I realize I'm literally doing this right now). Review sites like Yelp exacerbate this by making everyone think they're a damn food critic.
Throw in a heavy dose of entitlement and its a recipe for disaster.
Well, it's more than that, I think - it's kind of why you never hear comedians lead off with "Here's a really funny joke", and it's because everyone takes stuff like that as a challenge.
I haven't seen the negative reviews, but I read the article declaring Alma best new restaurant, and the article is focused a lot on the humble origins and surprisingly very little on the food. The author talks a bit on how some of the pairings were surprising, but more so because the author wasn't expecting it to be this good.
I'd like to see some of the actual negative reviews, but if that's the article that brought people in, it's not hard to imagine how some might take the declaration of "best new restaurant" as a challenge instead of as a claim.
At the end of the day their opinion does matter and is important. For a restaurant that has 1000 reviews the rating and comments are made up of each of those reviews. It's important to potential customers and hopefully the establishment.
If they all say this food is underwhelming then that's a wake up call to owner. Its tough feedback but it's real.
At the same time people do have a responsibility not to be a jackass. Don't name call, back up general comments with specifics, don't forget to point out what went well, etc.
Foodies flexing their Yelp/Tripadvisor power are a obnoxious bunch. Stalin may be worse than this guy :)
The best example of these food nuts gone wild can be found in "Mexican" restaurants all over the country. Once a small cabal of folks decide that a place isn't "authentic" or not, forget about it... They'll be whining about the lack of fish tacos or whatever forever.
Why not just write that on the menu? One of the best (and highest rated) restaurants near me often features a rant at the bottom of the menu from the owner, either about politics or the economics of the business or just complaining about the customers being douchebags. It's a little quirky, but it doesn't seem to hurt business any, and at least helps the customers understand his perspective on things.
I started Matasano with two partners, both from NYC, one of whom had taken a break from software security to go to culinary school.
What I heard from them is that stuff like this is also part of the restaurant culture of different cities. The rap on NYC and LA is that they have competitive, take-down cultures (NYC more so than LA).
"The rap on NYC and LA is that they have competitive, take-down cultures (NYC more so than LA)."
That's why they're better in the arts. In NYC, they tell you if you suck. In LA, they don't call you back if you suck. In SF nobody says anything and you can suck forever. Go to little theater or art openings and this is quite obvious.
Neither Chicago nor San Francisco have takedown restaurant cultures, and both have relatively spectacular restaurant scenes.
Some of this gets to what you're looking for from a restaurant. If you're looking at food as an art form, and only want to spend time getting exposure to the very best of it, NYC may indeed be a better filter for you. If what you want is a Great Neighborhood Restaurant, which is perhaps Great in ways that make it distinctive regionally or even nationally, I think Chicago is a better bet than LA.
I think you could almost describe this in the context of only positive-reinforcement cultures vs positive-reinforcement and negative-reinforcement cultures. Both approaches seem to work well in the long-term, but the city which also has negative-reinforcement might have 'failures' more often, which could be seen as a positive from the POV of looking at the health of the whole system, but on the other hand could be seen as needlessly cruel to individuals.
But it's also a question of whether you want the culture to optimize for peak artistic quality, or whether you want the median restaurant to be really good. There are some kinds of food for which the NYC median is higher than everyone else's, but for a lot of it, I wonder whether the Chicago median is better even when the NYC maximum is better.
New York has a level of diversity and quality (for $25/meal or less) which I've never seen anywhere else. It also has a ton of tourist trap ripoffs, but those are easy to avoid in the internet age.
Is there anywhere I can read some account/thoughts of your partner's break from software security to go to a culinary school? It sounds very interesting!
This is one of the most important points in the comments here.
In LA opening a restaurant with only 50k is irresponsible mathematically. I say this having taken restaurant management courses with the goal of one day opening one myself.
It is true that restaurants are one of the most difficult businesses to start. It takes time to find your groove, and 50k no matter what neighborhood your in is not a lot of time. Most people in this situation would start with a food truck or save more.
People go to restaurants for lots of different reasons. That's what a 5-star rating system doesn't capture. I think simply rating "I am/not likely to eat there again" would be more appropriate. A site could aggregate enough of that data to find users with similar tastes to you. I.e., Yelp should be more like Pandora and less like Rolling Stone.
I don't know anything about this particular restaurant but it seems like he's accidentally targeting the wrong audience. Wine pairing menus, fancy plating, an article in Vice, Kickstarter... none of these things strike me as targeting his desired customer, which is someone with modest expectations and expecting just dinner, not an event to review.
This actually is a huge pet peeve of mine. It's most obvious with extendingl extremely specific needs like vegetarians for example. It drives me nuts when I read yelp reviews that rate a restaurant low because they don't offer good vegetarian alternatives. It is obviously an issue, but it should be trivial for yelp to exclude that recite from the rating that they show to non-vegetarians. Less obvious examples that are a related but different issues are reviews by people who clearly don't know what they are talking about. Looking at reviews of high end Spanish restaurants in the Basque country, I really don't care about reviews that start out with "This was my first visit to a restaurant with a Michelin star...". I'm not trying to be snobby, but I'd much rather have the review by someone who had been to a ton of then in the same area weighed much higher.
Edit: I wonder if there is a great opportunity for some disruption here. Well be tough do to overcome yelps moat. I would love to work on this!
People assume that you pulled some sort of strings or gamed the "system" to be named "best new restaurant"; they don't know you're an accidental victim of overrating.
(If that were the case, some of the negativity would be justified.)
Starting a business is really hard, these people experienced just one of a near-infinite and surprising way that new companies fail. The good news is that should they try a new concept that is more community-oriented they'll have more leverage with investors and potential partners since they can clearly show they have potential.
Interesting that they were remarkable when they opened, but when the mainstream media made it remarkable, it was no longer remarkable to a different set of people who were looking for more than what the space was.
This reminds me a little of Clay Shirky's article A Group is it's own worst enemy.
Not faulting in the restaurant owners (all businesses have growing pains), it raises thoughts about branding and how much "this is how we do it here" is as much about the holes in the walls at the restaurant as it is the food, and how that story was known and told.
Was the restaurant's message about who it was clearly known, before outside reviewers came in and interpreted their story and told their story for them? For me, a restaurant bootstrapped on so little money is remarkable and worthy of support, but it might not be for everyone.
Some things aren't meant to appeal to everyone and still be successful.
Restuarants are a very risky business. I'd lump them in with other entertainment ventures like quitting your job to go write a novel or whatnot. You get to follow your dream but are not likely to be financially secure. Its a pity society works like that, rewarding pointless work (like corporate lawyers, middle manager and HR people (no offence intended)), and seemingly punishing people who pursue their calling.
I'm planning to do that myself (to make computer games) but I will arrange it so I dont have to make any money doing it and can still survive (I have almost saved enough money to buy a two bed apartment, I'll rent the 2nd room and live off that + my expenses will be extremely low as I wont have to pay any rent myself as I'll own the place)
Another possible explanation, as an alternative for all the "failing to scale" scorn shovelers who rushed to post: he started this restaurant, and then had it blow up in popularity before he had the chance to shake out all the bugs.
Not to mention, you can't 'scale' a small restaurant. You have a limited amount of space, and sometimes it's just not possible to progress beyond a certain point. Sometimes a neighborhood restaurant just needs to stay that way, it can't become a 'destination' restaurant because it simply doesn't have the logistics to manage.
Public restaurant reviews are simply not helpful. There are better ways to solve discovery for consumers, and it's uniformly terrible for venues. Enabling private feedback to the GM/owner would be better.
I do feel bad that they had to shutdown, but I suspect the same thing that hurt them (the accolades) also helped them to land a gig in The Standard. I consider this a success for a young chef, even if it arrived via a perceived failure.
I have a tough time ginning up a whole to of sympathy here. Most people in business would kill for such attention. Not being able to figure out what to do with it seems like a comparatively small problem.
"A year ago, a former friend and advisor who sought to partner with our business sued us. The charges alleged in the suit are serious, including fraud and unjust enrichment. For the past year, Alma has been hit hard with legal fees required to manage and defend the business against this suit." https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-alma-restaurant#/
Honestly, it just seems like they were a mediocre restaurant.
Whether or not Yelp and publicity helped or harmed them is debatable, but that doesn't change the fact that their restaurant wasn't anything spectacular to write home about.
There are many instances where a genuinely good product or service receives negative publicity (remember the original iPad anyone?), but is still a genuinely innovative product or service.
It just seems like they weren't able to deliver an exceptional restaurant experience.
When you get that much media attention and you still fail, there are no excuses. It means mistakes were made and expectations were not met.
I don't think it's the media attention which killed the restaurant. Getting people's attention requires luck, keeping people's attention requires skill.
fair enough. good points are made, people are brutally indifferent and you just wanted a kind of "secret" identity for your restaurant. yelp reviews didn't treat you the right way.
yet, most of what i read irks me because of its raging, venting way. oh well, its not like i haven't written similar things because of bad experiences.
Here's a great rule of thumb: don't write bad reviews. If a place sucked, oh well. People have bad days. Stop acting like a wannabe gourmet and shitting all over people.
I'll only consider a bad review if you give me food poisoning. Cooking your food thoroughly isn't hard.
... Or if your service personally lost me real money. Then it's a legit "beware."
It certainly is off-topic. But I didn't know that off-topic discussion, that goes as off-topic as a polite conversation between real people often can, is discouraged by HN.
It's generally good to be understanding of other cultures, but that doesn't require you to be polite about history's greatest monsters. Stalin and Hitler each directly and personally ordered the deaths of millions, and did so within living memory. That does stand out even from the horrific history of American colonization.
It's almost impossible to open a restaurant for less than 100k, so I don't know what you are going on about. Even if the 50k was free money from daddy, and not a business loan mixed with life savings and a a second mortgage, it's not even in the same realm.
Do you have as much antipathy for the various founders who build businesses with nothing but their hands, brains, and millions in investment from billionaires?
It is so easy to criticize food. This is not different than writing or cinematography. This is the same attack against George Lucas. The Phantom Menance wasn't written for 34 year olds who act like children playing pretend in costumes, its target audience is 7 year olds. And, the movie is about growing up, leaving the protection of the protective mother (although gender roles have changed so now this includes the protective father) and join the adults.
There are probably a lot of people on HN in academia who after publishing popular papers or gained some fame find themselves with targets on their back for criticism.
Anyone dealing with the pressure of criticism should read a very small book that contains 10 letters written by Rainer Maria Rilke to an aspiring poet who went to the same German military school he went to called Letters to a Young Poet. [1]
It starts with:
"I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings."
I did cook professionally for 17 years. I understand what this chef feels. However, I have learned to not care about what anybody feels or says about my dishes. I do not cook for other people. I cook for myself, because I enjoy the process, intensity, and experience of cooking and the food I make is what I would want to eat. Most of the time I find what I want to eat is also what other people want to eat and in the cases it is not they can move along to next restaurant because I don't care what they think.
The Phantom Menace is objectively a bad film. You want a good film that teaches this to seven year olds? Try Finding Nemo.
The Phantom Menace features offensive racial stereotypes, terrible dialog, A poorly-executed subplot about a trade dispute, and characters that I personally could not and cannot identify with.
Is it fair to speculate that you were born in 1992, making you the 7 year old you refer to above? Search your feelings, zappo2938, you know this is a bad movie!
Off topic, but I recently discovered the "anti-cheese" edits to the prequels, and they are a huge improvement to the originals, in my opinion. Among other changes, it removes almost all of the Jar Jar Binks scenes, and replaces all of the racially stereotyped alien accents with alien "languages" and subtitles. Of course, the edits make the movie a bit disjointed, but it was much easier to stomach than the originals. You can find them on youtube if you search "anti-cheese".
I watched the films in Machete Order[1] with my girlfriend in advance of the premiere of The Force Awakens last week. She hadn't seen any Star Wars movie in 15 years, and the Machete Order worked out quite well. I'd considered watching one of the two hour long "Phantom Edits," but it seemed too difficult to find one of good quality.
I don't want to weigh in on the discussion about The Phantom Menace, but I do want to address the sentiment that in order to have a valid opinion about some craft, you have to be proficient at that craft.
When you practice something, you usually don't practice it in order to impress others who practice the same thing. Unfortunately, this ends up happening in many cases (usually with abstract things such as pure mathematics or classical music, where appreciation is difficult without context). But in most cases, you produce things that can be appreciated by others, regardless of their interest in the process. If you knit your friend or loved one a cool scarf, they don't necessarily need to be interested in knitting to enjoy wearing it. And if you're a great baker, someone doesn't need to know anything about baking to enjoy your creations.
All the same, ordinary people can have valid negative opinions of things that they aren't proficient in. When a scarf has numerous dropped stitches or a pie doesn't taste quite right, many people can make observations and express their distaste. Just because they aren't knitters or bakers doesn't mean that their critique doesn't "count for anything." They might not be able to pinpoint the part of the process where something went wrong, but that still doesn't invalidate their opinion.
In this case, the intended audience of The Phantom Menace was not film makers, it was ordinary people (in contrast to say Birdman, which may be easier to appreciate if you have some insight into the dramatic world). Maybe it was meant to appeal to a younger crowd (I enjoyed it when I first saw it). Maybe it was meant to appeal to fans of the original trilogy. But the fact remains that aaronbrethorst is entitled to his opinion and his opinion is perfectly valid.
P.S. I also don't like The Phantom Menace, but that doesn't really matter.
Star Wars is for children and always have been. If a bunch of adults complain that the films don't speak to them, there is something very wrong with their state of maturity.
I wasn't passing judgement on the films whether they were good or bad. I was pointing out like the chef, after Lucas gained popularity, people started to attack him and his films with harsh criticism. Maybe the criticism of the chef is legitimate, maybe is earlier stuff was better than his latter stuff -- I don't know. My point is that criticism is an inevitable part of creativity and people can't make works of art to satisfy criticism because they will crush under the pressure. If the motivation for this chef is the applause, feeling accepted, and getting accolades, he is going to have a nervous breakdown.
This chef, George Lucas, Mark Zuckerberg, and before him Bill Gates can't catch a break from the shit talkers. I'm not passing judgement. But if you base your self esteem on prestige be prepared to have people tear that prestige and your self esteem away with it.
> Star Wars is for children and always have been. If a bunch of adults complain that the films don't speak to them, there is something very wrong with their state of maturity.
As if Disney executives were shocked to find a bunch of 30-40 year olds lining up for late showings of The Force Awakens on Thursday?
Star Wars may be made to appeal to children in addition to the adult audience, but it's pretty obviously not "for children" exclusively. That's especially true of the prequels and now the sequels, which are obviously made to cash in on the nostalgia of people who grew up with Star Wars in the 80s.
If a bunch of adults complain that the prequels don't speak to them, it's because they're fully aware that their childhood nostalgia is being exploited for cash, and the exploiters couldn't even be bothered to do a good job of it.
That's objectively false, though. Star Wars marketing quite clearly targets both children and adults; much more so than, say, Pixar films, which are marketed solely at children despite arguably being more mature (in the "thoughtful and intelligent" sense, not the "sex and violence" sense) than Star Wars.
You're actually trying to say that adults who like Star Wars are childish, and you're welcome to your opinion. But if you choose to back up your opinion with facts, you need to pick facts that are true. There are many exclusively kid-targeted properties that attract sneering attention from adult fans (mostly TV cartoons, in my experience), but Star Wars doesn't fit.
I absolutely enjoy Pixar and Star Wars films, along with many Dr. Seuss books which have messages not only directed towards children but also their parents reading it to their children on subjects like nuclear nonproliferation, anti-Semitism, dictatorial leadership, environmentalism, and in the case of Horton Hatches and Egg, not being a dead beat parent. I considered Star Wars just entertainment until my early 20s when I read Joseph Campbell which made me very conscious of what George Lucas and Disney were doing including the message of self sacrifice for a person's community, family, and friends. This means that George Lucas and everything from Disney [1] thoroughly rejects the libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand using a language of myth and symbolism which according to Campbell connects deeply with children. That is Han Solo's character arc; he didn't care about anyone but himself when we first met him, maybe a little for Chewbacca, until he met the princess. She was the first person he put above his own self interests and the investment paid off when she put herself in harms way to rescue him. It's for children, the toys which children use to foster their imaginations are for children, the dress up customs for Halloween are for children, and Campbell explains that the particular myth of Star Wars is the coming of age story of a boy who leaves the safety of his mother to join the men.[2] Most people are heavily influenced by these stories. It's pseudo science but we understand what is going on with children who have nightmares of the Beast from Beauty and the Beast or Darth Vader. As for adults who play pretend and dress up in customs for play, they really miss the point of coming of age in the stories.
I think the problem is that you're talking past the critics you claim are missing the point. The usual criticism of SW isn't about the main storyline (particularly of the first trilogy, which you summarized here), as the people who find that plot thin and uninteresting were never SW fans in the first place.
By the way, I was 10 when the Phatom Menace came out, and I can tell you that I found it very disappointing. For a film supposedly targeted at children, it has a lot of scenes involving politics, both at the Senate and at the Jedi Council. And no, Jar Jar wasn't funny, not even then.
Too bad you felt that way. All the little kids in my life at the time it was released completely loved it and were obsessed with it the way I was with the first three.
At no point did I say the movie was good or bad, only that it was for children and most of the children I know loved it. So I think it was on target.
My original comment was about handling criticism. I think that George Lucas will continue to make movies not caring about what people think about them. I'll let him speak for himself on the subject. [1]
Ah, so the cowardly Japanese business guy stereotype complete with stupid accent, that's okay, because the film 'is for children'?
The concept that the Star Wars films are just for children is just nonsense that is meant to deflect criticism. They're clearly meant to appeal to all ages. Hell, the new star wars film is rated PG-13 (as was the previous one); children aren't supposed to be able to watch it.
There are a lot of non-children there. George Lucas, at some point, decided that Star Wars was entirely targeted at children. He was wrong. From the very beginning, Star Wars has had fans of all ages.
The first movie involves torture, genocide, and a robot-man who likes to choke people with his mind. It's hard to see how this could possibly be conceived as "for children," especially in 1977.
The only thing in the entire original trilogy that I can think of being "for children" is the Ewoks.
To be fair as I said in another comment, Dr. Seuss covers some of these topics you mention too. Perhaps George Lucas has a different set of values. He draws the plot for most of his works from the Joseph Campbell's comparative mythology. Star Wars is the myth of a young boy who is still with his mother or surrounded by mother symbolism with his mother's family before joining the men, ep.1 and ep.4. An example of one of these rites of passage the plot and symbolism Star Wars draws from is a rite of passage with indigenous Australians when a male child is taken violently from his protective mother to join the men. During this ceremony they cut the boys penis open. George Lucas and Disney don't hide this as their source for symbolism and story plots.
From ep.3 of the interview between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers at Skywalker Ranch 1988:
"JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we know what they do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be, you know, a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they’re naked except for stripes of white down that has been stuck on their bodies, and stripes with their men’s blood. They used their own blood for gluing this on. And they’re swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voice of the spirits, and they come as spirits. The boy will try to take refuge with his mother; she’ll pretend to try to protect him. The men just take him away, a mother’s no good from then on, you see, he’s no longer a little boy. He’s in the men’s group, and then they put him really through an ordeal. These are the rites, you know, of circumcision, subincision, and so forth."
I for one completely support we stop coddling privileged children at Yale.
Consider the gentleman from New Zealand who made reservations via an email to the owner five weeks in advance, spent the afternoon walking around downtown LA to avoid rush hour traffic, and then showed up only to be told that they were closed for a wine tasting. Or, there was the reviewer who got the point of the restaurant, but still found the flavours rather difficult. Or heck, consider the endless comments about how poor the service was.
I take a couple of things away from this:
- No matter how interesting your product is, you still need to please your customers.
- When you're emotionally invested in something, it is tempting to set aside criticism as being gratuitously negative. But, sometimes your critics are your best advisers.