>My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines.
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking “I like to cook” means “I would like to run a restaraunt”. They’re two completely different things.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm sure there's more to it and it could be great to know what some of the specifics are, but it also seems like someone who likes to cook is going to need to be present for a good restaurant
The restaurant industry is brutal, low margin, and cut-throat. There's long hours and extremely hard work, and customers who don't give a shit about you. If you have a successful restaurant, it's probably because you have a good location (modulo those Michelin-starred gems in out-of-the-way small towns). So the landlord will do their best to extract any surplus value you generated through your skill and ingenuity. I've never worked in the industry and I've still heard of all of this.
Professional cooks have a completely different working style to skilled amateurs. They move faster and more precisely, and are able to juggle far more things at a time. It's a massive step up.
Plus the skillset involved in cooking well is orthogonal to what's needed to run a successful restaurant. Your major costs are labor, rent, and raw materials, and you need a certain personality to drive those down. Customers tend to be price-sensitive (again, apart from those high-end places) so you don't have as much power on the revenue side.
I love cooking. I'm never working in the food business.
> the landlord will do their best to extract any surplus value you generated through your skill and ingenuity
It sounds like you're describing landlord behavior where they don't simply arrive at a target rent and happily collect it, but attempt to actively monitor revenue of businesses renting from them and then ride the line between capturing that in rent increases below the line where it's worth it to the tenant not to move and unacceptable extortion.
If so, that's both interesting and kinda terrifying. I've never considered that rental prices might be set as much by specific tenant income as market conditions, and now I'm wondering if I should never tell any prospective landlord what my real income is beyond minimum requirements.
A residential landlord can't charge you much more than market rate because you could just move. At some price point a mover is going to be cheaper. Often there's also various rent control laws.
Commercial landlords, especially of restaurants, have way more pricing power because the tenants can't just move. Their customers expect them to be there, or there's a ton of existing foot traffic - location, location, location. And usually tenants put their own money into renovating the space for their needs.
I don't actually know what that is. Like I said, I've never worked in the restaurant biz. Everything I've written is just from reading random shit online.
Triple net is a bog standard leasing agreement for commercial properties - it's nothing specific to restaurants. Basically, you pay the expenses on the building. Taxes, insurance, maintenance costs.
A SUPER common pattern with restaurants is someone moves in and develops a location, tries to make it work for a year or so, then tanks. Then a slightly more savvy restaurateur leases the location along with the previous tenants buildout for far less, makes minimal renovations, and then makes it a success.
Perhaps a quick skim of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential might help. His position is that running a restaurant is very different from cooking for yourself and friends.
But obviously many people do set up and run restaurants.
But... quoted industry failure rates are insanely variable - from 17% to 60% in the first year, depending who you ask. The variability possibly says something interest in itself.
Clearly a restaurant is literally a food production line. It has to run smoothly and efficiently across a wide range of circumstances and load factors. And it has to handle shortages and customers who may be overly demanding, drunk/high/irrational, or actively hostile, while keeping staff morale high.
I'd guess that being able to make something nice at home seems like a good start, but isn't necessarily the most relevant qualification from a business POV.
"I like playing video games" would be analogous to "I like dining out."
"I like making video games" would be analogous "I like to cook."
Of course "I like making video games" might not mean "I want to work for an AAA developer", but the reasons why would probably be different than those you wouldn't want to make a commercial indie title / open your own restaurant.
As a video game player, developer (non-game), bar/restaurant owner, and a person who likes to cook:
I think the distance between them is about the same, as the GP noted. It's not analogous, but they didn't make that claim.
I have only cooked less than 1% of the time the restaurant has been open. Also "enjoying cooking" has nothing to do with enjoying a commercial kitchen. Pretty sure literally at all.
I feel compelled to put out quality food, but I do not enjoy it at all when I'm not cooking at home.
(Disclaimer: I've never ran a restaurant). A passionate and skilled cook is good, yes, but running a restaurant is about more than that:
* How do you train and employ an effective wait staff?
* How do you design a good menu that's practical to cook a lot of?
* Where do you source your ingredients from? How do you get the quantities you need (and no more)? You might need to cook dozens or hundreds of a certain dish in a day.
* You need to buy or lease a building suitable for a kitchen and dining room. The location is extremely important & will cost you a lot of money.
* Do you choose to embrace delivery apps?
* Can you handle lunch & dinner rush?
* How do you price your menu in order to remain financially solvent, given everything above? (and likely many factors I'm not taking into account)
Some of these things change depending on the nature of the food (e.g. pizza to go vs sit-down fine dining), but it comes with all the problems of a small business.
It is fairly common for a chef to team up with an investor for this reason - let the chef do the food, and the other party do the business stuff. If you're both trying to do both or have a too-personal relationship where you can't say no, it can get messy. That's not to say it never happens or can't work, of course.
Agreed and you don't need to tell me that. I have experience in food service, my extended family has also owned multiple restaurants. I personally spent 15 years running my own business, though not hospitality so it's not quite apples and apples. While we haven't taken the plunge I am putting it mildly when I say "like to cook" and did not feel it necessary to go into my background and knowledge about what goes into the food service industry.
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking “I like to cook” means “I would like to run a restaraunt”. They’re two completely different things.