Frankie Frost/IJ archive
Jeff Burkhart“Oh Dad, you are so not cool,” my 20-something daughter said.
So, there I stood in line with all the L.A. hipsters lined up around the block to eat on the sidewalk out in front of the former auto shop that was now a social media swanky breakfast eatery. The chef had written a cookbook, or a blog, or something, and my actress/Instragrammer/model daughter had insisted that we go. So now I was sandwiched between the sweating 20-something beanie wearer (it was 80 degrees) and the Japanese teenage tourist taking pictures of herself while making oddly pouting faces.
Having kids will make you do all kinds of weird things. But the weirdest thing they will do is remind you of how cool you are not.
But cool is not necessarily trendy. Sometimes it is the exact opposite of trendy. That is why the minute everybody starts drinking Moscow mules, Kentucky mules will be the thing, then mezcal mules, then gin mules, then … well you get the picture.
When we finally got to the front door, the 40-something hostess/manager with a bowl haircut and what can only be described as modern school marmy attire brushed us back.
“We all must leave room at the door for people to enter and exit the building,” she said using the royal “we” in a tone and manner that one normally reserves for speaking to 4-year-olds.
Sometimes people think restaurants and bars are busy because they are good and sometimes people think good restaurants and bars will be busy, but in my 30-plus years in the industry I have discovered that while both can be true, so can neither.
I offer two recent events as proof: the closure of the London bar Dandelyan, which used to occupy the ground floor of the Mondrian Hotel at Sea Containers, just two months after it was named “Best Bar in the World” by the World’s 50 Best Bars; and the closing of the Walden Inn, the only L.A. bar to ever make the same best bars list. Which begs the question: What makes a bar the best?
Bars and restaurants are businesses, which means they are designed to make money. If they don’t then they are not very good businesses. If the best bar in the world goes out of business, doesn’t that intrinsically mean that it couldn’t have possibly been the best bar in the world?
That thought occurred to me as I looked around the hipster breakfast place. No table service; instead it was this new counter order number delivery thing, but even still there were at least 15 employees that I could see. And there were only 40 places to sit, not all of which were being utilized because it appeared that the hostess/manager’s entire job was to offer condescending warnings about blocking the door, something a simple sign could have taken care of.
I did some restaurant manager math: 15 employees times $12 an hour (minimum wage) works out to $180 an hour in wages if they pay everyone minimum wage, which considering the weirdly intricate food (hot pickled carrots in fermented guajillo potato hash), I doubted. Since that place is open 10 hours a day (lunch and breakfast), they were paying out at least $1,800 in wages alone each day. Ouch!
Food costs on breakfast are usually quite high because people just won’t spend as much money on breakfast as they do on lunch or dinner (which is why a lunch hamburger is often less expensive than a dinner hamburger when they are exactly the same item). Even though their breakfasts were expensive — around $15 — once one did all the math, it seemed that the likelihood that restaurant will be around the next time I visit is probably slim to none.
“This place is the best breakfast place in the whole city,” the sweaty beanie wearer said to his friend or into his phone — it was hard to tell since he alternated between both without altering either his tone or tenor.
Making me wonder if the owner, or her investors thought that, too.
Leaving me with these thoughts:
• The busiest place in town can go out of business if the math doesn’t add up.
• Winning awards and getting accolades is great, but businesses are about making money and if they can’t do that, all the awards in the world won’t matter.
• Someday I hope my daughter’s daughter takes her out to a hipster breakfast. We’ll see how cool she feels then.
Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender” and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeff@thebarflyonline.com.
https://www.marinij.com/2019/03/23/what-really-makes-a-restaurant-the-best/ 2019-03-23 19:02:01Z
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