A huge problem with restaurants ... probably the huge problem is the margin. Restaurants typically run sub 10% profit margins. Being busy can, in fact, exacerbate this problem. The busier you are, the more food you're pumping through the kitchen, which increases your costs both in terms of ingredients and in terms of labour needed to cook the food. To say nothing of the utility costs, appliances, etc. etc. If there is significant food wastage you start to get yourself really into trouble.
Then, if you're busy, you need to staff up the front-of-house because service needs to be of a certain quality, again, increasing labour costs.
In the case of this particular business, they're also running a bakery: baker's hours start at like three or four in the morning and run to ten or eleven. So now you've got staff in the building, running the power, getting paid, and you're not actually making any revenue. This pushes the pressure up to make that revenue back in other areas: increased liquor sales is one of the easiest places to increase your margin, but this means now you need to be open for 'drinking hours' and present yourself as the kind of place where people would feel comfortable drinking... which starts to pull you away from the initial idea of 'bakery'.
From a complete outsider's perspective, what it looks like is a good idea "awesome bakery!" which ran into a blessing/curse: "we got this amazing 17th street location!" and ultimately realized that one thing or the other had to go, and chose to get rid of the location, but keep doing the bakery stuff within the company.
Restaurants are fascinating businesses and no one ever should ever open one. They are always, always a terrible idea.
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