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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 pr
by Gorbzel 11y ago
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."
Good riddance.
- downandout 11y ago>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.
- gyardley 11y agoEh, 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.
- downandout 11y agoTaste 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".
- hueving 11y agoBy that logic, nobody should ever leave a bad review because the food was disgusting.
- downandout 11y agoAny 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.
- stormbrew 11y agoCan 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.
- flexie 11y agoStop ripping people off with Eastern European wine? Really? That's what they did?
- avemg 11y agoEastern 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.
- foobarian 11y agoAll 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.
- ufmace 11y agoI'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.
- vacri 11y agoMichelin 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.
- damon_c 11y agoI love how well the other two replies to this comment compliment each other!
- lifeformed 11y agoRestaurants 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.