22 ms·

SF restaurants are suffocating

• technics256 8y ago
  An excellent article that highlights the biggest issues facing SF and the Bay Area overall, and the people who do not do a lot about it.
• robk 8y ago
  It's amazing that front of house staff are making $80-90k. That's starting salary for engineers in many parts of the country. Absolutely boggling.
  • nine_k 8y ago
    Maybe that engineering education and / or early experience is worth something.
  • ido 8y ago
    That’s senior engineer salary in most of Western Europe, and the vast majority of the rest of the world has significantly lower salaries than Western Europe.
    • mtw 8y ago
      But in most Western Europe, you've got health coverage, unemployment and also retirement is included. Plus cheap and good public transit so you don't have to pay for a ca
      • usaar333 8y ago
        Those SF-based servers are getting every one of benefits. Engineers outside of American tech centers are generally highly underpaid.
      • chrisseaton 8y ago
        > retirement is included I’m not holding my breath for my European government retirement benefit to actually be useful in thirty years, to be honest.
    • gamma-male 8y ago
      Senior people definitely make less than this in europe. Unless you're taking about large corp in london.
      • richardknop 8y ago
        Pretty sure in big tech hubs like London, Amsterdam, Dublin, senior engineers make at least this much. Probably more. I can only offer my experience from London, not sure about other places but for sure there you can make over 100k as senior engineer.
        • gamma-male 8y ago
          Oh. But then we're not talking about equivalent levels of senior. Senior in the US can be reached in 2 years.
      • ido 8y ago
        $80k is just under €70k, which is very possible for senior engineers in Berlin.
      • apexalpha 8y ago
        Idk I'm in NL and senior managers make this easily.
  • ra1n85 8y ago
    It's the same in places like NYC, Vegas, and some restaurants in Washington, DC. The patrons spend big on expensive wine and entrees, especially when the space is reserved for private events. It's also incredibly stressful, somewhat seasonal, and means working late hours in an industry that plays very hard.
    • dajohnson89 8y ago
      just out of curiosity, which restaurants in Washington DC?
    • i_am_proteus 8y ago
      In DC, at least, front of house tips out to the kitchen. Apparently that's forbidden by the law in San Francisco.
  • onetimemanytime 8y ago
    Ask how much of it left in the end of the month after expenses...
  • emcq 8y ago
    It's more than I made when I moved to the bay area. I remember meeting wait staff that earned more than me with more flexible schedules. That said it's easy to look over the skills of some of these folks. Being able to be gracious and provide a good customer experience for 8+hrs/day in a hectic environment requires skills that take effort to learn and maintain.
  • 0898 8y ago
    They're making the equivalent of $80k – not necessarily $80k. "With the service charge, our servers were making $38 per hour (hourly base + hourly service charge) or the equivalent of $70,000 to $80,000 a year if you were working for us full-time."
    • rectang 8y ago
      It's like citing contractor hourly as if it were employee hourly. The wages are feast-or-famine, but we're only counting feast!
  • refurb 8y ago
    How much of that is overtime? The article mentions being aggressive at picking up shifts. If it's a standard 40 hour work week then I agree - it's much higher than I thought.
    • rectang 8y ago
      In a service industry driven by on demand scheduling, a "standard 40 hour work week" is quaint nostalgia. Regardless of hourly compensation, total wages for semi-skilled proles are forever in the sweet spot of not-quite-enough-to-get-by.
      • refurb 8y ago
        I understand people aren’t doing regular 9-5s, but my point was if they are making $90k working 40 hours, that’s really good. If they’re making $90 working 65 hr per week, that’s not so impressive.
  • gremlinsinc 8y ago
    I'm a freelance fullstack dev (laravel + vue), probably intermediate-senior level. That's more than I've ever made. I live in utah and Rent is $1000 for a 4-5 bed house, and I under-price my services cause I suck at marketing. ($40-60/hour, when most freelancers get $100+).
    • harlanji 8y ago
      I live in SF and am charging $15/hr for Clojure exclusively. No bites yet. My budget is $1,500/mo total, $600 being food. Awe yea. I charge what the market will bear, starting at minimum wage. China is about $45 fyi, last I paid—good talking point.
      • hirundo 8y ago
        > My budget is $1,500/mo total, $600 being food. How do you pay for housing in SF with $900/mo or less?
      • geobmx540 8y ago
        Do you mean 150/hr?
      • gremlinsinc 8y ago
        If you're trying to do only clojure and nobody is biting, you might want to pivot to a less obscure framework/platform... I picked vue because I prefer it's templates to jsx, and I like vuex and it's sort of well documented for use with laravel. But if I hadn't picked vue, I'd have gone with react because of market domination. I'm currently even thinking of pivoting from laravel to node based backends because it seems js devs make all the $$... and I'm not so locked into laravel that I can't move or jump to other frameworks. The more you know the more you can charge...I have many friends who target a specific vertical like Fintech that charge between $100-200/hour for js/node development as freelancers. Working on teams I've made around $35/hr, solo depending on the client I've pitched 40-60... I work w/ a lot of small businesses who that's on the high end for them --they're used to wordpress devs at $25 or less per hour on upwork. Clojure being a bit obscure though, I think freelance would be harder to secure, but a full-time gig at a shop/agency or startup who's apps are built on that framework would be easier, as long as you have a good portfolio and very active github showing activity w/ that.
  • Mikeb85 8y ago
    Why? It's a skilled profession and there's demand for it. Given how many 'engineers' are working on yet another Facebook/WhatsApp/Twitter/whatever clone that people really don't care about, why shouldn't professionals who provide a service that people enjoy make the same money as people building a shitty app?
    • JamesBarney 8y ago
      Basically barrier to entry. It takes a lot less time to turn a friendly adult into a good enough waiter than it takes to turn a nerdy adult into a good enough developer.
      • Mikeb85 8y ago
        We all know wages aren't dependant on education, otherwise teachers and scientists would be rich. But they're not. Also, most of the waiters I know have at least one university degree. Many have multiple, or a graduate degree. Not to mention, good waiters know about food, wine, spirits and have the soft skills required to put up with people who frequent restaurants. Anyhow, barrier to entry is a bad excuse. Education does not equal a good living.
        • JamesBarney 8y ago
          I deliberately avoided using the word good because otherwise we go down a rabbit hole talking about what makes a good engineer versus a good waiter. > Education does not equal a good living No but it is heavily correlated with one. There are plenty of restaurants that will hire an 18 year old with no experience and literally no qualifications to be a waiter. Lots of places when they are looking for experienced staff just hire anyone who had any waiting experience. They aren't nearly as picky as development managers. I don't know of any software companies that will just hire an 18 year old to write their code without any training or experience. Without a 4 year degree I've seen it take people usually a year or longer of spending all of their free time coding to get their first coding job. But if you think it's as easy to get your first waiting job as software engineering job(which is very different from my friends experience who has done both), what do you think is the cause of the wage discrepancy?
  • joshuamorton 8y ago
    Tawla is not a cheap restaurant. Dinner was $40/person + tax & tip, wine and dessert were extra. The food was good, don't get me wrong, but it's a fancy place.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• vinniejames 8y ago
  "That also allowed us to give our employees private healthcare instead of relying on the broken Healthy SF system which has proven to be very hard to navigate"
• chinathrow 8y ago
  "We, among others, tried to be innovative. We tried to go the ‘service charge inclusive’ route, automatically including 20% in every check." I wouldn't call that innovative. Innovative would be paying a fixed salaray which allows your staff to live in SF without relying on tips. Others have done it in the US too. In lots of countries the world over, tipping is a plus, not a requirement. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/dining/danny-meyer-restaurants-no-tips.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/dining/danny-meyer-restau...
• 0898 8y ago
  Excellent article. Key take-away: "There is no amount of money an owner could pay an employee within the economics of a small business to allow their employee to live within the borders of the city or even within a reasonable radius that doesn’t have them traveling for two-plus hours a day to come to work. This is the reality of where we live."
  • oh_sigh 8y ago
    I don't see how or why the employer should care how long their employees commute is it is incumbent on the employee to make the decision if the commute is worth it. Maybe people would prefer a 2 hour commute to a place where they can make $80k/year, over working 10 minutes from home and only being able to make $35k/year.
    • thatoneuser 8y ago
      The very subject of this article is why the employer should care. Ethically the owner has no requirement to care. When you can’t find people willing to make the commute then you’ve found when the employer should care.
    • rebuilder 8y ago
      If that were the case, then restaurant owners wouldn't have much trouble finding staff, right?
    • jurassic 8y ago
      Small business owners do care about the health and happiness of their employees. But even if we pretend for a moment that they do not, it's a threat to the business viability if workers cannot afford to live within a reasonable commute. If rents continue to outpace wages, those workers will eventually leave the area or the industry. The article talks about the business impacts of people leaving in detail (loss of talent, reduced quality of service, direct hiring costs associated with turnover, etc).
      • oh_sigh 8y ago
• BadassFractal 8y ago
  This is obviously extreme, but we're in an extreme situation here. Vote with your feet and get out of the city, move away from the Bay. Only once the upper middle class feels some pain will anything be done about it. Until then, it's not their problem, they can work around it thanks to the flexibility wealth affords you. I don't see how else this will be fixed, it has to get much worse before it gets any better.
  • dahdum 8y ago
    SF ballooned their deficit by billions during the last bull market. Over $10 billion of unfunded pension and healthcare costs. The next recession is going to be brutal.
    • shostack 8y ago
      How does that work exactly with the massive surplus the state is running? [1] couple those Donna be used to fill this gap? [1] https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2018/dec/18/jerry-brown/does-california-have-budget-surplus-nearly-30-bill/ https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2018/dec/18...
      • dahdum 8y ago
        California has $63b and growing in unfunded pension liabilities. The surplus is only a cash cushion. The problem is vastly reduced if you can shift healthcare costs from the unfunded pensions to single payer or Medicare for all, I think that’s likely to happen in the next 20 years.
  • closeparen 8y ago
    Returning the Bay Area to a quaint, sleepy place isn’t making them feel pain, it’s giving them exactly what they want.
  • brianpgordon 8y ago
    The upper middle class in SF isn't a bunch of asshole NIMBYs who tip badly any more than the lower class is just a bunch of low-life drug dealers. It's a baseless stereotype on both ends. And possibly the most vociferous group blocking housing, Calle 24, is predominately lower class. So I'm not sure it's helpful to paint people with that brush. Incidentally, I think the young new-money transplants that the author trashes in her article are likely to be more sympathetic on this issue than SF native homeowners.
• crazygringo 8y ago
  According to the laws of economics and supply and demand, restaurant prices should be rising accordingly, if customers are still demanding restaurant food. In other words, if the tech industry has produced so much wealth that has driven up rent prices, it should be driving up everything else too, right? People need to go out to eat somewhere, right? (And my experience says this is true -- I live in NYC and I get sticker shock at SF restaurant prices.) Presumably other restaurants are thriving? Are we sure this particular one just didn't have the right business model, like most attempted restaurants don't? The restaurant industry is notoriously competitive, and the customer is always right -- you've got to give them the food they want (not the food you think they should want) at the location they want at a price that's competitive. As long as plenty of other restaurants are managing to pay their staff enough so that they'll commute... and it doesn't seem like restaurants are disappearing from SF... then isn't this just the case of a bad business plan, or product-market-mistmatch, for this one particular restaurant?
  • 0898 8y ago
    She argues they're managing by focusing on "me too" concepts like ramen, pizza or pasta shop that don't need staff of the same calibre.
    • zozbot123 8y ago
      OK, but that still doesn't explain why "me too" food should outcompete ethnic/specialty/niche food when workers at both kinds of establishment (not to mention the establishments themselves) are paying the exact same rent. Perhaps when eating at a restaurant gets so expensive, people opt to trade off food quality rather than e.g. doing less of it in the first place, or whatever else.
  • staticautomatic 8y ago
    There are somewhat hard limits on the availability of labor though. I know a guy who owns a very popular and expensive restaurant that had to start closing one day a week because he couldn't find enough staff, and not because he pays them peanuts.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• zozbot123 8y ago
  Tl;dr: The rent is too darn high! It's not just individuals that are suffocating because of it, but marginal, specialty/niche retail businesses like this restaurant. They should pack their stuff and move out.
• refurb 8y ago
  Oh the irony that the author is a former Google executive, who I assumed started the restaurant after cashing out big time. She doesn't realize that she has a role in this as well? How much did she pay for her house/rent? Did she outbid someone in cash? Yes, I realize the supply side is a major issue to. SF should build more. It's just the finger pointing (those evil landlords with their Ellis evictions!) made me chuckle a bit.
• mberning 8y ago
  “We thought hard about all the ways we could help from tapping our networks to find a more dignified temporary place for our cook to stay, to figuring out how to pay him more without having him lose access to different low-income programs for which he currently qualifies.” Wow. Or you could actually pay them a living wage that doesn’t require public subsidy. If this were Walmart making this statement they would be crucified.
  • tylerhou 8y ago
    I think the implication was that he was at a welfare cliff.
  • narrator 8y ago
    Many people are unaware of the huge impact of the welfare cliff, especially when it comes to families with children: https://www.learnliberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/welfare-e1471458574375.png https://www.learnliberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/welf... If you are a single parent with two children you get the same net income at $30,000 as at $80,0000 due to benefits getting cut off above $30,000/year income.
    • kaveh_h 8y ago
      That’s ridicilous. The system has clearly been setup to fraud the majority who needs welfare and is a political virtue signaling. I bet the mean salary was right in the Middle of the ”cliff” (around 55k$) when this was decided to ensure very few would get the benifit and cost on government would be minimal. The logical policy would perhaps be to equalize income to a certain treshold depending on available funds and budget on a particular year. This would also make investments in transits and housing more stable for everyone involved, simplyfing business decisions and quite possibly increase long term profitability.
      • usaar333 8y ago
        > The system has clearly been setup to fraud the majority who needs welfare and is a political virtue signaling. It has this effect, but I'd blame the need to simplify over malevolence. SF's below market rate housing is a great example of a huge welfare cliff. Make under $60k? You can get a 1 bedroom for $1600/month. Don't? Join everyone else fighting at $3k/month or what not. So yah, it's a bit ridiculous that we have a system where someone making $59k does better than $70k. But it's really hard to administer everything as a phase-out system, especially with non-cash benefits. (currently the apartments are required to charge X rent.. so what should happen to the person making $70k/year?) Hence, these blunt-edge qualifications.
• protomyth 8y ago
  I can tell you why the whole Service Charge Inclusive irritates customers. Its false advertising. You are increasing the cost of the meal but not reflecting it on the menu. People find it dishonest like every other time in our lives where we are told a price, but then we get hit with a fee. Ask bank customers about it. Just be honest, the meal needs to cost more because the cost of production is more.
  • terandle 8y ago
    I’m all in favor of abolishing tipping culture from the US but that’s not something you can expect a single restaurant to accomplish on their own. Given the reality of US culture I think this is a good compromise for now. It’s much more honest then pretending that the restaurant isn’t expecting a 20% tip on every order.
    • protomyth 8y ago
      If you expect a mandatory fee and its not on the item's price, then its dishonest. Sales tax in the US is bad enough, but at least we all know about it and its the government. If they want to break out the "labor" cost on the menu like auto folks do, then fine, but this fee crap is just plain irritating.
      • rectang 8y ago
        Well, you can rage against it. You'll be joined by all the people who never want tipping to end because they're intoxicated by the feeling of power they hold over waitstaff as they decide how much to tip.
        • protomyth 8y ago
          Oh give me a break. If you need to charge the money, then you need to be like every other business and charge the money. In fact, they are charging the money, they are just throwing it on at the end as a fee. Businesses who do that are dishonest.
      • 8y ago
• matchbok 8y ago
  What's the breaking point here? Are we there? SF needs to make the NIMBYs shut up and start building more housing yesterday.
  • rectang 8y ago
    There's no breaking point, just ever-increasing inequality as an inevitable consequence of structural factors. Feudalism persisted for centuries, and it can again.
    • cc439 8y ago
      You'd think there would be a breaking point somewhere around "we could pay 25% less and still attract top talent to relocate to literally anywhere in the Western world". The cost of living in the SF bubble has long since passed the point of being insulting and the salaries being commanded by those who are driving the continued growth could go so far in other major metro areas that most employees would think they're living like kings even with such a paycut.
    • ummonk 8y ago
      Even in the feudal era, early landowners didn't generally pay artificially lower taxes than later landowners. What we have with prop 13 is worse than feudalism.
• lsc 8y ago
  eh, I think the real problem is that we're building/converting space into office space at a much faster rate than we're building/converting space into residential. I personally think that to get zoning approval to build an office tower in this area, you should need to get someone to agree to build an apartment tower nearby with a similar number of units. I mean, I'm not saying they need to be owned by the same people or that those apartments will be occupied only by people who work in that office building, but you need housing nearby where there are jobs.
• threadify 8y ago
  > In nearby San Francisco, only 0.1% of restaurant staff can find affordable housing in the city, with the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment at an insane $3,447. Lack of affordable housing is doing the suffocation. America was built by a strong middle class, and SF is setting an example of what happens when people stop caring about the middle class and $70K/year becomes low income.
  • changoplatanero 8y ago
    Just because the median apartment is not affordable doesn't mean there isn't affordable housing. Half of all people have apartments that are cheaper than the median.
    • closeparen 8y ago
      The stat doesn't mean that on its own, sure. But if you've searched for downmarket housing recently... it's pretty bleak.
• jellicle 8y ago
  > figuring out how to pay him more without having him lose access to different low-income programs for which he currently qualifies Wow, the charitable impulses here are overwhelming. You'll pay him more, as long as it doesn't lift him out of poverty. Wow. Wow. If you want more staff, pay staff more. This easy equation has been understood for thousands of years but business owners find it difficult to comprehend when it is their business.
  • Johnny555 8y ago
    Wow, the charitable impulses here are overwhelming. You'll pay him more, as long as it doesn't lift him out of poverty. Wow. Wow. If a salary increase makes him ineligible for the services that he's using to stay in the city, the higher salary could be an effective cut in pay. While it's possible to pay him a large enough salary to make up for those services, it's likely more than the business can afford.
    • sampo 8y ago
      Not very capitalist to run a business that is dependent on the employees being able to live in assisted housing.
      • Johnny555 8y ago
        San Francisco is not a good model for capitalism. The housing market in particular is highly skewed not just because of politics, but also geography.
      • ummonk 8y ago
        A city that is setting aside a large portion of its housing stock for low income people isn't all that capitalist. Businesses have to learn to work with the system.
• z3t4 8y ago
  I'm a big fan of Turkey and Greece home made food. Where I live, one such meal, and if I bring the family, would cost up to 10% of my monthly salary as an engineer with 20 years of experience. The chef at the restaurant earn more then I do.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• usaar333 8y ago
  This article was a bit scattered over the various sources of issues (high living costs, low labor pool (leading to high salaries and high turnover), reduced high-skilled chefs, high taxation, complaints about customer base with some nativism thrown in); figured I'd try simplifying it. On the labor side, there's enough labor competition to drive salaries of line cooks to $50k/year. That's about $38k post-tax, which even after spending spending $19k/year in rent (split a two bedroom maybe 40 min from downtown) leaves $19k. Not great, but mind you the average line cook in the US is pulling $30k/year pre-tax (24k post-tax) -- the COL difference is pretty much compensated for. Where things break down badly is with older, more experienced workers that have/might have families (e.g. the cook with 4 kids in the intro paragraph). Space comes at a premium in the Bay Area and if they prefer to not be crammed in to a small place, the salary an experienced worker can make isn't going to cut it to cover the desired marginal living space. The final piece in the puzzle is that the desired salary multiple of these experienced workers (over entry-level ones) is higher than their productivity gains. That is, if the experienced cook needs twice as much take-home ($110k pre-tax) as the entry-level one (due to family needs), unfortunately, there is insufficient customer demand to pay 2.2x as much for food for this higher quality. (but mind you much more base demand in SF than elsewhere!). Result is that experienced folks move to areas where housing costs (per-sq feet) are lower as a percent of salary. Net effect might be that the dominant strategy for someone in the restaurant business is to start out in SF but later move to a somewhat lower COL area. With such a strong economic incentive, restaurant composition will likewise follow; city policies, etc. are likely secondary.
  • jurassic 8y ago
    One of the challenges, I think, is that landlords don't want to rent to you if your salary isn't three times annual rent. I'm not a real estate professional, but I've been told that multiple times when looking for my own apartments. In your example, you have the worker coming out okay or possibly slightly ahead (compared to lower COL areas) by spending half their net on rent. But by this 3x rule the landlords renting a property that costs $19k/yr would want to see an income of at least $57k and the worker wouldn't qualify.
    • deleted 8y ago
• tchaffee 8y ago
  The article seems to be transparent at first glance with giving lots of numbers about salaries and so on. Why no numbers on profit and what the owners take home? Also, there is no mention of trying to raise the prices of their products in order to pay their employees a living wage. I guess that could mean you go out of business if your competition offers a similar product but doesn't raise prices. But I would personally be ok with that. Otherwise what's the service you're really providing? Guilt free eating for your customers who you shield from what those prices are paying the welfare dependent cook? I'm ok with not being in that business.
• dawhizkid 8y ago
  The tone of the article was really off-putting. I get that it is a hard business, especially in SF, but it felt like she was blaming everyone (including her staff) for her restaurant's failure and taking zero responsibility herself.
  • MuffinFlavored 8y ago
    I didn't read the article yet but what are some responsibilities an average failed restaurant owner should take? Improper location/menu? Bad hiring? Poor ability keeping staff morale up?
    • Mikeb85 8y ago
      > I didn't read the article yet but what are some responsibilities an average failed restaurant owner should take? Think of a restaurant owner more like the founder of a start-up. They're literally responsible for everything. Or should be, if they have any sense. Outsourcing every single aspect of a start-up isn't a great idea, is it? Ideally, a restaurant owner creates the concept, menu, picks the location, hires staff, trains staff, sets service standards, cooks or interacts with guests, orders product, sets prices, etc... You can't just hire people and expect success. If you're a first time owner and not in the restaurant at least 70 hours per week, you're probably going to fail.
      • danielvf 8y ago
        I've known several people who have started their own restaurant - let me confirm that the hours required are more than any other job or startup I've ever seen. I am 100%, never, ever, going to start a restaurant.
      • goatlover 8y ago
        Is that worth it in terms of life/work balance?
        • Mikeb85 8y ago
• reasonablemann 8y ago
  It does not make sense that this person is attempting to run a reasonably priced restaurant and has FOH staff. SF needs to adopt more Japanese style ordering machines. You choose and pay up front. When you are done you just leave. It's beautiful.
  • Marsymars 8y ago
    > SF needs to adopt more Japanese style ordering machines. You choose and pay up front. When you are done you just leave. It's beautiful. I feel like North American restaurants are only willing to implement these with awful touchscreen UX, like the McDonald's touchscreen displays.
    • mushufasa 8y ago
      That may be due to capex. McDonalds can invest in a ordering system while a mom-and-pop can't front capital for some sort of ticketing machine. I don't know how the economics work out in Japan. I'm sure a large part is cultural and shared knowledge. Maybe there's an opportunity for vendors of Japanese ticketing machines to jump into the San Francisco market??
      • QML 8y ago
        You don’t even need an in house ordering machine; everyone has a smart phone so just make a mobile system or website. It’d be easier if there was an aggregator like UberEats but for dine-in.
        • Thriptic 8y ago
          Iirc this is done in China with Wechat
    • Scoundreller 8y ago
      I've found the McD's self-order UX pretty good. What's bad about it (as someone that hasn't used any other restaurant's self-order). It's the supermarket self-checkout UX horrible -> I'm automatically treated as a criminal because I can't checkout the next item before bagging the first. I have two hands darnit!
• jelliclesfarm 8y ago
  Am I the only one who is appalled that a person with a wife and for children(one under 6 months) is working in a minimum wage job? 1. They should have either not had four kids or 2. should train to pick a higher paying job. 3. Or move to a cheaper part of the country. The question is: how do we train people for better jobs or when jobs aren’t available, how do we make sure they ..well..live? These are the questions we should be asking and not talking about SF restaurants and housing unavailability. Where is the ‘Linkedin’ and retraining resources for people like this cook? This author with a MBA just didn’t make compelling reading.
  • a-dub 8y ago
    astonishingly tone deaf. you need to get out more...
  • yellowbuilding 8y ago
    This is really an outrageous suggestion, when so many extremely overqualified people work in restaurants. If you have paid any attention at all, you would realize we live in an increasingly service-based economy. The repercussions of that undermine your entire thesis, which is the long-time neoliberal position that there are millions of jobs sitting empty for decades on end that could be filled if only people had gotten enough college. Well, the solutions have been pursued and all numbers conclude the diagnosis was false.
  • xivzgrev 8y ago
    What is the cook going to retrain in that’s going to substantially change the picture? The only substantial wage gain would be in tech, and retraining to be a coder/designer/sales person is not a universal panacea, not everyone can do those.
    • jelliclesfarm 8y ago
      I don’t know. Maybe we should create different categories of work. You are right about technical training. While people like him ought to be responsible wrt procreation and family planning...surely there has to be something from this side of job market too? Maybe restaurants WILL disappear. Like movie theatres and book stores and retail eventually will..in that case, cooking is a skill. Perhaps there has to be a program where they can cook for students or in offices with ten clients. Regulations has to be relaxed. CA food laws and business licenses are too stringent and difficult to navigate. I also want to say that in CA..being reliant on undocumented laborers in the restaurant industry has created an artificial pricing. Food is cheap but rent is high. Labour has become the unmanageable variable while in fact, food was cheap because the savings from hiring cheap labour was passed on to the customer. Or maybe the solution is going to be universal health care and universal basic income. That might be another possibility but whats happening right now isn’t sustainable.
• Mikeb85 8y ago
  > When I set out to open a restaurant in San Francisco’s vibrant restaurant market, I thought I’d employ all I’ve learned from an MBA from a top school, the rigor of an engineering education and a decade and a half launching and managing some of the most successful businesses for Google and other tech companies. Furthermore, I wasn’t naive to think that I knew better than all those who’ve been tenured in the industry. I actively sought out the mentorship of many titans who’ve been generous with their time and knowledge of the industry. So I opened Tawla, a restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission district. I'm curious what the author is actually adding to the restaurant's value? In the current economic climate in the US, there's more capital than places to put it. Everyone wants to open a restaurant. Not everyone knows how to run one. If she's not cooking, managing the front of house, etc..., what is she doing? > culinary cultures of Turkey, Greece and the Levant area There's shawarma shops everywhere in the western world. They all offer Mediterranean/Levantine cuisine, what does this restaurant offer beyond that? > Over the past two years, it was quickly and often apparent that there’s nothing that a small and young business in SF could do to make the city a living option for its employees. Yes there is, pay more. And to pay them more, raise prices. If people can afford to pay rent and they still want to go out to eat, they'll pay more. That being said, you need to have a compelling product. Not sure someone with no restaurant background selling a commoditized product is going to be able to produce a compelling product. > As alluded to earlier, the mass exodus of individuals from this workforce leaves fewer people and less reason for those people to excel. Yes, people leave because they're not paid enough. Pay more and maybe they'll stay. > The impact is seen when we tried the aspirational ‘Service Charge Inclusive’ model. Diners were so dismayed by it. Of course they were. No one likes add-ons that they weren't told about. Instead of adding a 'service charge', just raise the menu prices. You know, the same as in Europe and other places where service is included. All I see when I read this article is someone who knows nothing about restaurants, adds no value to her own restaurant, claims she's innovative and knows better but then reverts to the restaurant status quo and claims it doesn't work. This is what I don't get about restaurants. Some of us work in them for 10-40 years. Do our apprenticeships in restaurants that win awards, have Michelin stars, are top 50 in the world, and work 80 hour weeks for decades on end. And then someone who got a little money from Google thinks they can just open something, hire people and be successful. Just imagine if Sergei Brin and Larry page were restaurant managers who thought they could hire a few programmers, rent an office and create Google?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• lisper 8y ago
  This kind of complaint drive me nuts. It is manifestly untrue that "restaurants are suffocating in San Francisco." San Francisco is chock-full of restaurants, and the vast majority of them are not going out of business. The author's real complaint is not that restaurants are suffocating, it is that his restaurant suffocated. But the reason his restaurant suffocated is not because there's a systemic problem with the restaurant business in San Francisco, it's because the market didn't conform to the author's preconceptions. If it were really true that there was some kind of systemic crisis among San Francisco restaurants, they'd be closing left and right. The survivors would then be able to raise prices to the point where the crisis went away. That's how the market works. But this isn't happening because there is no crisis, only a market operating just as it should by occasionally weeding out businesses that, for whatever reason, don't conform to the market's needs.
  • almost_usual 8y ago
    _Her_ restaurant, not his.
  • clay_the_ripper 8y ago
    Yep. It’s easy to reverse engineer these arguments, because they are true in some respects. But the fact is that plenty of restaurants in the city find ways to stay in business. Make a better product that the market will reward, and then either go high volume and lower costs or go high price lower volume for a premium product and increase your margins. Either way, you have to have a viable business model that works for the market as it exists not some fantasy market that the author things it should be. No one is saying rents in sf aren’t high, or that there aren’t real problems like the author is pointing out. There is a crisis of affordability. The question is, can your business model work in those conditions? Sounds like the answer is no. Sorry to be harsh, but the market is harsh. That’s the point.
  • thebradbain 8y ago
    Sure, maybe the market is working "just as it should," but if it is: why is that an excuse for all of the collateral damage done to waiters/cooks/hosts/cleaners throughout the whole city? It's an objective fact that the vast majority of the service staff cannot afford to live alone in or near the city they work in, much less support their families. Is that success? Is that fair? Should we really be content to let these people suffer the fear of not being able to put food on their table and a roof over their head simply because the equilibrium point of two lines on a graph says so? Maybe the state of the restaurant economy is fine – I don't doubt that – but what about the service staff who make it up and work there daily? Or is the solution just to get a job in tech? If we're advocating for market-based approaches, though: lower the cost of housing by building more housing, and building it fast. Both affordable and market rate. That would solve a lot of the Bay Area's problems.
• syntaxing 8y ago
  I wonder how the numbers compare nationally. I thought restaurants has a tendency to close more often than any other business (30% close within 3 years). Also, why is this only a phenomena in SF? The real estate price in NYC should be higher and the business seems pretty good for even the nonfamous restaurants. Even small coffee shops thrive like crazy here.
  • boulos 8y ago
    Coffee shops have become nearly all day affairs. Like a bar, the key product has really high margins and you don’t need many employees. So once you sell enough {coffee, tea, beer, wine, cocktails} to cover your rent plus a handful of employees, you start making a (small) profit. tl;dr: Hot water is cheap!
• almost_usual 8y ago
  This is the first time I’ve heard the entire state of Illinois being labeled a “rich locale”. I’m assuming the author meant Chicago suburbs? That or they’ve never traveled through rural Illinois (95% of the state). Illinois is also home to some of the most violent and poor metropolitan areas in the country. East St. Louis which ranks in around 18x the national homicide rate and South Side Chicago which is consistently one of the most violent places in the country.
• boulos 8y ago
  Not mentioned here is that Tawla had a slightly rough start [1] (that they purportedly righted): > My reactions were mixed on my first visit, but by the third, I was a major supporter. Flavors blossomed, and I could sense the kitchen becoming more confident. I went early on, found the food to be reasonable but not great, and ultimately didn’t return. Roughly, she shot for Mourad-level prices, but without the track record or execution. I grew up with this food, and while (again) it was okay, it simply wasn’t great. For $16, that should be an amazing dish of mujadara. I assume many people felt that they’d rather get tastier middle eastern food, rather than feel hip with the pretty decor. I’d love to see an upscale middle eastern restaurant succeed, but the food has to come first. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/diningout/article/Tawla-is-the-Mediterranean-restaurant-that-S-F-9124825.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/diningout/article/Ta...
  • eigenvector 8y ago
    This is a serial problem with Middle Eastern restaurants. For lovers of the cuisine, there's always cheap and delicious alternatives, so we feel a little betrayed paying 2 or 3x for the same dish and finding it isn't as tasty the hole-in-the-wall joint with plastic tables. This isn't a knock on Tawla specifically, but as you said, the food has to come first. I am willing to pay, but when I leave I don't want to be thinking of a $15 meal I had that was better.
• TomMckenny 8y ago
  The state is paying the price for two decades of anti-tenant rule. So long as no one is working to repeal the Costa-Hawkins (and to a lesser degree, the Ellis Act), the noose will continue to tighten around Bay Area quality of life and raise the price of doing business in all of California. A similar problem with sky rocketing housing cost occurred in the 70's True rent control was established in the communities that needed it and the threat of it in other communities stabilized prices. And California 1972-1995 is unambiguously a success story. In '95 Costa-Hawkins passed, and prices have been rising faster than the 1970-1995 period ever since. With an accompanying rise in homelessness. Particularly interesting about Costa-Hawkins, it was soundly defeated when written as proposition measure and only passed the legislature by one vote and with strong backing from the real estate industry. But today it has somehow become politically impossible to repeal. Unless California has become a lot more conservative since 95, it is clear money in politics and political advertising are to blame.
  • elgenie 8y ago
    Nah, the core problem is Prop 13 (and its extensions). There's no solution to allocating dramatically less housing than people demand, regardless of how pro- or anti-tenant the law is. Rent control, which Costa-Hawkins limits, is a form of artificial price controls that remove a bunch of housing inventory and the incentives to create more. But it's a mere footnote in the margin of Prop 13, a state wide regime that has been in place twice as long and has the effect of removing a bunch of housing inventory and the incentives to create more.
    • TomMckenny 8y ago
      Yes, the theory is that rent control causes reduction in inventory. But housing is not an ordinary good and the evidence shows that this theory is incorrect. New York has had rent control for most of the 20th century with 2 million units still under rent control. Yet it has plenty of development. And as I point out, housing prices rose slower and housing supply was greater before Costa-Hawkins than they are now. Furthermore, renters favor rent control while landlords oppose it. So whatever the mechanisms, clearly it benefits renters at the expense of landlords, clearly by reducing housing costs. And while it is definitely worth adding as much housing as possible, all new housing will price at the top of the market. And at this moment there are thousands of high end units with vacancy in SF and essentially no low priced. So clearly this does not relive pressure on middle or low end housing. Repealing prop 13 would raise revenue, much of it from large land holders (of which Howard Jarvis was one) so that's nice. It would lower mortgage payments by the amount which property taxes rise thereby converting some mortgage interest into tax revenue. So that's nice. And it makes it easier for new buyers by driving those who can't afford the higher property tax out of their homes. The advantage of this is less clear. The main problem is that it is difficult for people to believe that which is in their financial interest to disbelieve.
• mensetmanusman 8y ago
  Really points to how low cost robotics could potentially revolutionize food in cities with impossible living conditions for the poor.
• boltzmannbrain 8y ago
  > the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment at an insane $3,447, according to a 2018 rent report by Adobo. The U.S. Census revealed in March, the median rent in San Francisco in 2016 was roughly over $1,600/month. These numbers are worrisome in a few ways: 1. The egregious rent amount that is required for somebody to live in the city today. 2. The jump in median rent in a mere two years. 3. The $1,600 median rent from 2016 also included rent-controlled apartments which indicates their rapid disappearance. median != average Fun example: In 1987 the average starting salary of University of North Carolina geography graduates was over $100,000. In 1986 Michael Jordan graduated.
  • p1necone 8y ago
    I was taught in school that average can refer to mean, median or mode (is that common everywhere?). Mean seems to be the default when not specified but journalists really should be specific (also as you point out, median is more often than not the best/least misleading one to use). Edit: wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average) seems to suggest that they can all be considered "averages".
    • Hupriene 8y ago
      I think it would be very unusual to refer to the mode as the average, especially if it wasn't close to the median or mean.
      • darkerside 8y ago
        I think most people would agree, making it the average belief (by mode!)
      • torstenvl 8y ago
        Mode is the most common meaning for "average" in vernacular English. When someone says "I'm just your average guy," they are not doing math. They're comparing themselves to what the majority (or perceived majority, i.e. plurality) of other people are like.
• tschwimmer 8y ago
  I don't mean to come off as unnecesarily dismissive of the author, but I have serious doubts about the quality of their MBA education after I read this sentence: "The situation in this industry has created a mercenary frenzy where everyone is running around trying to maximize what they’re able to make per hour." That describes the general trend in human behavior worldwide for the past six thousand or so years. This seems like such a foundational truth that I question if the author is writing it in good faith. The author seems to have the numbers straight in terms of personnel costs required to run a sustainable business, but what's confusing to me is that this analysis was not run before they decided to start this business. It seems like the numbers were hopelessly unfavorable pretty much any way you cut them. To me, that says that there simply wasn't a business worth creating. I acknowledge that the problems outlined in this piece are real. The commentary about the SF healthcare plan only being available within the city limits when many of its beneficiaries live far away calls attention to how badly dysfunctional our healthcare system is. Nevertheless, I keep coming back to the conclusion that most of the hardship (on behalf of the author) here was self inflicted. Running a restaurant is generally a very poor means of making a living as the author repeatedly points out. It's great that this person was following their passion, but doing so is usually expensive. As a mental exercise to the outraged reader of this article, try substituting the word restaurant with the word yacht and all the positions with various nautical ones. I think you'll find yourself a lot less sympathetic. I'd argue that they're semantically identical in this case.
  • krschultz 8y ago
    How would a restaurant be in any way analogous to a yacht? I own a boat, it is not a place of public accommodation. The neighborhood is not better off because I have a place to hang out with my family and friends. The point being, this article is not one person complaining that they can't "follow their passion". It's someone pointing out that the economics make running a restaurant untenable in SF. Restaurants have always been run on razor thin margins, but the piece makes a compelling case that it's tipped beyond that.
    • stickfigure 8y ago
      I believe the parent was referring to a yacht "for hire". It makes sense read that way.
• drawkbox 8y ago
  Inequality is a big problem. In the meantime, retail and restaurants are going to have to come up with a transportation system for their workers. Time to helicopter in the help... then shuttle to where they need to go. Until there are robots that can do the work either remotely run by chefs/cooks/retail or removed entirely, there needs to be better transportation systems to allow people to live elsewhere and work in the metro/city if the metro/city is unwilling to fix the rent/housing problems.
• trimbo 8y ago
  I don't disagree with the problems outlined. But, for this particular case, start and end with the fact that the restaurant has 3.5 stars on Yelp and people were consistently dissatisfied with the food and service? SF has incredible 4-5 star restaurants of all price levels. So who wants to eat at a very expensive 3.5 star one when there's a Michelin Star place 5 minutes away? If SF's problems are so insurmountable, how do other good restaurants do it, even ones not owned by some major group?
  • flaque 8y ago
    This argument is silly. If restaurants are harder to run, the average quality of the place goes down. The existence of high quality restaurants does not refute the possibility of the average going down.
    • mcv 8y ago
      Maybe, but if staff is in short supply, it makes sense that they will prefer to work for restaurants that can afford their wages.
• mbrumlow 8y ago
  You can't have it both ways. Either change the city and build upwards or stop complaining about the price of living. The notion that a city should not change and keep it's "feel" across sunch long times is backwards thinking. Cities grow. I say this because the same people who want lower rents seem to also vote down big new apartments because it will ruin the atmosphere. But I can't for the life of me understand why anybody would want to preserve the current atmosphere. The one you think you are defending is long gone.
  • hrdwdmrbl 8y ago
    They literally don't see how they constrain supply and how that leads to higher prices.
    • tachyonbeam 8y ago
      Home owners have a selfish incentive to constrain supply to keep prices going up.
      • nerfhammer 8y ago
        also the local far left does not believe that scarcity and prices are related, and attempts to block new housing on that basis. E.g., greedy developers and/or rich people will never "allow" prices to fall.
        • mbrumlow 8y ago
          Which is funny. Because I think 5 well places high rise apartments would level the entire playing field. You want to place the buildings right in front of the most expensive ones today. Blocking whatever view they have. This would instantly cut the value of those places in half or more. Which for the left should be a huge win. Sticking it to rich people and providing more affordable housing for the normies and probably good set of the super poor. New buildings wils have to allocate 12% or so of their units to low income housing. Think apartments rental units mixed with ownable ones. Or just all rent.
• chenpengcheng 8y ago
  The author is just one of these people who has benefited from a system and pretends to care for the underprivileged. And through this article, she makes me feel that she is entitled to success in all her endeavors and if that is not the case, then it’s others fault. This makes me sick.
  • newnewpdro 8y ago
    Have you ever actually lived in the SF bay area? What you're describing has become typical of the area's residents.
    • dang 8y ago
      Please don't post regional putdowns. We don't need that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • JamesBarney 8y ago
    The author spends the first half of the article talking about how they did everything right. And they spend the second half talking about how they were sabotaged by a high cost of living, incompetent government, and most of all greedy consumers who didn't appreciate their product.
    • LanceH 8y ago
      Clearly they should be investing in affordable housing and volunteering it for rent control.
  • ajkjk 8y ago
    That's what makes you sick? What about all the very real problems she describes?
    • chenpengcheng 8y ago
      The very real problem is a restaurant which fails to serve its customers well goes out of business. There are other restaurants which are more expensive and pay healthcare, too!
• aceon48 8y ago
  So why don't some of these restaurants come to South Bay? Sunnyvale and San Jose have like nothing... Way less competition, at least somewhat more affordable
  • usaar333 8y ago
    Because it's about where the customers are, not the workers. SF's demographics favor these restaurants well (high income, low percentage of people with children). If you want to count gaps, the entire East Bay has a single Michellin Star restaurant; South Bay has 3 (4 if you are willing to count Palo Alto in the South bay)
• fourstar 8y ago
  Quite poetic that a Google exec talking about the issue she's contributed to (high rents/housing prices) is complaining about it and blaming the failure of her business on it. Survival of the fittest. Plenty of great restaurants in Tokyo and it's almost as expensive as SF.
• diiaann 8y ago
  A bar closed in my neighborhood and and when I was chatting with them they too blamed the spending habits of the tech crowd. I think if anything, people spend more money on eating out and drinking than the average person. So I don't think it's that people are unwilling to spend it. I'm not sure it is technology folks or millennials, but I find there are increasing amounts of people who want the "best of" everything...shoes, falafel you name it. People aren't okay with just a "good experience", they want the best experience. As a result, I think there are plenty of people who aren't very forgiving. Especially if you eat out regularly and have a lot of things to compare it to. Oh yeah and the housing situation is broken.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    It’s pretty natural for people to want the “best” whatever that means for them. And which is probably situational. I’m willing to believe that online information, however imperfect, makes it easier to surface the best value options.
  • eigenvector 8y ago
    I agree with you on the 'best' thing. Every time I'm in SF hanging out with SF friends I feel like 'let's get a drink' becomes 'let's find the best cocktail bar in the Bay Area'. And nobody will step into an establishment that has less than 4.7* on Google (or whatever their preferred rating platform is), let alone just walk into a random place that looks OK. Walk-in foot traffic is non-existent.
    • nanoseltzer 8y ago
      That’s an excellent filter for who I wouldn’t want to hang out with.
• kenneth 8y ago
  This article is ridiculous. Yeah, SF is expensive, but $80k+ is a ridiculously large income for front-of-house service staff. When I first started working as a software engineer in SF, I was making $70k/year and I survived just fine. I got roommates and spent <$900 on rent. Obviously, I increased my earnings over time and as soon as I could moved into a 1br. I now pay right about average, which is more than I'd like but which I make do with.
• s1mon 8y ago
  I've lived in SF for 25 years, and eat out often. While I never visited this particular restaurant, as others have noted, 3.5 stars on Yelp in SF's hyper-competitive market is telling. 3.5 is maybe enough to keep the cheap place you go to across the street when you're lazy in business. Less than 4 stars isn't going to get enough people to make a reservation, travel across town and shell out $$$. We have over 4500 restaurants listed in Yelp, and roughly 7% turnover of openings/closings per year. It's physically impossible for anyone to eat at all, let alone a fraction, of the places here. Foodie places which are successful may be a big hit when they first open, but if they don't keep up the quality, they will die quickly as that crowd moves onto the next shiny thing. It takes a lot to stay in business here. The way that some restaurants blame their success and failure on the high cost of labor makes about as much sense as when people review restaurants on Yelp and complain how surprised they were by the bill at the end of the night. It's a math problem. Other people are managing to balance their costs and revenue and stay in business.
  • logifail 8y ago
    >> Foodie places which are successful may be a big hit when they first open, but if they don't keep up the quality, they will die quickly as that crowd moves onto the next shiny thing. Q: Is keeping up the quality going to be enough, though, when it appears crowds seem to demand "the next shiny thing" above other factors (including, perhaps, quality)?
  • abalone 8y ago
    Nah, closures are up and openings are down all across the city due to higher costs.[1] You may have lived here 25 years but that’s no substitute for hard data. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/2017-wasn-t-the-greatest-year-for-San-Francisco-12480441.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/2017-wasn-t-the-gre...
    • s1mon 8y ago
      That’s where I got the data. That article mentions higher costs, but the Harvard study they referenced links review stars to closures. Clearly costs are one of the main pressures on restaurants, but there are plenty of things that restaurants can do to improve diners’ experiences which don’t necessarily cost more. Hypothetically, restaurant A and B are the same except A is better organized and your food gets to the customers table faster and at the right temperature. Or restaurant B’s staff doesn’t notice when your wine glass is almost empty and doesn’t sell that second or third glass. Little things can make a huge difference in revenue and ratings, and yet you can see restaurants making stupid mistakes all the time.
• freyir 8y ago
  > the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment at an insane $3,447, according to a 2018 rent report by Adobo. The U.S. Census revealed in March, the median rent in San Francisco in 2016 was roughly over $1,600/month. These numbers are worrisome in a few ways: 1. The egregious rent amount that is required for somebody to live in the city today. 2. The jump in median rent in a mere two years. 3. The $1,600 median rent from 2016 also included rent-controlled apartments which indicates their rapid disappearance. She's comparing apples and oranges, and doesn't even realize it. $3,447 is the asking price for apartments now on the market. $1,600 is the median rent price people are actually paying, including people with rent control and affordable housing. People who have been living in rent-controlled apartments for many years pay a fraction of the current market rate. As a result, her second and third conclusions don't follow. If this is the kind of critical reasoning that comes with "an MBA from a top school, the rigor of an engineering education and a decade and a half launching and managing some of the most successful businesses for Google and other tech companies," it's worrying. In fact, it's easy to find actual market rate rent prices from 2016. According to the sites below, it was around $3,500, so rental prices have remained very flat over the last few years. [1] https://www.zumper.com/blog/2016/05/zumper-national-rent-report-june-2016/ https://www.zumper.com/blog/2016/05/zumper-national-rent-rep... [2] https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-rent-trends/ https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...
  • eecsninja 8y ago
    Being able to code and get degrees is quite different from actually thinking critically rigorously. I think the median rent also includes people sharing a 2/3/4 bedroom home. There aren't that many 1 bedroom apartments to go around in SF, as I understand it.
  • closeparen 8y ago
    >$3,447 is the asking price for apartments now on the market. $1,600 is the median rent price people are actually paying, including people with rent control and affordable housing. People who have been living in rent-controlled apartments for many years pay a fraction of the current market rate. Which is why this problem is a slow burn. It's not like everyone was evicted and the worker pool cratered overnight. But as existing low/middle income workers leave for whatever reason, they cannot be replaced. Their numbers are on a one-way ratchet downward.
• droithomme 8y ago
  > our servers were making $38 per hour or the equivalent of $70,000 to $80,000 a year ... assuming 36% on rent after tax, that would mean you have about $1,460 available for rent per month. > Cheryl Young, an economist for Trulia, found that in nearby San Francisco, only 0.1% of restaurant staff can find affordable housing in the city, with the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment at an insane $3,447. $80,000 is vastly too much pay for restaurant servers. It's understandable that if one-bedroom rent in the bad part of town is $2447 that restaurants simply can't exist in this economy. That's just the way it is.
• abalone 8y ago
  Having >10K karma on here and knowing people involved in this restaurant and the SF scene in general.. I can make these observations: 1. The vast majority of people on HN are in complete denial about the impact of a massive sudden influx of demand on SF housing. 2. They will exclusively talk about supply constraints and also totally ignore the concept of price inelasticity due to inexhaustible levels of demand. 3. pg himself had noted the importance of a vibrant restaurant scene for startups.[1] 4. This truly is a widespread problem for all SF restaurants. Nopa, one of the most prestigious midrange restaurants, has been advertising for cooks in their menu for years now. 5. In order for the market rate price of housing to become affordable to cooks and servers, it would first become dirt cheap for tech workers making 2-4x their compensation. Therefore all of that worldwide demand for SF tech worker housing would need to be satiated before the market solves this problem. (See point 2.) 6. Most tech workers don’t give a shit. They are here to hopefully make their fortune or at least get their career started in the next 5-10 years. A vibrant restaurant or working class community is not a priority. If they burn through it, it’s fine. Long term community development goals are a “nice to have”. 7. Only reserved means-tested housing for the working class will solve this problem. This is what divides the “market YIMBY” and “affordable housing PHIMBY” political groups in local SF politics. It’s not just about ethics.. If you want a vibrant city rich with interesting restaurants and cafes then you need to provide housing for the service industry. Otherwise you face a real macroeconomic problem. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html
  • chrisweekly 8y ago
    Some good points, but "vast majority... complete denial" is a bit much.
    • abalone 8y ago
      Happy to be proven otherwise.
  • selestify 8y ago
    Why can't they pay their chefs more until the chefs too can afford to live closer?
• rdiddly 8y ago
  Hear that everyone? People from New York and Chicago haven't heard of small business, good food, or getting food from farms nearby. But on to the main point. It seems obvious Bay Area restaurant prices need to come up to keep pace with everything else costing more. But if you're going to charge more, you make it part of the price. You don't tack on an "extra" charge of any kind; that's madness, and sends the wrong message psychologically to the customer. The same people complaining about a service charge will gladly pay a higher base price exactly equal to that charge. It makes them feel "upscale." Paying a service charge makes them feel penalized. Or something. Anyway it sounds like the type of thing that has reasoning or an explanation attached to it. You want to be in a business where people pay more, and either the reason/explanation is obvious, or even better, there is no explanation and they just pay more anyway. Like Apple. But either way, you don't want to be in the business of explaining/justifying a charge, ever. It's tough to make money? Your workers can't survive? The food sucks? Charge more. Pay the workers more. Make better food. Nothing about "the economics of a small business" prevent this. You may still fail. The macroeconomics of the Bay Area are difficult. But you'll fail for sure if you under-charge, under-pay, and under-produce in complete disregard of those economic conditions. In a tough market it's always the mediocre who fail first. But if you survive, and enough other restaurants fail, eventually the few that survive will be able to... you guessed it, charge even more, pay their workers even more, and make even better food.
• fredophile 8y ago
  San Francisco isn't unique as a city with very high rents. Somehow places like London, NYC, and Washington DC all still have a nice selection of restaurants. This makes me think that it'll sort itself out even if it is painful for some of the people currently affected. It probably doesn't help that San Francisco has been shooting themselves in the foot over housing for years. This link from a couple weeks ago has a lot of details on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18778496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18778496.
• newshorts 8y ago
  Is no one considering the impact of foreign investment on housing and sunbsequently rent prices? Sure tech workers play a part, but they often pay a better part of their salary to the land owners who are more frequently likely to be foreign investors
• lebanon_tn 8y ago
  I'm reminded of this part of David Chang's take on "the next global food mecca" being Houston, a city in many ways the complete opposite of SF: I've always wondered where the food in a Blade Runner-like future would appear first and what it would taste like—and I genuinely believe it's here. Partly that's due to a demographic reality: By some measures, Houston is the U.S.A.'s most ethnically diverse city (a bunch of New Yorkers just choked on their halal kebabs reading that, but it's true), and when you get a collision of immigrants, the food scene is guaranteed to be bonkers. Houston also has cheap commercial and residential rents—oh, and no state income tax—which means broke-ass cooks and chefs can afford to live and open here. Zoning laws are more permissive than an Amsterdam brothel. And customers have cash to spend. Source: https://www.gq.com/story/david-chang-houston-food-city https://www.gq.com/story/david-chang-houston-food-city Added disclaimer- I grew up in SF and left in 2005. I live in Houston now.
  • jnwatson 8y ago
    Every Christmas, I go home to Houston for a week or so. Every time I budget 5 pounds weight gain. It is never enough. Houston is a crossroads of different food cultures. It is the South, the West, and the bayou rolled up into one. At first it was Cajun, Creole, Soul, Mexican, and it has been like that for 50 years. But in the last 25 years, lots of more has mixed in like Vietnamese, Central and South American, and a significant New Orleans diaspora due to Katrina. Plus, you have a car culture where it isn't uncommon to travel 20 miles in 25 minutes for a weekday dinner out. There's so much money sloshing around that lots of folks eat out every night. That plus a healthy supply of labor means it is a very good restaurant city.
• JshWright 8y ago
  A little off topic, but the idea of a "celebrated" pizza shop in SF strikes me as a little funny... I try a different pizza place every time I'm there, and I've yet to not be disappointed.
  • gamma-male 8y ago
    Yup. But I would say that pizza in the US is disapointing in general if you know italian pizza.
• gamma-male 8y ago
  In the bay area people: * Don't want to tip * don't want to see taxes added at the very end * Don't want the service (seating, waitering, etc) If restaurants don't evolve they will die yes
• eigenvector 8y ago
  One of the things the author points out is that restaurants in SF are moving toward "fast dining" type setups that require less labour as well as simpler dishes. For the sake of argument, let us imagine that skyrocketing labour and housing costs make the traditional sit-down restaurant extinct in SF (or reduced to a handful of ultra-high-end establishments). This in turn makes being a waiter or a line cook no longer a viable profession in SF. If - and I recognize this is a gigantic if - enough of the massive amount of wealth being created by the SF tech industry can be taxed and shared with the people impacted by the loss of those jobs, so that they can continue to maintain a decent standard of living, is there actually a problem? When a waiter loses their job, I don't imagine it's the loss of waiting on tables that puts them in a tough spot. It's losing their income and their ability to afford food and shelter. The problem now is that the externalities of the tech industry fall upon low-wage workers whose jobs become economically unworkable. The rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. But on the whole, total wealth is increasing. Why can't we redistribute some of the tech wealth to these put-upon low-wage workers and leave everyone better off?
• _i____ii_______ 8y ago
  If you work BOH in restaurants you develop a distaste for servers. Not only do they make far more money but they do it in half the time. Time is money and money time. I've worked in the industry in SF and I can tell you there is no shortage of coke habits amongst them. They are also less skilled than the cooks and much more easily replaced, which gets to the point the author was making about the need for skill in cooks and the damaging mercenarial culture arising out of desperation. In a cook you want someone you can retain who will develop a deep understanding of the workings of a particular restaurant and its menu. It's far more of an investment than a waiter who can cram homework for a few days enough to sell a menu. But training to prep and cook that menu properly will easily take weeks if not months at a high end place. You don't want those people to bounce for a dollar more; that is a huge waste. You'd rather lose half your FOH staff than your lead line cook or heaven forbid sous chef. However the tip culture succubi aren't the perpetrators as regards the pie cutting of restaurant earnings; it's tip culture and diner expectations. But good luck changing that or getting the public to understand the changes. I see a lot of hard-nosed posts here about basic economics, supply and demand, and what about's regarding the "successful" places (you mean places hanging on another year). I understand a lot of you take pride in your ability to cut through the fat in that way. But you're glossing over perhaps the main point of the article which is that without skilled cooks restaurants slide more into the spectrum of dummy-proofed food processing and thus weak, boring menus. That goes for the yelp darlings as well who are likely hoping nobody notices drops in quality and absence of ingenuity. The average self proclaimed foodie or just frequent diner I doubt knows enough about cuisine to realize the hollowing out of the scene they're in. Restaurants continuing this decline will keep it hidden and the tech crowd won't notice the difference as their favorite haunts continue to provide what they really have always wanted anyway: a place to see and be seen. A major priority for restaurants will be maintaining image and hype in an increasingly superficial SF hellscape. Maybe diners, in an honest moment, will say "fuck it" and head to the nearest Burger King.
  • leetcrew 8y ago
    if BOH employees are much more costly to lose than FOH, why does FOH get paid more to begin with? is it just that minimum wage plus tips is already way more than the cook gets paid? I don't disagree with your core claim that cooks are more valuable. anecdotally, when I worked at a takeout pizza place the main pizza guy got paid about twice what we made in the front, even including tips.
• mcv 8y ago
  Why the service charge? Why not simply raise your prices to that same level, while still letting people tip if they want to? More specifically, why does the cook only make $24 per hour while the waiting staff gets $42-48? I understand that San Francisco is an expensive city, but doesn't that simply mean you should raise your prices? Of course that will mean poor people won't be able to eat at your restaurant, but it sounds like poor people have trouble affording anything at all in San Francisco anyway. Clearly the only viable market to focus on is the rich people who can afford to live there. I don't mean to be callous about this: it's terrible when a city is so expensive that only rich people can afford to live there, and kicking poor tenants our of rent-controlled housing should be illegal. But if your employees are leaving because you don't pay them enough, the solution seems obvious: pay them more. Raise your prices correspondingly. If the market can't bear those prices in such an expensive city, then clearly there's not enough demand for restaurants in San Francisco, which would be sad, but it may be the reality. Meanwhile, the city would do well to invest in some affordable housing if they don't want to turn into a rich people's ghetto.
  • samspenc 8y ago
    > More specifically, why does the cook only make $24 per hour while the waiting staff gets $42-48? That was my takeaway from the article as well. Does anyone know if this par for the restaurant industry? Does FOH make more than the line cooks?
    • crazygringo 8y ago
      Yes it is definitely par, for a multitude of reasons.
      • dannyw 8y ago
        What are the reasons, if you could elaborate?
  • aeternus 8y ago
    Raising prices does seem to be the right answer. Many expensive restaurants in SF are packed and it is quite difficult to get a reservation. There is clearly market demand in that segment.. if the food is good enough. The low or mid-range segment demand is likely shrinking. Why go out to get mediocre food when it is increasingly easy to have food, groceries, or meal-packs delivered to your door?