My parents' generation came to the west and ran restaurants. Several of my aunts and uncles have been doing this for years. I grew up in these sorts of shops. Y

My parents' generation came to the west and ran restaurants. Several of my aunts and uncles have been doing this for years. I grew up in these sorts of shops. You can't do it anymore. The 1980s don't seem that long ago, but back then there was not nearly the variety of foreign cuisines that there are now in the west. At the time you could still conceivably go to a Chinese restaurant for an "experience meal" where you would either enjoy some slightly different cooking, or bring a date or business connection. It even felt right that the owner's kids were running around, and there were kitsch pictures from China on the walls. Back then the entry cost was very very low. You had either only family or other recent immigrant staff. You'd spend nearly nothing on the interior. Nowadays that style of restaurant serves a very small segment of the market. Basically, it's the people in the area - not the town centre - that don't want to cook that night and didn't have Chinese the night before. They don't care about the decor, many of them do takeaway. They don't care about authenticity either. And they are well aware that this style of food is unhealthy in large quantities. If you're going to open a restaurant these days, it needs a degree of slickness. People expect it, heck even I expect it. You can't have a bunch of spelling mistakes on your self-printed menus. You can't be showing tourist quality photos of the food, with plastic place mats and different cobbled together chairs. Plus people now care not only about general healthiness but also specific things like allergies and intolerances that your foreign chef might find hard to communicate about. The competitive landscape is also changed completely. You're not competing with just other mom and pop stores. There's not only McDonald's, which was always a thing, but actual Chinese food chains that do what you do, better. Finally, I don't know anyone who actively desired for their kids to take over. If the family business was a global shipping company, sure. But not the bottom-of-the-pile restaurant, surely. Having said that, one of my cousins did build and sell a restaurant, having made the observations I've written about here.