4 ms·

The takeaway is: even if you sell an over-the-top bait product, make it profitable! They charged 72$ and didn't earn a penny, because the ingredients were too e

The takeaway is: even if you sell an over-the-top bait product, make it profitable! They charged 72$ and didn't earn a penny, because the ingredients were too expensive. Even at 120$ it would probably still have worked.

nemothekid 5y ago
>over-the-top bait product Calling it over-the-top bait is so strange to me. He seems to have put so much effort into actually making the dish good and then was surprised that people liked it. Like he actually tried! Was the joke that people who buy $72 meals are idiots? It's like a student who tries really hard in a class as a "prank" on the teacher. Maybe I don't get the joke, but if I went to relatively cheap restaurant and saw a $72 dish I'd expect the dish to taste good. If it did, I'd be pleasantly surprised and tell others about it, if it didn't I'd feel ripped off and probably never order there again. If me being happy and well-fed is the purpose of this prank, then I wish more pranks were like this.
- jfengel 5y ago
  I'm sure it was good, but reading the description, I wonder if it was more than the sum of its parts. Dishes like this are almost always agglomerations of expensive ingredients -- truffles, caviar, wagyu. I'm just surprised it doesn't have foie gras -- and perhaps that's only because foie gras was illegal in California until recently. It's over the top by design. It may be only in San Francisco that it could possibly catch on, where just living there is so expensive that food is a tiny percentage of your budget. As you say, it sounds like he was at least shooting for a bit more than "a bunch of expensive ingredients". A chef will usually want to be known for technique and judgment, though most people don't really care about either one. It's the same way in every field: movie buffs want films that are different from the same-old action movie; coders want to write clever algorithms more than merely being useful.
- platinumrad 5y ago
  The restaurant isn't even relatively cheap. There's a $48 crab noodle soup dish which presumably isn't a joke. With prices like that, $72 for fried rice isn't such an outlier.
  - Asraelite 5y ago
    The rest of the article before that point led me to be believe that their dishes would be around the $5 to $15 range, in which case $72 would probably be a bit funny. But to really pull the joke off with another dish costing $48, it would need to cost at least $200 imo.
pcurve 5y ago
Considering the ingredients, it's very underpriced. Yet, it's also hard to price it too high, because at the end of the day, it will taste like very tasty fried rice, with expensive ingredients laid on top. If you go too high, you're setting very lofty expectations. So they were stuck in a rock and a hard place. Could they have offered it for longer? Sure, but I think they made the right call. Call it quit on high note.
France_is_bacon 5y ago
They made no money on it? Then raise the price to $105 or $129 or whatever is needed to make it profitable. But what I want to know is: what kind of bleeding idiot is going to spend $72 or $105, or $129 on f-cking dinner? Like lottery people who win $25 million and are flat broke 4 years later. Financial diots. They're everywhere.

nemothekid 5y ago

>over-the-top bait product Calling it over-the-top bait is so strange to me. He seems to have put so much effort into actually making the dish good and then was surprised that people liked it. Like he actually tried! Was the joke that people who buy $72 meals are idiots? It's like a student who tries really hard in a class as a "prank" on the teacher. Maybe I don't get the joke, but if I went to relatively cheap restaurant and saw a $72 dish I'd expect the dish to taste good. If it did, I'd be pleasantly surprised and tell others about it, if it didn't I'd feel ripped off and probably never order there again. If me being happy and well-fed is the purpose of this prank, then I wish more pranks were like this.

jfengel 5y ago
I'm sure it was good, but reading the description, I wonder if it was more than the sum of its parts. Dishes like this are almost always agglomerations of expensive ingredients -- truffles, caviar, wagyu. I'm just surprised it doesn't have foie gras -- and perhaps that's only because foie gras was illegal in California until recently. It's over the top by design. It may be only in San Francisco that it could possibly catch on, where just living there is so expensive that food is a tiny percentage of your budget. As you say, it sounds like he was at least shooting for a bit more than "a bunch of expensive ingredients". A chef will usually want to be known for technique and judgment, though most people don't really care about either one. It's the same way in every field: movie buffs want films that are different from the same-old action movie; coders want to write clever algorithms more than merely being useful.
platinumrad 5y ago
The restaurant isn't even relatively cheap. There's a $48 crab noodle soup dish which presumably isn't a joke. With prices like that, $72 for fried rice isn't such an outlier.
- Asraelite 5y ago
  The rest of the article before that point led me to be believe that their dishes would be around the $5 to $15 range, in which case $72 would probably be a bit funny. But to really pull the joke off with another dish costing $48, it would need to cost at least $200 imo.

pcurve 5y ago

Considering the ingredients, it's very underpriced. Yet, it's also hard to price it too high, because at the end of the day, it will taste like very tasty fried rice, with expensive ingredients laid on top. If you go too high, you're setting very lofty expectations. So they were stuck in a rock and a hard place. Could they have offered it for longer? Sure, but I think they made the right call. Call it quit on high note.

France_is_bacon 5y ago

They made no money on it? Then raise the price to $105 or $129 or whatever is needed to make it profitable. But what I want to know is: what kind of bleeding idiot is going to spend $72 or $105, or $129 on f-cking dinner? Like lottery people who win $25 million and are flat broke 4 years later. Financial diots. They're everywhere.