I poured my blood, sweat and life savings into my restaurant. It ruined my life.

The first big red flag for me (besides that the whole thing pretty obviously started as a mid life crisis) was how little time it sounds like he spent working at his friend&#x27;s bar in the three months he needed to put in to qualify for the liquor license. How could he not take that seriously as an opportunity to learn about the industry? I would bet money that the answer is he was afraid to learn that running a restaurant is actual work, not an episode of chef&#x27;s table.<p>His lack of preparation is mind boggling, but completely deliberate: the less he knew, the more room there was for fantasy. Beware working with people like this, who want to skip straight to the end.

A bit of advice from someone who was in the restaurant industry for 7 years. Don’t start a restaurant especially if you work in tech. 80-100 hours a week for managers and owners is mandatory.<p>Tech is easy money compared to what it takes to create a profitable restaurant from scratch. The author made the same mistake I’ve seen people make before.<p>This guy did no research at all and sadly this is extremely common.

&gt; At work, I had trouble concentrating on spreadsheets and instead found myself scribbling menus on graph paper<p>Funnily enough, if he wanted to be successful, spreadsheets could&#x27;ve been the key to his success. He would&#x27;ve known his Cost of Goods Sold, he would&#x27;ve known his staffing costs, his rent, and how much money he had and could spend.

&gt; We had started with $60,000; after six weeks, we were down to $3,000, and there was still so much to do.<p>I don&#x27;t think he did nearly enough research into how much it costs to start a restaurant.

Having started a software business with too much optimism and too little business knowledge myself, and failed, I seriously have no idea how people start successful restaurants at all these days. No matter what mistakes he made, I feel for the guy, and the thousands of people every year trying to get a restaurant off the ground and ending up bankrupt. Aside from marketing, the initial costs of getting a SAAS business running are almost nothing; people &#x2F; dev time is far and away the main cost usually. The economics and risks and up-front costs of opening even a small restaurant are staggering to me, I doubt I&#x27;d ever attempt it. But I&#x27;m glad some people do, and make it.

I grew up working at a very successful family owned restaurant and landed in tech after college. The two can’t be any different.<p>Owning a restaurant is a lifestyle in ways that working in tech never would be. There is no free time, there is never a day off, there is no exit in sight. It’s 80-100 hours in per week, small margins, and frequent turnover.<p>Can it be profitable? Yes. But it requires as much, if not more domain expertise as anything else, including doing a startup. And, there are far fewer people out there talking about the valuable details of doing it correctly - very different from the startup world.

Between this article and the article on people too poor to retire, I sometimes think we should have classes on financial planning in high school. A lot of the mistakes he did came down to poor financial planning. He even gave a raise to his employees when he sold his home. As he describes it, there&#x27;s no way he was counting, looking at his benefits, costs of goods, etc... Basic stuff but too many people seem to not know how to manage their money at all.

Sounds to me like he started his restaurant with way too little experience. He was an amateur cook who had never even worked in a restaurant. Even a bit of experience as a cook or waiter would have helped by giving him a sense of how things work. And ideally he would have had some experience on the management side too, maybe as an assistant manager.

Running a restaurant is hard and unsurprisingly its even harder if you never have run one before. Staffing, food cost, vender management and health code malarky: these are some of the first things that make or break a restaurant. Then maybe location. Quality of food clearly doesn&#x27;t make the list, at least not disconnected from price as Dominos, McDonalds and Starbucks succeed with high probability. Sad to see a vanity project eat up someones life.

&gt; so I doled out $3,000 to hire a lawyer to oversee my incorporation. He later told me that I could have done it myself online for a couple hundred bucks.<p>This guy is so raw that he is even missing basic stuff.<p>&gt; We can barely afford the place, but I wanted my daughters to have their own rooms<p>And he doesn&#x27;t learn.

One thing that&#x27;s interesting is that there&#x27;s a factor a lot of people don&#x27;t consider.<p>The more appealing a lifestyle seems, the more hard work probably has to go into it, because there&#x27;s so much more competition.<p>For instance, in the story, he had a fantasy about having a hunting rifle next to the stove and going hunting whenever he damn felt like it. Who the heck doesn&#x27;t want that?<p>Once he gets a taste of what it&#x27;s like to peel several dozen potatoes, he doesn&#x27;t take it to heart. He writes it off as an outlier. Anything cool takes a lot of effort, because so many other people want to do it also. But he still thought he could pull it off, because he &quot;loved cooking&quot;. Does not matter. If you can&#x27;t do the 1001 other things required to run a business, you&#x27;re hosed.

I&#x27;ve known two chefs who&#x27;ve gone on to start their own restaurants over the years, and the one thing they have in common (other than smoking) is they are REALLY highly strung. I don&#x27;t just mean a little anxious&#x2F;fidgety - they quite literally don&#x27;t seem to be able to sit still even for a few seconds. Even little actions like pulling out a chair to sit down happens as fast as they&#x27;re physically able to do it. Noisiest people I&#x27;ve ever known!<p>Neither of them have actually worked as a chef in years, and one of them hasn&#x27;t set foot behind the counter at a restaurant since 2004. I can&#x27;t even imagine the constant time pressure chefs, and undoubtedly restaurant owners must feel for this type of behavior to manifest and basically never go away.

I don&#x27;t want to sound mean, but... he has a well-thumbed copy of Kitchen Confidential and did this anyway? Because one of the things I remember most strongly from that are the stories about people who imagine fondly they&#x27;d like to own a restaurant, and it always ending in tears.<p>(Also I&#x27;m bemused as to why the opener suggests red tape was a problem.)

I am surprised by the lack of up front number crunching that he did, seeing as his previous job was as an analyst.

<i>My role was largely symbolic anyway, and after a few shifts stretched over a three-month period, I checked off that box.</i><p>I am reminded of a college class where everyone but me was solely concerned with getting a good grade and enthusiastically encouraging the professor to curve the grades and skip parts of the curriculum. I was the only one who expressed the concern that we might actually need to learn the course materials in order to actually be prepared for higher courses or even, god forbid, a <i>job</i> at some point.

This is really something everyone who opens a restaurant should be prepared for. An overwhelming majority of restaurants go out of business within a few years. It&#x27;s a really difficult profession to be a part of, and if you want to be successful you&#x27;ve got to make some serious sacrifices--even then that might not be enough.

Every so often one of these articles comes out about someone&#x27;s dream restaurant or coffee shop that failed and I&#x27;m starting to think that maybe there are lots of just soft, naive people out there who just got by in life checking off the boxes and being responsible enough to get an easy office job (they&#x27;re usually decent at writing a dramatic article though). Unless you get lucky making anything stick in the real world is very hard. Having succeeded and failed in business before most days I can&#x27;t believe how easy my office job is.

I think one issue with restaurants is they aren&#x27;t usually conducive to an <i>MVP and iterate</i> model. But that isn&#x27;t always true. Velo Burrito started as delivery only two days a week,then turned into a restaurant.* I wonder if a template for how to do this more successfully could be developed.<p>* <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;this-tiny-burrito-shop-has-legs.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;this-tiny-bu...</a>

Pretty much every restaurant owner I know is in the same situation - maybe not quite as bad - but generally they have at least one total nightmare horror story about a restaurant they owned that burned down&#x2F;got shut down&#x2F;went bankrupt.<p>I find similarities to being a founder in a super risky high tech startup - but with higher possible payoff.<p>Yet, I don&#x27;t hear a chorus of bar backs, dish washers, servers, hosts and chefs complaining about not having a life outside of the restaurant or needing &quot;work-life balance.&quot; What gives?

I like to visit local neighborhood restaurants to give these places hope because I hate seeing another retail location taken up by a franchise or worse of all - banks which are just basically dead space. To digress - they just opened another WF near me so there are now five total. Each is essentially a huge empty building with a huge empty parking lot. It&#x27;s like the city decided they didn&#x27;t want any useful commerce happening in this area and zoned it entirely for banks. Sad.<p>Meanwhile within walking distance there are like two restaurants and a coffee shop and I count myself lucky I even have that and visit all of them at frequently because I so treasure them. Even if their food isn&#x27;t that amazing they at least somewhat contribute to the community of their surroundings.

I&#x27;ve often wondered about the selection bias of the &quot;80% of restaurants fail, they&#x27;re the worst investment&quot; because I had a suspicion that many people start restaurants thinking essentially, &quot;My Mom&#x27;s pasta sauce is so good, people say they would pay for it. I should open up a restaurant with her recipe.&quot; and then proceed to fall flat on their face.<p>Reading this article, I think I&#x27;m right. I wonder what the success rate is of a restaurant is when the owner has even a basic idea of how the various positions in a restaurant work and the important business metrics.

I wonder if some suffer from the same mistake people doing entrepreneur IT do. I fix computers at home, how hard can it be? I cook at home, how hard can it be?

&quot;What I lacked in experience I could make up for in enthusiasm.&quot;<p>So many startups are based on this very premise.<p>Reminds me of this poster: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.shopify.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;files&#x2F;1&#x2F;0535&#x2F;6917&#x2F;products&#x2F;incompetencedemotivator.jpeg?v=1403276021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.shopify.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;files&#x2F;1&#x2F;0535&#x2F;6917&#x2F;products&#x2F;incompe...</a>

I had a few more thoughts after thinking about this one for a bit. It&#x27;s easy to laugh at the boneheaded mistakes, but can we say anything deeper about this?<p>The author&#x27;s actions seem to be motivated by an almost childish level of over-enthusiasm. That the word childish occurs to me makes me wonder - are we making it too difficult for kids to try things? Not actually opening a restaurant, of course, but something moderately ambitions for their age. Big enough for them to fail badly at when they&#x27;re insanely, blindly hopeful about it. It would be good in a way to experience that sort of failure at an age and life situation where you don&#x27;t destroy your finances when you&#x27;re 3&#x2F;4 to retirement and with kids of your own to send to college. Maybe if he had experienced that, then he could chase after his next dream with a little more realism and self-control and a little less blind optimism.

maybe start with a food truck? seems like a less risky way of getting into the business. if you are successful and make a name for yourself, you could parley that into a restaurant.

You all would be surprised how many people will operate and act like him in worse ways. He’s putting it in business, however it looks dumb for what he did, people gamble in casinos, what would you say to that? He had a dream, was dumb, reckless but attempt to fulfill it. Hard life lessons learn the hardest of ways

Well, duh. This is such a cliche that it is a plot point on &quot;Hawaii 5-0&quot;. Most new restaurants fail.

I read the whole article end to end - this guy looks like he had a real interest into cooking, was willing to work hard and was able to contribute to the society in terms of a nice highly rated restaurant. It doesn&#x27;t look like he wanted to draw millions of dollars from day 1 nor that he wanted his restaurant in the fanciest of the places. This should be a very normal thing to do and such people should succeed. Why is our modern day society arranged such that following this straightforward path doesn&#x27;t help you make the ends meet?<p>Something is very very wrong.

ive always liked the idea of automated restaurants. weve seen what automation has done for car production, so its interesting to imagine what an automated restaurant might be like. since the food is the product of very exact expenditures of energy, time and resources, you could forecast, resupply and otherwise manage your output and resource levels in a much more accurate way, for one.<p>and of course, you could make the food a lot faster i would imagine. and you could make it perfect every time. and you wouldnt have to pay people huge amounts of money to make it. i would also advocate for automating the delivery of the food to the table but that might be off putting to customers, so you could just build a system that would automate most of the mental load of managing tables and just use your human employees as meat puppets for the delivery software. perhaps something like google glass could be used. i bet you could reduce your serving staff very dramatically by doing that.<p>and as for ingredients, you could even grow some of them. ive seen videos about restaurants in new york that use roof top aquaponics systems to grow all their vegetables. whether on the roof or off site, one would need to run both production and processing and delivery in order for uniform quality to be achieved. the quality of the ingredients is supremely important -- i went to sauls in the bay area and their cheese burger literally gave me pause. if you want to know the difference between average ingredients and good ingredients, go try the cheese burger at sauls medium well.<p>even outside of automation, there are so many improvements to be made. i used to work in a restaurant and they would cook food on these large woks. i would guess more than a third of the energy from the flames below simply go around the wok and up out of the vent hood. automating the heating of the food would probably make it much easier to capture and use all of that thermal energy instead of half.

Seems like this was his life&#x27;s dream to do, and he got to do it. So, I&#x27;m not sure it was entirely a bust. But certainly it was a very expensive dream to follow. And how many really ambitious people fail and fail again, before finally succeeding at something? It is a common story. Not that failure is any guarantee of success.

Reminds me of this story (sadly similar)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wweek.com&#x2F;restaurants&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;30&#x2F;heres-what-happened-when-i-opened-a-restaurant-in-portland&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wweek.com&#x2F;restaurants&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;30&#x2F;heres-what-happe...</a>

This sounds like a lot of startups, insufficient market research, poor cost management, chasing hip trends...

most of the time i read a story like this, the infamous statistic of 90 to 80 percent new establishments failing is referenced, and then the person goes on to explain how they barged into the business like a belligerent, drunken bull in a china shop. this guy did zero research. zero thought was put into the costs involved. i am frankly amazed that this guy made it as far as he did. i remember the last time a story like this was posted, the guy got fooled into paying to renovate the building he was renting. i have a feeling that most of these restaurants fail because they are started by complete idiots.

Hard as it is to read it, I am glad that he wrote the article.<p>His journey is a cautionary tale on how difficult it is to start a new business (including tech startups). There&#x27;s so much work to be done and a lot of them are non-glamorous.

Peter Thiel uses restaurants as an example of a super competitive industry that you don&#x27;t want to be in.

FTFY: I poured my blood, sweat and life savings into a business I knew nothing about. It ruined my life.

A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks here.;)

&gt; In 2011, I applied to operate a booth at the Toronto Underground Food Market [...] my fingers cramping so severely from peeling 100 pounds of potatoes that I almost called 911. [...] I lost money<p>So his first experience was extremely painful, almost landed you in the emergency room, and you lost money on it. What valuable lessons he learned going forward?<p>&gt; I didn’t care.<p>None.<p>&gt; Eighty per cent of first-time restaurateurs fail. I knew this. Opening a restaurant was the least sensible, dumbest thing I could do. My wife, Dorothy, a daycare worker, was coasting toward the end of a maternity leave, and we had two kids to feed.<p>It&#x27;s so rare to see people <i>brag</i> about being reckless, irresonsible, and wasteful of resources they cannot afford to waste.<p>&gt; “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into.”<p>Friends who knew what they were talking about tried to warn him off.<p>&gt; My shifts consisted of a few leisurely hours chopping veg and prepping salad dressings.<p>Any opportunity for experience is to be strictly avoided. &quot;The law says I need to know how a restaurant works? I know better!&quot;<p>&gt; My role was largely symbolic anyway<p>No it wasn&#x27;t.<p>&gt; As it turns out, no one invests in first-time restaurateurs, no matter how mind-blowing they think their cooking is.<p>Man, I wonder why? More to the point, it&#x27;s clear he never did.<p>&gt; I realized it was far from the downtown foodie scene [...] Admittedly, I had an ulterior motive: the place was a 10-minute walk from my house and close to the girls’ school<p>He purposefully chose a bad location, knowing it was a bad location, because it was convenient for him.<p>...I&#x27;ve got to stop reading, this is actually enraging me. It&#x27;s so <i>dumb</i>, and he seems so <i>proud</i>.

I could have saved him the trouble has he asked before doing this on quora. Seriously the culinary world is full of the worlds rejects. Junkies, alcoholics, thieves and the mentally unstable. I took a break from IT to pursue a culinary career. It was a great lesson in life. It taught me you don&#x27;t get paid anything but slave wages even though you are working 15 hour days. Your body gets wrecked. You get no respect. You work with the people who couldn&#x27;t get a job anywhere else for the worst reasons. It&#x27;s repetitive AF. There are not a lot of good reasons to try and live that life. No matter what glitter and rainbows crap food tv makes it look like.