Don't start a restaurant - lots of startup parallels

The article describes the new fast-casual restaurant style, which sounds a lot like a modern startup in its ethos:<p>&#62;&#62;Bill Kim’s [fast-casual] restaurant...“We’re going to serve really good, vibrant flavors. It’s going to be $15. [Customers are] going to be in and out. I’m not going to serve dessert or drinks..."<p>In other words, make what people want, make it really damn good, and strip away everything else. We know this works for startups, but I wonder if it will work as well for (higher-end) restaurants, which generally try to sell an atmosphere and experience.

If "fast-casual" is actually an industry trend, that makes me very sad. I like the full dining experience; it's pretty much the only reason I'd willingly go out to eat.<p>If there's no "experience" to the act of doing so, what's left is in most cases a commodity that can be made, or reasonably emulated, at home or wherever without all the trouble.<p>I think there's some startup parallels in that too.<p>Doing business with a vendor is often valuable when the vendor offers truly substantive core competencies and a breadth of experience spanning a problem domain, not just because the vendor has a competitively priced deliverable to sell you.