Our chef has a man bun, a very well-groomed long beard, a facial piercing, wears black apron, and black gloves
But he’s passed out in the back, so this teenagers gonna slap your burger together.
But a black & white stencil print of him is the cover of our menu.
The bartender makes and sells his own line of beard balm. The waitress wears overalls and a bandanna on her head and she’s just so fucking done.
If I were to start my own fast food business, I would make my food cheap as fuck and deliberately target locations that have:
- A sixth form or university campus nearby. Students are a big market.
- Nearby pubs or nightclubs. Doesn’t have to be a city centre, could be a local high street. The main intent would be to target the late night crowd.
People care about speed, cost and not eating something that will give them food poisoning, not gourmet food. The luxury market is oversaturated and we have anything but the luxury to do that often.
Also, if it’s a sufficiently large eat-in location like a diner, maintaining toilet facilities that don’t look like they’ve been vandalized is important too.
There’s a reason why premium fast food has spread so much.
By the time you’ve paid your business rent, your staff and your own rent, you can’t keep prices cheap and still make money.
And at a price point that covers your expenses, people won’t buy your “cheap and simple” food.
So you make your food “premium” cause a hipster burger doesn’t take more time or skill to prepare than a normal one, the cost of better ingredients doesn’t make a difference compared to your other expenses, and all you need for people to be satisfied with the experience is a couple thousand extra initially for interior design and marketing.Damn, nailed it, perfect synopsis!
Exactly this, gotten into it recently and seen first hand the costs balloon up fast
I agree, there are still ways to sell your food cheap though. A good example is a vegan/vegetarian burger place near me. Demand for that kind of food is high because it’s a liberal college town, but that restaurant is the only one of its kind here, so it’s always full. Also they sell more fancy, more expensive dinner options in the evening which I’m sure subsidizes the cheap burgers. And if you mainly go there for their burgers you might return for dinner sometime to try out those options. They’ve existed for around 10 years now and their cheapest burger has stayed at 4,50€ that whole time.
Granted it’s hard to know what kind of demand there is in your town without trying some stuff and maybe failing.
The business model you are describing is perfect for a food truck.
They usually aren’t happy when I take a shit inside our local food trucks. They keep telling me it’s unsanitary but I always insist that a restaurant must allow its patrons fair use of their toilet facilities.
Fast food + college kids , good idea.
Fast food + drunk college kids, not so much.
As was suggested earlier, a food truck is the perfect solution. You’re not responsible for cleaning vomit.
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Throw in a fun clown mascot for the kids, and I think you’re on to something with this cheap fast food idea
I hate how this society has turned something as deeply emotional as cooking and turned it into a factory farm where people think burgers and hot dogs just magically appear with fairy magic.
Everything in life can be deeply emotional, just not for everybody.
That’s just like a food truck in my city with the BEST carne adovada nachos
Check out how successful Dick’s is in Washington. They have so many locations now. Their first location was Wallingford, Seattle. It’s about a 1 mile walk from the U district, where a lot of the college kids hang out. Now, Dick’s has a location in most major districts of Seattle, mostly around bars, and even outside of Seattle. They are cheap ($2.50 for a cheeseburger) and super fast because they don’t do customizations with a limited menu. Mostly window only walk up pick up, no dine in (except for the one outside the hockey stadium, but it’s standing only).
You’ve got the right idea.
It’s annoying that you can either choose between having a weedy shit burger that’s mostly lettuce and has to be held together with a stick, or eating a really expensive one and have to look at a load of wanker tat on the walls.
Also, you can stick your brioche buns up your arse. A brioche bun is not a load bearing bun. It dissolves in contact with moisture.
I hate when my buns get moist.
Those guy knows his buns
hell yeah lemme get that pretzel bun SON! shit SLAPS
Kaiser Roll FTW
Kaiser crowd represent!
Hold on, a brioche bun can totally work! Toast the bun, put a little mayo on it, put the veggies on the bottom (at least the lettuce), and a regular-sized burger will hold up just fine.
Not saying it can’t go wrong, especially in a place that just wants the decor and the food to look good on Instagram even if it’s disappointing when you bite into it. But for burgers I’ve made, a brioche bun can be a nice option. :P
Also why do Americans like mixing sweet and salty. Here in Australia they have brioche buns everywhere now. I hate that crap, if you don’t have normal buns give me two slices of bread instead
Hipster burger restaurant starter pack.
And the main burger is called ‘the americano’ which is fatty, with too much cheese, and a sweet relish.
That does describe America pretty well though
“if i pay $50,000 for this hanging piece of flare, and only stay open from 4-10pm we can siphon money from money with our money from the people who have money. But our waiter? minimum wage, cameras in the back our head chef is a wanker from out of state who pretended to be something they are clearly not, and the wine? straight from my vineyard, with minimal staff, green card only workers and an ever living hate for anything that shows compassion or empathy. that’ll be $18 a glass of home wine and $38 for alfredo pasta add $8 for broccoli add $10 for chicken. what…what’s wrong this is just business.”
Also, let’s not use plates. How about a small metal pan, fryer basket, or wood plank that allows the food to scatter onto the table?
Is there an equivalent Lemmy community to r/wewantplates? I just realized how much I missed browsing that one.
Question for the audience: what city do you most associate this style with? For me it’s Seattle, because that’s where I live, and ugh, it’s everywhere.
Every major city.
I’m in Dublin (Ireland) and it’s exactly the same here
I grew up in a small town in the rockies and one of the developer outfits had a fancy office with this decor
Oh probably. It’s quite a popular design choice.
Modern Rustic / Industrial Rustic does look really cool to me, so I can see the reason why it’s so popular.
It IS cool, and I will die on this hill before I let these places tarnish the style!
Exactly the style is fine the problem is the use of it as an excuse to pretend all your stuff is unicorn dust and triple the prices.
Boulder, CO comes to mind for me. Although, there’s one in my small town that’s almost exactly like this so I suppose these are just everywhere.
Confession: I actually kinda like this decor. Not the overpriced food and drinks though.
Yeah, I doubt many people mind the decor, just the prices that seem to always come with it.
I don’t associate this with any particular city, but with the rich neighbourhoods in every city, particularly the recently rich neighbourhoods built from gentrification and forcing the existing poor residents out. An upscale “urban eatery” is a sure sign that the neighbourhood is destroyed.
I’ve seen dumb places like this in every city I’ve lived in.
Winston-Salem, NC. This looks like 3/4 of our downtown hipster spots. Except everything here is also a microbrewery. Soooo many different IPAs. I didn’t realize that there were so many ways to make beer that tastes like shit.
Oh God, I thought that was just a PNW thing because it’s a hop growing region.
Are IPAs somehow cheaper to make or something? Like the whole microbrewery scene has devolved into “We make nine IPAs, whatever the fuck a cucumber lager is, and a stout.”
Hops cover up shitty beer very easily. That’s a big part in it.
Even with a dozen microbreweries within a walk of my house, it’s over half IPAs. I love them, but my wife is sad about the lack of stouts. There’s a couple of good breweries with solid stouts, so it’s not too bad.
In my head I’m picturing Portland, OR
Yeah, I don’t think there’s a restaurant on Alberta that doesn’t have at least a little of this aesthetic.
That said, Pine State is worth the asking price and I’ll kill on that hill.
Really? I see most US places come with sides at least. I have to go with Queenstown, NZ.
I think the answer is “The city you’ve been to.” Greensboro is full of crap like this.
I was gonna say SF, but now that I think about it the burger places there tend to be a bit more quaint and definitely don’t have the live laugh love shit everywhere. At least I’ve never seen one, but it’s a big fucking city so there’s almost definitely at least one.
They were everywhere in Denver.
We have them here in Atlanta GA.
I moved to Seattle 2 years ago, and I’ve seen it ALL over the US. Mostly in gentrified neighborhoods or the college kid areas.
Came here to call out Seattle too. Those chairs especially show up in any style of restaurant it is wild. I see this some in Spokane (or I did when I was there last don’t know if there are more or fewer of them in the last few years).
Fries on the side are a minimum for me.
ok but they’re served in something weird.
A silver plated original civil war shovelhead plastered with googly eyes as a plate
A miniature frying basket is the default.
Truffle oil with rosemary and artisanal oregano grown on the roof in our sustainable vertical farm.
That actually sounds kind of good
Funnily enough here the prices of fast food chains have risen so sharply that the fancy hipster burger places are now priced the same or even cheaper. Like a double cheeseburger at a McDonalds is 5.50 euros but a local burger joint with burgers twice as big, filling and so much tastier are 6 euros, it’s a pretty simple choice.
Where is that because here a “gourmet” burger is more like 16€ with fries.
Estonia
5.50 for a double cheeseburger! I swear that was a dollar menu item here but that long ago.
And you just know that this is the type of restaurant to throw out still edible food in a dumpster and then call the cops when starving people try to take stuff from the dumpster.
Damn…what is this, r/seattle?
Don’t forget the fact that despite it’s just a cheeseburger, it’s named “The Vonderbilt Wonder”, “Halfsie Pattsies”, or “Edmonton the Second”. Ideally on a menu so scant on details it’s hard to tell the french fries from the extra avocado.
The truly fancy places call ‘em “frites”, not French fries. That way they can charge an extra three bucks for the fanciness.
And the menu doesn’t show the price like:
Cheeseburger £13
Instead you get:
Cheeseburger 13
So cool and minimalist.
Reminds me of that one joke from What Men Think About.
“In our restaurant, dry bread is called a crouton. It is still the same piece of slightly fried bread, but dry bread cannot cost 8 dollars, whereas a crouton can.”
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Lol I have those exact barstools at home.
TIL they are supposed to be hipster/fancy?
No, just cheap and generic.
Praise the sun for me being cheap and generic, instead of hipster, then!
Praise it!
Fancy a bit of jolly cooperation?
They are suggested for restaurants because people don’t linger very long as they aren’t comfortable.
The “We want your money but get outta here” stools. Just seeing them in a restaurant is enough to make me want to leave.
Same. I won’t pay to eat in a restaurant that only offers uncomfortable seating.
I think it’s a offshoot of the shabby chic aesthetic. Expensive stuff made of cheap elements because you’re being sold a certain flavor of minimalism.
I suspect it’s also so the rich assholes can pretend to be in touch with society by occasionally “getting the poor people eating experience” (at a premium of course). They emulate classic burger joints and diners while being ten times more expensive with none of the charm.
Well you bought them from design within reach and paid their ridiculous prices, so you should know.
woah - raz
same here lol
Aldi for $17.99 each if I remember correctly!
I despise that kind of lighting because it’s so fucking dim at nighttime. The places that still have physical menus apparently expect everyone to pull up their cellphones’ flashlight to read it.
One place I went last year also had some boardgames, but only opened at night and only had that shit dim yellow light. Reading anything was nearly impossible and even the colors of the game pieces were blending together, “is this red, pink or orange?”
They do it so I’m not as ugly. I apologize.
Old man pro tip: use your phone’s camera viewer to read menus and such in darker places.
Gentrified takes on junk food with gratuitously expensive ingredients that are a slightly more subtle equivalent to just sprinkling everything with gold leaf like in 1990s Moscow or somewhere (“Our Southern-fried hog jowls come from rare heritage-breed hogs sourced from a tiny family-owned farm in the Outer Hebrides”)
My daughter begged us for a year to take her to a place called the Sugar Factory. It has really fancy and overpriced milkshakes. So we finally relented. They have the monstrosity below for $150.
What is the fucking point? Honestly?
I can’t speak for how that tastes because we weren’t willing to pay for food there, but the drinks (my wife and daughter got milkshakes, I got an appletini) were not good. Fun to look at, but pretty mediocre. I’m guessing the burger is more of the same.
But my daughter felt it was worth the experience.
But my daughter felt it was worth the experience.
That’s exactly it. I’ve been to the Sugar Factory before and everything was pretty good, not great. You’re 100% paying for the experience.
I would 100% patronize a restaurant that had full transparency and decent no-frills food. They publicly post all their expenses and how much profit they make. Charge a table/dine-out fee, then actual cost of food and prep on top. Pay their workers in full, so no tipping required. Explain things like dining hours that help the business keep down costs.
I would too. Unfortunately I’m pretty sure most places that check even half those boxes still fail in the market. You often have to drag consumers kicking and screaming towards something more equitable and less exploitative, even when they’re the ones being exploited.
