A huge swath of people ignore reviews by never reading them. They are only important because of how tight restaurants margins are so even a 5% dip is important.
Not sure if trolling or... but restaurant margins are paper-thin. For example, my father, a restaurant owner for 35 years lost money on most of his offerings (the exceptions being the cheap stuff - chicken fingers, fries, hushpuppies, etc). Almost all profits were made off soft drinks. If people all of a sudden stopped ordering tea, coffee and soda, he would have gone out of business in under a week. This was true in all different venues he operated -- a sandwich shop, an upscale steakhouse, and the ever popular "fish camp" style of restaurant. The only exception was his pizza restaurant -- and he only made money when people ordered plain pepperoni pizza. Ironically, if they only ordered cheese, you had to put more cheese on the pizza to make up for the lost space the pepperoni took up, and cheese is the most expensive thing in a pizza restaurant by far, especially if you use anything that is remotely real.
Fascinating. I guess what I'm trying to wrap my mind around is, how can the margins be paper-thin even at the very high-end places, where entres are > $40.
Most of it has to do with waste, labor, logistics, and how far off the well-trodden path they go with respects to food orders.
With respects to waste -- it's pretty obvious -- not everything can be made to order so every restaurant has prep-work. Some are better at predicting volume than others, so they waste less, but every restaurant wastes. As a concrete example if a restaurant wants to serve lasagna the whole day, they have to continually make lasagna the entire day, or risk disappointing customers. The pan they make at the end and at the beginning tends to go unused.
Also with respect to waste there are everyday products we take forgranted that a restaurant probably uses anywhere from 100 to 300x more than your average household -- soap, towels are overused, water is constantly running, multiple thousand dollars of water and power bills are not uncommon, waste disposal fees for grease traps and recycling and cardboard. All of these are factored into the cost.
Labor is obvious too -- you have to pay people to prepare and make the food. A basic restaurant that seats 100 people will have at least 1 prep cook, 2 line cooks, an expediter, a dishwasher, and a busboy. All are critical to ensuring the kitchen runs to acceptable speeds. All of this is on top of the executive and sous chef salaries you pay.
Logistics and well trodden path: Logistics is what you have to pay for raw food products to get delivered to you and depending on your menu and what season it is things will be cheaper at certain times of the year -- restaurants do this better than others. What I mean by the "well trodden path" is -- the big restaurant food distributors (Your Syscos, PFGs, US Foods) really try to funnel you to their cash cow offerings and they tend to not be the good stuff - the organics, the grass-feds, etc. Ordering anything else is considered "premium" and comes with a hefty markup. Not using the big food distributors comes with its own laundry list of risks and considerations -- now you become a salesman and you have to advocate your restaurant, negotiate price, schedule deliveries, ensure your supplier is reliable, what if they go out of business? What if the local harvest is bad that year? (For this I truly admire those "farm to table" type places)
I grew up in a restaurant. I have a passion for food and cooking and interacting with people. I would never want to be a restaurant owner. Restaurant failure rates are the absolute highest because the margins are so small -- upwards to 80%, and even 90% (NYC). It's crazy, not worth it. I became a software engineer instead.
