The One Day a Week Restaurant

Posted on 2010/02/22 by .

Eric Crampton emails me:

    Why don’t we see more of this? I went to the only Ethiopian restaurant in New Zealand last night. It runs one day a week – Mondays – in a Burmese restaurant that otherwise was closed on Mondays.

    http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2010/02/one-day-week-restaurant.html

    I can understand that this kind of arrangements would have risks for the host restaurant. Ideally, you’d want it from a non-competing cuisine style. But this is the first instance of it I’ve ever seen. Have I just not been paying attention? The story from the Dominion Post on how the place opened is very nice. The woman running the Burmese restaurant was an immigrant from Burma who later started volunteering with an NGO that helped new migrants acclimatize. She met a guy there who wanted to open an Ethiopean restaurant but had no capital; her restaurant was closed Mondays.

    The other 6 days a week the Ethiopean restauranteur drives a cab.

Originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

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Posted in Economics of Dining | 2 Comments

Why was El Bulli losing so much money?

Posted on 2010/02/13 by .

Leigh Caldwell offers an analysis. Here is one bit:

…why is it losing so much money when demand is so high? The 48-seat restaurant has a six-month season with about 8,000 covers a year. It receives 300,000 applications for those seats [though this article says a million and this one two million], selling out the whole year’s reservations on the same day that bookings open for the season. Why wouldn’t they bump up the price from 230 to 330 euros, to simultaneously manage demand and eliminate the losses? Price elasticity can’t be that high.

My hypothesis is that the restaurant was never intended to turn a profit, but rather it was a loss leader for book sales, endorsements, lecture fees, TV contracts, cookware lines, and so on for Ferran Adria. Even if higher prices could bring in a twenty percent rate of profit, it wouldn’t — at this point — be worth keeping the place up and running. Adria already has a reputation as the world’s greatest chef, running the world’s greatest restaurant. It’s best to quit while ahead and branch out into food-related money-making ventures.

The low prices make going a hard-to-obtain event, open up the restaurant to more people than just the very wealthy, and maximize the publicity value of Adria’s name.

He won’t and can’t stop cooking forever, but cooking six months a year is probably not an optimum for him at this point. The real profit and loss calculation for El Bulli has to include the shadow price of his labor as an important variable.

Originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

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Malik’s Kabob

Posted on 2010/02/08 by .

Malik’s Kabob, 9542 Arlington Boulevard, Fairfax, VA, also accessible from Rt.29, right smack at Fairfax Circle, 703-246-9005 (Metro Trip Planner – opens in new window) [zabihah | Yelp]

This place is a knock out. Ask for it spicy. The Karahi chicken for two is first-rate. The breads are freshly cooked. I like the chapli kabob. The vegetables taste like…vegetables. The service is sometimes a disaster, especially for lunch. There’s amazing people-watching at night when the hookah bar is up and running, though if the smoke bothers you ask for the back room.

For the first time we have a superb Pakistani restaurant in our midst, you just need to bear with the service a bit.

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Posted in Fairfax, Pakistani, Virginia | 5 Comments

Banh Cuon Thang Long

Posted on 2010/02/04 by .

Banh Cuon Thang Long, web site, 6737 Wilson Boulevard, #22, Falls Church, VA, 703-534-1746, East Eden Center, (Metro Trip Planner – opens in new window) [WaPo | MetroMix | Yelp]

(Updated review 2019)

Indoors, against the back right corner of the mall. Their #1 dish is excellent — one of the best dishes in Eden Center — just don’t ask me to describe it. It’s not weird, though, just original. The menu here is limited but they specialize in what they do and they do it well. Worth a visit.

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Antipuqueño Restaurant

Posted on 2010/01/24 by .

Antipuqueño Restaurant (also Intipuqueno), web site, 2504 Ennalls Avenue, Wheaton, MD, 301-942-1129 (web site says place is for sale)

This place is a total wreck and mess when it comes to service, décor, and organization. They also serve the best pupusas I’ve eaten in the U.S., ever. It’s worth it. The soups look pretty good too. The menu is ghastly in its presentation and it doesn’t list a lot of what they serve. Just try to talk your way into what you want to eat. The cute waitresses will giggle and mess up your order, but they do know what a pupusa is. I call this a find, though you need to go with the proper expectations.

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Which are the “safest” cuisines?

Posted on 2009/12/23 by .

James Hinckley asks:

Which cuisine are you most likely to be satisfied with when dining out? Which disappoints you the least # of visits?
If you were at a shopping center you’ve never been to before and it has one restaurant of each cuisine and your goal was to simply be satisfied (you’re not looking to be blown away, you just don’t want a bad experience), which cuisine do you pick?

Korean is perhaps the safest bet, for two reasons. First, non-Koreans are not usually interested in the food. They might enjoy Bul-Gogi but there will be plenty of other dishes for Korean patrons and these will not be “dumbed down.” The lack of mainstream interest limits the potential for sell-out behavior on the part of the restaurant. Second, many Korean dishes, most of all the pickled vegetables, “travel” relatively well and do fine in a culture — the USA — which is not obsessed with fresh ingredients.

The most dangerous cuisine to try, in the United States at least, is Chinese. Your best working assumption is that the restaurant simply isn’t any good. Even in a Chinatown, such as in New York or DC, most of the restaurants aren’t very good. Inverting the two principles mentioned above puts you on a path toward figuring out why. Still, even in Paris or most of Europe for that matter, most of the Chinese restaurants aren’t very good.

I find also that (in the U.S.) Mexican restaurants are risky, Vietnamese establishments are relatively safe, and Thai places were traditionally safe but they are becoming riskier. I’ve never been to a bad Nepalese restaurant.

Originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

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Mayuri

Posted on 2009/12/17 by .

Mayuri, web site, 2316 Hunters Wood Plaza, Reston, VA, 703-860-2444 (Metro Trip Planner – opens in new window) [VAIndia.US | Yelp | Insider Pages | Gayot]

I have mixed feelings about this place. They have the single best and most authentic Indian menu around, ranging from the Chicken 65 dosa to Kori gasi, namely chicken made in fresh coconut, red chilly, and curry leaves, plus a lot more in between. And none of it is bad. Yet somehow the dishes don’t quite taste right. With some superior execution this could be premier places on this list, but as it stands it is an interesting curiosity of unfulfilled potential. If I lived nearby I’d go all the time, but it’s not yet worth the trip.

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Super Chicken

Posted on 2009/12/15 by .

Super Chicken, 422 S. Washington Street, Falls Church, VA, right next to Blanca’s, 703-538-5366 (Metro Trip Planner – opens in new window) [Falls Church Times | MenuPages | City Paper | Insider Pages | Yelp]

How good can any chicken be? Should any roast chicken place be on the “must-tries” list? Maybe not, but this is the best chicken place around and it didn’t make my guide at all last time, so I believe it could use the extra publicity. Northern Virginia Magazine did a blind taste test of about ten different roast chicken dishes from leading restaurants. Super Chicken was a clear winner, including in my eyes. I since went to the restaurant and found it was even better on-site. They also have the best rice and beans around and occasional Peruvian dishes such as fried fish and tripe stew. No, it doesn’t transcend its category but it does win its category. Worth a try.

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Posted in Chicken, Current Favorites, Falls Church/Seven Corners, Peruvian, The Best, Virginia | 3 Comments

Eyo Restaurant and Sports Bar

Posted on 2009/12/13 by .

Eyo Restaurant and Sports Bar, web site, 3821-B South George Mason Drive, Falls Church, VA, 703-933-3084 (Metro Trip Planner – opens in new window)

This unassuming locale is one of the two or three best Ethiopian places at the moment. Furthermore they serve Ethiopian breakfast, starting at 10 am, though sometimes interpreted flexibly by management. Their foul is simply superb and more generally you can’t go wrong with anything here. This single strip mall in Virginia is raising Ethiopian food to an entirely new level and making the trip to 9th Street obsolete. This place is also a favorite of the local cab drivers.


ETHIOFEST Open Mic Audition @ Eyo Restaurant

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How to avoid being fooled by a menu

Posted on 2009/12/11 by .

This one is not so easily excerptable, but it’s one of the best pieces-with-graphics I’ve seen all year. It’s about all the “nudge” tricks which go into designing menus, and how to avoid being fooled by them.

You really do need the image with it (best is to buy the New York issue), but if you insist on an excerpt, here’s one:

5. Columns Are Killers
According to Brandon O’Dell, one of the consultants Poundstone quotes in Priceless, it’s a big mistake to list prices in a straight column. “Customers will go down and choose from the cheapest items,” he says. At least the Balthazar menu doesn’t use leader dots to connect the dish to the price; that draws the diner’s gaze right to the numbers. Consultant Gregg Rapp tells clients to “omit dollar signs, decimal points, and cents?…?It’s not that customers can’t check prices, but most will follow whatever subtle cues are provided.”

Originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

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