The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets (2020)(thehustle.co) |
The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets (2020)(thehustle.co) |
Personally, I liked going to buffets as a kid. But as an adult, I find them repulsive. In the back of my mind, instead of choosing a well balanced meal. I am instead motivated to just get the priciest items. Forget rice. Forget veggies. Protein. Protein. Protein. Steak, lobster, fish.
Of course I regret it the night of or the following day as it exits my system
Smart! The buffet my family has gone to the most, Sweet Tomatoes (RIP, COVID-19) didn't really even have meat. You could fish for chicken in the chicken noodle soup, and they had chili, but that was about it.
> Even higher-end buffets, like the $98 brunch at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, employ these tactics: “They hide the truffles, the foie gras, and the oysters,” says Britt. “You literally can’t find them.”
I've never had the $98 brunch, but their downstairs (less expensive) brunch buffet is a pretty good deal. The pricing for kids was especially reasonable when we ate there a few years ago. But nothing will beat their pricing on our honeymoon — they comped us brunch for the whole week!
Can't speak to that particular brand, but a lot of buffets will have high-end meats that are hidden from plain sight. I went to a dinky local buffet not too long ago, and I found a prime rib roast on my second pass through. What they did was place the carving station in a hole in the wall so it wasn't sticking out, and then staffed the station with an extremely quiet man. Since your focus is on the buffet line, you completely miss him and his expensive meat (and also dim sum, and maybe a few other things. IDK, I just went straight for the prime rib).
I guess that includes hiding food that wouldn't pass inspection
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-golden-corral-d...
The trick they use is a large fizzy complimentary drink up front, which reduces your hunger for the first set of pizzas which take a bit to arrive.
When I moved to UK I realised the difference. I can only eat like maybe 70% compared to an average Westerner so it is always much more expensive for me.
Rightly so, food waste is inexcusable when we have people going hungry.
EDIT: With the planet being used up people are perfectly happy to just waste edible food. We're doomed.
How would that food in the buffet get to the hungry?
What you need is a hybrid buffet, in which each person gets a certain limit of meat, but unlimited of all the cheaper food.
You could go through the salad bar, the soup, and bread line as much as you want.
But on the salad bar, most of the actual proteins (I should say non-vegetable proteins -- all the garbanzos you can eat!) were an extra unit charge.
The "secret" was that they always had Chicken Noodle Soup, so folks would go there and simply pick out all the chicken, leaving the broth and noodles. Which was, honestly, pretty annoying.
Souplantation gave up with COVID. They literally threw in the towel, and shut the entire chain down.
I can only imagine it would induce a little snickering from Warren or the late Jimmy though . . .
I'm not sure what's that supposed to mean. Addition and subtraction are commutative, aren't they?
Times have changed and more people are there for the food and not for the drinks, so the business models change.
Food cost isn't typically a loss leader, but (American sense) entrees are often aimed to be around neutral because people judge mainly on that when they peruse menus. But that's neutral including loss.
Desserts margins are similar to booze, often. Appetizers make them money, as do sides and upsells.
There are many economics lessons to learn from buffets. And people tend to learn zero of them.
And really this would depend on a rich freeze drying industry. Imagine people driving around in trucks collecting all the uneaten scraps from children and adults plates. Sure we would not be able to handle to food safely, but we will be exporting it to countries that do not have as stringent laws on human consumption.
If the food hadn't been ordered, it wouldn't have been shipped, it wouldn't have been grown...
It's silly to directly relate the exact food a kid didn't eat on a buffet in Los Angeles to a starving family in Detroit, but that doesn't mean there are zero lines to draw.
Also, I can’t help but recount an anecdote from the last time I was at an all-you-can-eat place… conveyor-belt sushi with my kids.
A pair of guys came in and sat at the table next to us. They said a loud ironic prayer begging indulgence for “the sins we are about to commit” as they sat down… then proceeded to unwrap all the fish rolls, eating the contents as sashimi and discarding the rice and veggies on a tray on their table. By the time we left there was probably 8 lbs of rice on the tray… can’t believe they weren’t kicked out.
Not 100% on-point, but check out Roadside MBA, [1] which was written by a trio of MBA professors. Instead of using the case study method with examples from huge companies, they do a deep dive on small businesses that they visited on cross-country roadtrips. Very entertaining and accessible.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Roadside-MBA-Entrepreneurs-Executives...
Edit: It's $5 for a used edition. Then my comment is now moo.
Maybe I should do it!
Like when do operators decide to invest in a new ride and what’s the payback cycle like?
They have a really interesting blog overall.
Of course, elasticity goes in both directions. Demand that can be cut quickly, can also expand quickly.
Toilet paper is almost the opposite. And the extremely inelastic (and thus stable) demand means that competition is sharp and everything needs to be hyperoptimized for your business to stand a chance. There's almost no slack in the system, because that would be a needless expense.
I believe I once read a quip in The Economist about golf courses being a good investment for the second owner (the first usually going bankrupt).
And no, this isn't going anywhere. I'm not going to contact anybody for an interview or write a blog. This is everyday life in the real world. So much stuff going on that no one ever thinks about...
Why should they be? It's likely that the restaurant still charged them for the full price of the plates that were removed from the belt, regardless of whether or not they ate everything that was on said plate.
If they're otherwise quiet, respectful and paying customers, what about picking apart their food warrants kicking them out? As another user suggested, what happens if you don't eat the crust at a pizza joint?
Edit: Since I'm getting a lot of similar replies here, I'll point out that OP has since clarified that the conveyor belt sushi joint that they went to, contrary to how they are usually run, did in fact charge a "flat fee" for access to the sushi train. Hence my confusion - this is a deviation from the norm.
Edit 2: Kinda interesting watching the up/downvote progression in this thread. My initial post, despite being incorrect, was decently upvoted. Now that I've clarified that I was wrong and tried to correct myself, I'm getting downvoted. Neat!
At all-you-can-eat buffets, customers are charged a flat rate, not per plate.
Obviously this breaks down if people are taking plates of food and chucking them in the trash.
Because people didn't know you were wrong before, and it's usually good to make factually incorrect comments be gray.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/27/1197954459/all-you-can-eat-bu...
https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/
Available as a podcast
At least, I've never had a hankering for a water and a half pound of tiny slivers of sashimi.
The prank of taking the same amount of sushi and leaving it in a neat stack would be closer to enlightenment.
Over here, all-you-can-eat Asian shops generally operate on one of two principles (sometimes combined):
1. You can only order 5 things per person per 10 minutes
2. For every X amount of weight left over you pay a penalty
The restaurant had a to-go by-weight option. For the dine in patrons, you would check boxes on a menu slip with your order, quantity, etc.
Their menu included a simple request that patrons reasonably finish each plate before submitting a new order, that being honest kept their prices reasonable, and that patrons wasting entire orders would be charged on a per-weight basis for the wasted order at their discretion.
It's up to the market (ie patrons and restraunts) to decide which mix of policies they prefer.
Our big fill-you-up-cheap item was pizza. The ingredient cost for pizza is ridiculously low, even for above-average quality ingredients. An entire pizza was likely $0.50 or so, depending on toppings.
The restaurant oven was this giant gas-fired thing with 5 or 6 circular, rotating stone surfaces with each set to its own temperature. The pizza stone was set somewhere between 550 and 600° F.
My main job was making the pizza, and they were good. Definitely better than anything you could get at a Pizza Hut or Dominos or Little Caesars. People would even ask for custom pizzas, and management didn't care. You put it out on the buffet line and wave at them so they know it's ready. Of course, while they're waiting they aren't eating other things...
The restaurant also had a little game room with arcade machines that spit out tickets for cheap prizes. Kids would have a slice or two of pizza and then run off to play games, making their visits especially profitable.
The salads and starches and suchlike were all self-service, and waiters toured the room with big skewers of freshly roasted meat they'd carve right in front of you. But of course they'd only serve you a certain amount, and they weren't very fast to make a return visit. Thus limiting diners' consumption of the more expensive items, unless the diner was very patient.
Of course, the prices were very fair and we all left well fed.
I'm pretty sure the owner winced every time we pulled into the parking lot in my friend's heavily used Ford Escort. They had the best Crab Rangoon, and we would knock back between 3-5 heavily loaded plates, each. (Not only Crab Rangoon.) And then heaping bowls of self-serve ice cream.
The restaurant is long gone now -- it folded sometime after I moved out of state (so I don't think it was our feasting that did it) -- which is a shame. I can't put away food the way I did as a teen, and I wish I could go back and have a few much more reasonably sized meals to help restore balance. In my limited defense we always tipped heavily even though we were poor teenagers with part-time amusement park wages.
This further cultural entrenchment of people into homebodies is really sad to me. Really hope this does not happen.
I am assuming of course that the implication is that in-restaurant dining demand will shift to delivery, not that delivery will see some massive explosion over and above current restaurant food demand.
1. Family with kids. The kids don't eat much.
2. Couples. The female doesn't eat much. I honestly don't understand why they go to AYCE.
I'm surprised to learn that in the US the ticket is $20. In Indonesia, with a minimum wage of only $320/mo, it's around that price too! ($10 to $20). Also in most AYCEs here you're limited to 90 minutes.
I don't often find myself at AYCE places, but when I do, I always enjoy watching people line up and jockey for position for the next batch of fresh crab legs coming out of the kitchen.
Given how much they cost at markets, this has got to be a higher cost than the highest cost they're accounting for of steak.
All the businesses I observe come and go it's usually something about how they opened a hip restaurant in a trendy neighborhood and 5-10 years later it's fully gentrified and the rent causes them to close shop. Did they make enough profit to offset the cost of the leasehold improvement investment? I'm guessing not in that short amount of time. Meanwhile, the businesses that are family owned and have been around for 50+ years have no rent expenses and can weather some ups and downs more gracefully. They also get to have a reasonable profit to live on.
IKEA's food is the closest I've found. Food courts at malls generally are no different from just going to a fast food place, which have all raised prices as of recently. Costco is cheap but their options/taste isn't great. I've been bumming off a friend's college meal plan recently and it's so good. Pizza, pasta, a few really good vegetarian options, same with the allergy-free section. If only I was allowed to pay what he pays for that food.
Taco bell is also good about having some high calorie per dollar foods on their value menu. There’s a $2 burrito that comes out to like 600 calories. You could always swap out the meat for black beans if you want it a little healthier perhaps.
Originally on HN here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22151891 - with 268 comments
From a quick search on those comments, I still don't see the obvious comparison between all-you-can-eat restaurant buffets and all-you-can-use internet bandwidth.
And not all packets are the same. As much as net neutrality is a good idea at 10,000 feet. When you look into details like 911 calls over Wifi shouldn't actually share priority with 4k VR porn.
...but even if all the traffic is somehow within an ISP's own network, that "...marginal cost that is nearly zero..." is a very poor description of the economics. Networks aren't free, and building a network that can handle 10X the bandwidth means you're stuck with a far higher monthly payment on your construction loan.
That's just no fun, you lose all the upside. I hope they offer free doggy bags and takeaway for those who eat less than a reasonable amount
[1] https://www.mashed.com/1374299/chain-restaurant-buffets-disa...
I don't know if this is standard but I avoid such places like the plague.
> I prefer Embassy Suites though, where I can see them crack eggs.
Heck, maybe they're boil in a bag powdered eggs.
I was at a hotel in/near Miami, FL, and they opened their morning buffet to the local first responder community. I thought that was rather generous of them.
Also, having been to some high end buffets, these can sometimes be disappointing but they can also be truly amazing. I ate at a seafood buffet at a fancy hotel in Guangzhou once that blew my mind.
The best bang for your buck options at a buffet still come in a bucket, but there no obligation for the restaurant to keep that bucket full, regardless of demand. It's a bit like playing poker in vegas. You're competing with the other gamblers, not the house.
This comes with the assumptions that 1) food waste should be minimized (i.e. can't be sold the next day, or less ideal to serve it at dinner hour if it was cooked for lunch), 2) the $15 customer would almost never pay $30, or very little overlap.
All items? Sure. But enforced scarcity on the more expensive items is almost a given.
It's 12€ for 4 plates or 15€ unlimited with a drink, and really good quality overall.
Marge's courtroom testimony is my favorite part
Oily fried foods are very filling. You are limited in how much you can eat without feeling sick.
I suspect that if Golden Corral is struggling, and they are mostly serving oily fried foods, the problem isn't changing consumer preferences. The problem is that they aren't serving foods people like.
> pizza
> cheap
> arcade machines
This all sounds too much like heaven to be true.
My roommate could eat so much pizza I'm sure some of those kids were worried they'd run out.
It's none of the chains anyone mentioned. It was just a single place in a dying rustbelt town, and closed up a decade or more ago.
In hindsight, it was obvious that this kind of place depended on being able to hire labor that it could pay less than it was worth. The dream around there was to snag one of the few steel mill jobs that was left, yet almost everyone I worked with went off to college and never came back. We all worked hard and used our brains. For example, they had tuned the oven such that a pizza was cooked in two revolutions of the stone. By using the peel to place the pizza in different spots on the stone you could vary the amount of time the pizza was actually in the oven without needing to set a timer or keep track of anything. Because, as you know, the perfect cooking time depends on the toppings ;). If you've ever watched a Pizza Hut/Dominoes/Papa John's/etc, you'll see that they just throw the pizza on a conveyor belt and forget about them. Everything gets cooked the same exact amount of time (in an over that looks horrendous for energy efficiency!).
My normality has been surrounded by people that make their own stuff, from septic systems, to custom cars, to work sheds, to brick barbeques and to wood fired pizza ovens.
There's an entire state here of people that wouldn't see that as much of a challenge to build or aquire if they wanted good pizza.
For years we just used the annealing oven out the back next to the glass furnaces .. other people had other ways.
It's a shame that bad pizza is so popular, when good pizza is relatively cheap to make.
Ive found these types of restaurants all over the US - https://fogodechao.com/ is one I remember
the roaming the room and serving you from the skewer is called rodizio
The quality+price of a steakhouse with the variety of a buffet.
https://theculturetrip.com/south-america/brazil/articles/the...
* If there's something specific you want and it's not currently going around you can ask and they'll usually bring you a whole skewer just for you. Your server will also typically collect the table's favorites and send them your way.
* For everything except the steak that's carved right on to your plate you can just ask for more when they're serving it to your table. And the only reason for the steak is just because they have to take it back to get seared again.
* Unless your restaurant has specific dinner service slots (which is pretty rare) you'll likely get people coming over to serve you meat before you even get a chance to hit the "salad" bar.
Those steakhouses make the economics work by simply charging $25/plate/lunch $50/plate/dinner before drinks. They've got to be some of the least "sleezy" restaurants around.
Which is probably why they weren't delivering full skewers at request.
I've seen this at several AYCE sushi restaurants. They repeatedly offer you seaweed salad, soup, and mussel appetizers, but get really 'busy' when they are preparing the sushi rolls. The worst I saw was (about 20 yrs ago) some stingy owner had a stipulation for AYCE only for the first hour, then you had to pay up. The chef was incredibly slow preparing the food. Other places I've seen try to chat you up to slow down your eating.
Another effect in addition to slowing down eating (i.e. reducing how much food is consumed before customers feel satieted/full) is that the raw meat and fish shrinks from the water loss during cooking so customers get to feel like they filled up their plate but only be served a smaller amount of cooked food than if they had been able to load up their plate with pre-cooked food directly. And of course most of the sauces and marinades as well as the deep-fried cheap food is also fairly salty, encouraging customers to pay for more drinks (which also additionally fill up their stomachs).
Did the waiters ask if you wanted meat or were there cards with a red side and a green side?
They kept coming again and again with the delicious things... I left so full I could barely walk.
It's weird how while I could have turned "more grilled meat" down at any time but I didn't.
Do you remember where it was and what it was called?
That being said, my table ate an inhuman amount of extremely delicious meat.
What the hell is that stuff? I lived most of my life in Asia, but went to a Chinese buffet on a visit to the USA. Crab Rangoon sounded exciting... but it was full of cream cheese or something? Absolutely shocking. I'm very confident that's not a Chinese (or Burmese) dish.
If you are living in America, and you want the food made by the people in your community who are Chinese, would it make sense to call it Chinese food?
Chinese food, as in: the food the Chinese people make.
Italian food, as in: the food Italian people make.
Indian food, as in: the food that Indian people make.
America is a country made up of immigrants from other countries, so when they are here making the foods that they used to make in their home countries, we call it "Chinese food", "Italian food" etc.
I understand why this can be confusing to people who aren't used to living in culturally diverse countries. It is normal in The United States to interact with people from all over the world. Saying "Chinese food" does not literally mean food from China, it means food made by Chinese immigrants to The United States.
My understanding is a lot of those fried American Chinese appetizers were introduced as part of the whole Trader Vics thing when he was getting underway
Those are overlapping, but different, categories, and “Chinese food”, without additional qualifications, in the US usually refers to the former (and/or food of Chinese-themed restaurants in the US catering to general American tastes, with some inspiration from from it), without regard for whether or not it is also the latter.
(This is true of “<ethnicity> food” in the US generally, its not specific to Chinese food.)
I haven't been to one in years. A singular issue with Chinese food today is the seeming race to the bottom. They're all as commoditized and cheap as they possibly be, and it's a real shame. It's also, at least locally, seems to be getting sweeter and sweeter.
In late 1970's or early 1980's (I think), Super Stop & Shop's salad bar had a "seafood salad" with imitation crab meat.
So I'm wondering if your "crab" Rangoon was real crab, or something much cheaper.
I happily eat a dozen of them when the neighborhood Laotian church does its fundraiser, no matter what’s in them. Perfect snack.
Just for the guys with allergies: It contains eggs and wheat.
Delivery made sense when it was artificially subsidized by VCs, now that they’ve all jacked prices it’s not competitive at all.
Because you can eat it in the comfort of your own home, instead of the discomfort of an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers.
It may just be me but I really do not like eating in public.
1. I don't have to drive
2. I don't have to listen to other people talking loud or being obnoxious while I'm trying to eat my meal and have a quiet private conversation with my wife
3. I can enjoy it in the comfort of my home, whether this means eating dinner in front of the tv, or enjoying a scotch or wine we have at home, or even just being able to get out of the clothes we've been in all day and enjoy comfort food in our PJs
4. I don't have to brave the cold or wet weather
5. I don't have to deal with wait staff interrupting my meal every 5 minutes to ask if everything is ok
6. I don't have to worry about music that I don't care for, or is distracting, being played while I eat
7. I don't have to worry about dirty dishes on the table, or the table itself being dirty (although to be fair I have no control over the dishes used to prepare the food and so some might consider this to be moot)
8. I don't have to worry about my home being crowded and busy with strangers, making for an uncomfortable dining experience. My mother once took me to a restaurant to celebrate my birthday, just the two of us. I'm a foodie and, despite listing several reasons I often prefer delivery / take-out over dine-in, I actually do love a great restaurant and the food at this particular place was supposed to be amazing. The two of us were put in a tiny corner in a crowded restaurant so close to the tables nearest us that the three parties (us plus our neighbours on either side) could hear every single word of each others' conversations. It was practically a communal table situation. Edit: I forgot to mention that we had a reservation which made this experience all the more frustrating. Which leads me to...
9. I don't have to worry about finding myself at a restaurant that has communal tables
10. I don't have to worry about people celebrating their birthdays receiving a loud and obnoxious group of wait staff bursting out of the kitchen to interrupt the entire restaurant's private conversations with an annoying song and cheer
I recognize that a lot of the above points can be avoided by choosing a different restaurant. But sometimes you still want the food of a particular restaurant but that restaurant's dining atmosphere is what kills it for you.
Grandparents used to take everyone out to dinner regularly. Now we eat at their house. They have more comfortable chairs at home. The environment is much quieter. You don’t have to wait for refills. They personally have better cutlery. We aren’t really the types to like being waited on.
So unless we explicitly want something social from the restaurant or we need a table as we are travelling, the reasons for actually going in one have disappeared.
If my family gets together, we can bang out a multiple course guaranteed high quality meal in one hour, having fun while we do it.
But a lot of that is due to cooking knowledge that the elders in the family pass down and refine over many, many decades.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-r... [0]
This is an odd take because the trend in new/remodeled homes is dedicating practically the entire first floor and back yard of every home as an entertaining space. The line between "at home" and "out" is getting to be very thin.
Going over to a different friend's house 4-5 times a week for dinner, games, movies, music, sporting events, swimming, spa, fire pit feels to me pretty darn out.
US tipping is sick, and it is not fair to people who are involved in preparing your experience. Why only servers receiving tip? Why not the cook? Or cleaning lady? After all, dirty toilet will ruin your dining experience.
It's a glaring example of local optimization at the cost of global (your own life, viewed in its entirety) worsening.
The only reason I eat out is it's a date and we're in the early stages of getting to know each other, I want to treat someone (including dates) to something nice, or it's a special occasion.
At least in this country (Ireland) restaurants seem to be, if anything, fuller than they were before covid; deliveries are definitely more of a thing than they used to be, but no apparent evidence that people are giving up on going out.
If someone is going and eating a small amount of a single dish then it makes no sense (unless, as in your example, they're going with someone else like a spouse in which case maybe the person/s they're going with like it enough for it to be worth going on average despite the person who isn't eating much).
But I've known a handful of people with quite small appetites who enjoy AYCE restaurants because it lets them enjoy several of their favourite dishes and/or try several new dishes, even if only a few mouthfuls of each. It might still work out poor value in raw terms of calories per $, but compared to any other way of enjoying 5 different types of tasty food in the same meal it can be very good value in pleasure per $.
Because a buffet isn't a competitive contest where you pay to see how much food you can stuff down your gullet for $20. No, you're paying to walk away satisfied. If that only takes one plate, well, you still "got your money's worth".
I mean it was for me and my brothers growing up. Back when Pizza Hut used to have a linch buffet we'd always have a competition to see who could eat the most slices. Even though I was the youngest I won a decent amount of times. I recall my record being somewhere north of 20 slices, though the buffet slices were smaller than normal pizza slices. We were all skinny as rails back then too (and mostly still are).
This is the most hilarious tragedy of the commons I've ever heard of
So I guess you gotta do what you gotta do
Charging customers for food left on the plate is quite reasonable though. I’m sure a lot gets left on the plate and the waste must be nauseating.
Is it though? What if the food quality is really low? As the article states, it's a place to get rid of some old food items. Do you think you have an obligation to eat it no matter what?
The next time we went, they no longer offered AYCE dumplings.
I don't plan to read the book about online dating with my daughter, but perhaps she'll read it on her own someday!
The customers are. Comcast is charging every one of their customers $80+ per month to connect to internet infrastructure that they update maybe once every 20 years. They have massive profit margins, this is public data.
> And not all packets are the same. As much as net neutrality is a good idea at 10,000 feet. When you look into details like 911 calls over Wifi shouldn't actually share priority with 4k VR porn.
QOS is entirely unrelated to charging money for data packets used and is already a solved problem with existing infrastructure and technology, so I don’t really understand why you brought up this straw man.
That's irrelevant, because sane people don't try to stream 4k VR porn and make 911 calls simultaneously on the same device. Just give each device ~64Kbps (enough for even a uncompressed phone call) that it has exclusive first dibs on. For robustness, give each modem ~1Mbps that it has exclusive first dibs on, so 16 people in the same house can't stomp on each other's traffic[0].
This works fine even if the porn and the 911 calls are both going over indistiguishable TOR connections, as they ideally should be in order to deny ISPs the physical possibility of not having net neutrality (though that's not always practical).
(A alternative option is to always allocate marginal bandwidth to the device that's using the least bandwidth total, which avoids having to know what a phone call costs, but seems like it would harder to make reliable in practice.)
0: Technically this is the only part you can properly enforce, since a user could reprogram their modem to give more bandwidth to certain devices, but the 64Kbps/device limit is good default, and if they change it, any problems are on them.
That implies a wide distribution, but digging a little deeper, about half of their 280 locations are in Texas.
> (This is true of “<ethnicity> food” in the US generally, its not specific to Chinese food.)
Outside the US too. I remember ducking into a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Poland and finding that everything was served with a very Eastern European cabbage and carrot salad.
That still wouldn't include crab rangoon. It's just as homespun American as key lime pie. No Asians of any variety were ever involved, as you can tell by the fact that it is made of cheese.
> Saying "Chinese food" does not literally mean food from China, it means food made by Chinese immigrants to The United States.
Not even close. It means food that is sold in restaurants that are called Chinese restaurants. If it meant food made by Chinese immigrants, it would include Mongolian barbecue (which is Chinese food) and all Japanese cuisine (which isn't, but the Chinese like opening Japanese restaurants because the American price of Japanese food is higher).
> America is a country made up of immigrants from other countries, so when they are here making the foods that they used to make in their home countries, we call it "Chinese food", "Italian food" etc.
This seems to contradict the rest of your comment. Are you taking the position that "Chinese food" refers to food that is made by American Chinese for whatever reason, or that it refers to food that is made by Chinese in China? If the second, what are you objecting to in your parent comment?
Ok but nobody in China makes "crab rangoon".
> I understand why this can be confusing
That sounds a little patronizing. Obviously I am familiar with the concept of migration. I was simply surprised by something that is so wildly different from any reasonable notion of food that originated in China. The line from China to chow mein or general tso chicken is much more clear than the line to crab rangoon.
> Saying "Chinese food" does not literally mean food from China, it means food made by Chinese immigrants to The United States.
But now we're getting into the territory calling pizza Mexican food because most people in the back of the house at pizzerias in the USA are of Mexican origin.
Particularly as second and third generation immigrants gain adulthood, it's easier to recognize that Tex Mex, Cal Mex, UK Takeaway Indian, American-Chinese, LA Korean, etc. are their own categories of food worth celebrating. Yes Korean tacos from a truck aren't "authentic Korean" but they're not trying to be.
I usually just tack Country-X on food when we're talking about the fusion version. It's a little unwieldy but makes the point clear.
Interesting.
I haven't made or eaten crab rangoon before, so does this fact make spaghetti carbonara "more Chinese" than crab rangoon?
I mean, personally I think the English language is still trying to adopt to the multi-ethnic situation in the USA, which is why crab rangoon would be classified as "American Chinese food" instead of "Chinese food". But I guess language is flexible enough that if enough of you insist on calling it that, eventually it will stick.
May you suggest another term for the food that Chinese people outside of the US actually make and eat? Maybe "authentic Chinese food" sounds too ethnonormative for your culturally diverse palate, but I can't think of any good alternative, and simply using the same term for both types of "Chinese food" seems counter to the cultural diversity you espouse -- I mean, unless "people all over the world" just means Americans.
There's not much challenge to a 320 degree Celsius oven (or 600 F in some parts of the world, apparently).
I'm sure you know this, but they're actually interrupting your meal every 5 minutes to minimize any possible delay in seating the next person after you. They just accomplish that by asking if everything is ok.
It's all about throughput.
(And it's a US thing. In France, among other places, you're expected to be the only group using the table for that meal. Which means they're in no rush for you to finish, but also that they are not happy if a group sits down but only a subset of people order food. Sometimes to the extent of asking you to leave.)
And often, it just comes down to overcorrection, where the server is afraid of getting bad tips (so yes, that is US specific, and maybe related to throughput, though not exclusively), or incompetency, where they haven't learned how to read the table and predict their needs.
(Pun intended)
In my opinion you could teach both economics and common spreadsheet usage. Just please do not make it Excel-specific, many people here use Linux desktops. I would suggest LO Calc as it runs everywhere, or maybe Google Sheets as a distant second.
I was planning Google Sheets, since I'm on Linux and don't have excel.
I am hoping for something I can embed in the actual article.
I didn't even know about LO Calc. I'll check it out.
So it's Chinese enough by that standard.
On the other hand, I have gotten the comment several times from a cashier while buying milk, "wow, I've never seen anyone buy that much milk at once!"
How much milk do you need to buy to trigger that comment? One gallon. I drink that much in about two days. (This is several cartons; the largest carton you can buy is 1350 mL of milk.)
So I conclude that Chinese people expect to be able to buy milk, but regardless of that expectation, they actually buy almost zero milk.
The concept of lactose intolerance doesn't seem to be well known. I had someone react with horror when she asked what I was going to have for lunch and I said milk. She assured me that if I were to drink milk on an empty stomach, I would suffer from diarrhea. She was confused when I responded that that wouldn't happen to me because I'm white.
Then General Cho's Chicken is American, because it's very popular in Iowa. Including amongst our ethnically-whitebread people.
But I would hesitate to call that "pizza" just because of the name of the restaurant. I would not even call it "American food". That's not why it's on the menu.
However, aren't some types of imitation crab not kamaboko at all but a kind of fish fillet processed with crab juice to give it that flavor?
I actually dislike the taste of crab so I am not all that familiar with the options.
Similar dynamic, they’d come out with a fresh pizza, do a lap around the dining room, and if you wanted that flavor you’d ask for a slice, or keep waiting.
I don’t remember if adults could make requests / suggestions.
That is an understatement with that guy. I have been tempted to over the years to make a web comic on this guy. The junk he does most normal people would never even think of.
That makes sense. At my local pizza place there isn't a buffet, but there is a lunch menu for slices, and those slices are double the size of XL slices.
Though it wouldn't come as too much of a surprise to reasonable customers when you kick out unreasonable customers.
You are right that (bad) surprises are bad for commercial transactions. Most restaurants, especially all-you-can-eat joints, have some rules written down somewhere about these kind of situations.
There's a fantastic documentary about it (and the Chinese food complex in American in general) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_for_General_Tso
Anyway, point taken.
And I'm sure restaurant chefs get some kind of training to replace the passed down knowledge :)
Anyway, if you don't want to pay for wasting things you don't like, make your first plate a grazing/browsing sampler platter, then come back for the stuff you liked.
Even in a case of "sampling" and finding things you didn't want to finish, you'd be charged. There can be a reasonable alternative.
Only if you put it on your plate ;)
No, just pay for the waste.
Eg, if yellow plates are $1, blue plates are $2, and orange plates are $3, and you pulled two orange plates, a blue plate and a yellow plate, your total would come out to $9 even if you didn't clear your plates.
Yes, flat-rate sushi conveys exist.
OP clarified, and I thanked them for clarifying and acknowledged I was wrong. I've further mentioned as much in additional comments[1, 2, 3], and I've edited my original post to clear things up. Care to continue being snarky despite my attempts to correct myself?
>Yes, flat-rate sushi conveys exist.
And are, by and large, less common than per-plate joints, hence the confusion.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562397
That a conveyor belt is involved doesn’t change the offer.
The entire world is not just Japan or the USA, please be respectful of this.
Basically 100% a buffet except the table moves to you (which, to the point of the original article, waiting for your preferred sushi to come around probably slows down consumption and improves the economics)
Obviously if people want to buy food and waste it that's on them. But this was a pretty clear abuse of the restaurant's business model as well.
Can't really fault her for this weirdness, she has it rough enough.
That really depends on your personality. Not only is "people watching" not my thing, but the idea of other people "people watching" me is terrifyingly uncomfortable. Sends shivers down my spine level of discomfort. Please don't watch me while I eat. Some of us find the idea of "making small talk" with anyone, let alone wait staff, to be inherently uncomfortable.
For others, eating is a social activity, or an opportunity to socialize, and they like that. Some people feel "trapped" if they are cooped up inside their homes for too long, and need reasons to "get out of the house." That sounds like you, and that's great. Nothing wrong with it at all and you should enjoy eating out as much as you like. For others such as myself, who are introverted and find great comfort in the solitude of our homes, the reasons that you find eating out to be comfortable are the same reasons we find eating out to be uncomfortable.
If it makes you feel any better, and maybe I'm only speaking for myself, but when I people watch, I'm barely paying attention, and I'm never really watching people actually eating. It's the activities around the eating, mostly just walking and talking (this is why I really like European sidewalk cafes, you get an endless river of people passing by to watch). I'm not taking detailed notes on anything, and definitely not bite sizes, how many times you chew, how messy you are etc. That's all too close for my own comfort. Couldn't care less about that stuff. Probably the most info I retain is new ideas on how to dress myself, outside of exceptional or weird situations that might arise in public. Which, OK, in the context of this thread, I might notice the people carrying two or more heaping mountains of food to their table at a time.
Re: baby: If there's an Ikea near you, you might want to try that. Around here, they typically are very well-prepared for small children (say, 1+). Basically, all of the cutlery and china they sell for kids is available for use in the restaurant. And they have play areas integrated into the dining area - kids play and parents can eat.
For you. If a person says they don’t like eating out because it’s uncomfortable, you can trust they know whether they are uncomfortable or not.
I don’t like loud, busy places. It’s great when I can have a meal at a restaurant when it’s not packed, but you never know until you get there.
With friends, family or coworkers, eating out is fantastic and a fun social activity.
Alone, it's awkward, uncomfortable and unpleasant.
If I'm not with someone, I'd rather it be delivered.
So now I think more people then ever will be having restaurant food at comfort of home and not worrying about traffic, driving, cabs, parking, crowd, one more beer or wine glass etc.
My family rarely goes out to restaurants anymore, not because we don't love restaurants, but because it's more fun to cook at home.
Most restaurant food needs to be simple and easy so they can get you in and out quick.
People never ate out because of the food. They ate out because of the dining experience.
You can make better meals, cheaper, at home, in less time than it takes to go out. Yet people still dined out.
And, they pay a premium for it. There is no sense in paying a premium for home delivery, because you are getting substandard meals[1].
[1] Few dishes travel well in a bag, even if it's packaged properly and delivered quickly - steam rising off hot food that is not ventilated causes things to go soggy. If you do ventilate it, then it goes cold in minutes while traveling. Then reheating the food makes it less nice than it was when cooked. Hence, all delivered food tend to be slightly different to eating it off a plate when it is freshly cooked. Even pizzas suffer from being steamed while traveling.
It isn't as good as a home cooked meal but it is a lot better than the awful TV dinners I rarely ate back in the 80s.
This is going to be highly dependent on your local restaurants and what you like to eat. I can't make better bbq or pizza than the restaurants near me. I can make either of those pretty well, but not faster. I can make a pretty good burger, competitive with almost all the restaurants near me, but I can't make French fries as good as a restaurant with a fryer.
And if I am a part of this comment chain, and I am confused (admittedly so, I should remind you), is there not confusion in the comment chain? :)
Boy, you should probably step outside and touch some grass or, I dunno, maybe let stuff like this bother you a bit less. Yikes.
Edit: And no, contary to your suggestion, I'm pretty comfortable not deleting my comments - I don't mind publicly making a mistake and then owning it. Thanks for the thought, though! :)
But most all-you-can-eat sushi places use a conveyor belt.
But it's when I'm not seeking those things, when I want to enjoy a meal or a private conversation, then I start to a) feel protective of my privacy (and yes I know, restaurant = public place) and b) I just have no interest in the type of socializing that we're talking about (making small talk with the wait staff etc.).
In other words I just want to be left alone, and I find the concept of people "people watching" me while I eat or go about my daily business to be, well, creepy. If I'm asking for attention it's different. If I'm enjoying a meal with my wife, leave me alone.
I will add, however, that the privacy element is probably a bit more "extreme" for me than others because of having experiences as a child where privacy and boundaries, when there was an expectation of privacy, was violated. And so I am more concerned with privacy than probably even the typical tinfoil hat wearing techie who is paranoid about Internet and device privacy. That's undoubtedly where the thought of people "people watching" me while I eat at a restaurant creeps me the hell out comes from.
I am unduly paranoid about my privacy when working from my home office, and I absolutely hate anyone approaching my screen to look and ask what I’m working on. I always have to catch myself to avoid snapping at my wife when she barges in. In my case its probably that my father used to aggressively check our screens and say like “oh who is that girl you’re talking to on Facebook etc” (not in a fun way, kind of ridiculing or trying to embarass you kind of way).
Its completely irrational but the back of my head is yelling “an authority figure is about to come tease, ridicule, question you etc”. So I definitely see where you’re coming from.
Some people are allergic to rice. Some people are on medically prescribed diets. Maybe there's an obscure religion that forbids eating rice. Some people just don't like rice. Are they all jerks too?
That restaurant wouldn't be my preference, but if I did have to be there for an important reason, I certainly wouldn't be bullied into eating something I didn't want to eat. I'm generally strict about wasting food, but in that situation I wouldn't feel even slightly guilty about it.
If they can accommodate your request, and they typically will, you’re golden. If not, you may need to patronize a different business. It is, after all, a reciprocal relationship. If your basic needs aren’t met, and they have a stiff policy on substitution - then yes, you are a jerk for ignoring them.
The actual controversy here is that the folks in the story clearly thought they were cheating the system, and people are responding without questioning that, and some people are questioning that.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer... does not show eastern countries as having particularly high birth rates, and the largest eastern countries have the lowest.
The description on that page under Africa, which is the only continent remaining with fertility rate well above replacement rate, does agree with your assessment that it's about the society and its expectations.
(As a side note, I heard that Nigeria is on track to soon becoming the country with the 2nd highest number of English speakers after the US, which stunned me given that India is the most populous country in the world and—I thought—has a fairly high percentage of English speakers.)
No? A -> B doesn’t mean that B -> A. In the case of East Asia, it’s nearly a century of deliberate anti-natal government policy. China’s one-child policy is the most brutal, but pretty much all East Asian countries had softer forms of encouraging people not to have kids.
China's one-child policy is long since over, but their birthrate is very low too. Government policy isn't the problem (if it's even a "problem"). People just don't want to have big families, and now that they have a choice, they don't.
It's not about culture, it's about economic conditions.
- make housing cheaper
- fix education so people can start their careers and adulthood earlier
- pass safe harbor laws so that parents and feel safe leaving their kids at home, or letting them take the bus
- also economic incentives help, beef up people's social security if they have kids
I'm not sure that that's that surprising (particularly if it's UHT/shelf-stable milk); go to any convenience store anywhere in the developed world, and you'll find plenty of items that far less than 10% of the customer base have any interest in buying. As long as _enough_ people will buy it, they'll sell it; doesn't need to be the whole population or anything like it.
It isn't! To get UHT milk, you have to go to a supermarket - it's an imported product. Supermarkets will also have cheese; kind and quality of the cheese vary by store.
Convenience stores only carry fresh milk. I think my favored brand is from a local dairy.
The price of milk in Shanghai, by the way, is much higher than the price anywhere in the US. This is an extreme reversal of the normal situation for food products. Imported UHT milk is quite a bit cheaper, I assume due to economies of scale, but I can't stand the taste of UHT milk.
> go to any convenience store anywhere in the developed world, and you'll find plenty of items that far less than 10% of the customer base have any interest in buying.
Mostly those items are theoretically capable of being used to full effect by 100% of the customer base. Here we have a situation where less than 10% of the customer base is even included in the potential customer base for the product. And given that milk has no place in an ordinary Chinese diet, a very large majority of those potential customers are never going to consider buying it.
Plus Singapore is reasonably fond of her time as a British colony.
> She was confused when I responded that that wouldn't happen to me because I'm white.
Of course, we also have populations of westerners with less lactose tolerance. I think Italians fall among them?
But the maybe 38% of Italians who can digest lactose ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28673071/ ) still dwarf the ~7% of Chinese who can. If your only exposure to whites was Italians, with their very strong cultural features of cheese†, cream-based sauces, and ice cream‡, you'd still know that (1) whites consume much, much, much more dairy than Chinese do; and (2) they are much less likely to suffer any negative consequences from doing so. On the other hand, Italians would probably sympathize with the risk of indigestion from drinking milk "wrong" where Danes or Dutchmen would most likely just be confused at the idea.
My white ancestry is mostly drawn from England, Ireland, Sweden, and Russia, so the baseline expectation for me to be able to digest lactose would be a lot higher than the Italian baseline. Visually I do look more like a southern European.
† To the best of my knowledge, there is no significant amount of lactose in cheese. But it is still a good indicator that milk features in the culture.
‡ Ice cream is also very popular among the native Chinese.
Lactose content depends on the kind of cheese. As a rule of thumb, the longer your cheese is matured, the less lactose remains.
Even in other highly-lactose tolerant countries, I don't think I've ever seen milk sold in a carton or bottle more than one litre, outside of the US.
- 40% 1L - 40% 2L - 20% 3L
It was more like a dare, along the lines of: if you claim that you can't gain weight, just take whatever you are currently doing, and add a gallon of milk a day.
A jar of peanut butter a day would also work. Or just increasing your intake of calories overall.
Unless you're going to call the entire story fake, then yes we have enough information.
> People just don't want to have big families, and now that they have a choice, they don't.
But “choice” is individualism! There are American subcultures that are more educated and affluent than average, like Muslims and Mormons, that have much higher fertility rates than average. And that’s because those cultures exert strong social pressures to conform to expectations about family life instead of leaving it to choice.
People can only learn so quickly; you're not going to give people a college-level education by age 15. Modern society requires more education to be productive than past societies, but this is at odds with human biology.
> pass safe harbor laws so that parents and feel safe leaving their kids at home, or letting them take the bus
This is only a problem in the US, but birthrates are low in all developed nations.
Some economic incentives might help a bit, but they're not going to have a dramatic effect: people simply don't want to have big families any more. Kids are a lot of work (and expensive, even with those incentives), so people like to have 1 or 2 and concentrate all their attention on those. They don't want 6 kids.
The exchange rate is usually better for grains than for e.g. chicken or even beef[0], though.
[0] https://animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/ Note that I'm a little skeptical of the numbers here, particularly those for grass-fed beef. Not that it matters for the purpose of claiming rice has a cost in lives.
> 33 field mice were fitted with radio collars and tracked before and after harvest. The researchers found that only 3 percent of them were actually killed by the combine harvester (amounting to one mouse). An additional 52 percent of them (17 mice) were killed following harvest by predators such as owls and weasels, possibly due to their loss of the crop cover. It is unknown how many of these mice would have been eaten by owls or weasels anyway.
That last sentence is key: without a control you can't draw much from this experiment.
Additionally, while they say "animals" many times they're not clear on which ones they're including. The decision on whether to consider insects would be especially important.
So any kind of waste that we can put a dollar value on, also has a value in human lives.
Make of that what you will.
How is that not a completely useless waste of energy, time, money and resources?
I'm in the "every life is sacred" camp, but...even if you do kill one animal and leave it to rot, it's not a total waste, just a "cruel" one.
Other things feed off of the carcasses of animals the same as you or I do. We just consider all other organisms beneath us, so if we kill and discard something, we write it off as a total waste. Birds, dogs, rodents and microorganisms disagree.
Carbohydrates are much cheaper than proteins and fat.
Proteins and fat of vegetable origin are cheaper than those of animal origin, but they come accompanied by excessive amounts of carbohydrates.
The most efficient way of getting food for human consumption for now is to dump as waste most of the carbohydrates from vegetables and retain only the valuable proteins and fat (this can be done at home for instance by making bread but washing the dough before baking in order to remove most of the starch, producing thus a protein-enriched bread, or by removing completely the starch by extra washing of the dough, converting in into gluten a.k.a. seitan).
The high proportion of carbohydrates from vegetable food can be used completely only by those who do hard physical work, but not by those who have a sedentary lifestyle, who must necessarily dump the carbohydrates as waste, either directly or indirectly (by buying food where the carbohydrates have already been wasted in various ways, including as energy sources for animals that have been raised for becoming food).
In the future it might be possible to develop better ways to use the carbohydrates that must be wasted now, by converting them with high efficiency into proteins or fat, by using bacterial or fungal cultures.
Are you arguing that everyone should be vegetarian? That's a topic I was not even remotely touching on.
Food in general is a significant part of our ecological footprint. Rice has a relatively high impact for a crop. Of course it's still in a different ballpark than beef.
But, when it comes to the real deal. Sushi from a tier one or two Japanese sushi chef then the rice is actually the most important factor in making good sushi.
Discarding the rice would be seen as comparatively barbarian as dunking a freshly made piece of sushi by a good chef into this mixture of soya sauce and ersatz "wasabi".
For now, there exists no way of producing enough proteins and fats without also producing an excessive amount of carbohydrates, which must be wasted in some way or another.
One way of using the excess amount of carbohydrates from vegetable food is by feeding animals or mushrooms, to obtain food with a more favorable proportion of proteins or fat (and this is a form of food wasting, as less food is obtained as output than it is provided as input), but another way is just dumping the excess carbohydrates (i.e. starch or sugars), after using food processing methods that separate the protein-rich or fat-rich parts.
When humans eat the excess amount of carbohydrates instead of dumping them as waste, the result is obesity, which is a worse choice than wasting the undesirable food.
I'm guessing it's very, very small.
I've never had either.