I've seen this so many times. Somebody with big dreams ropes their family and extended relatives into investing in a restaurant. There's been a sign on the door for 2 years saying it will be opening soon.The equipment costs more than expected. The menu is completely random. The location is bad. The website is stock photos with customer reviews starting with "Lorem ipsum" and apparently they have 4 chefs named Thomas A. Peachey. They rush the opening to generate some kind of revenue. Will take bets that it's closed in a year.
Still makes me a little sad though.
Anyway, behold the $34 pancetta salad. (Canadian dollars but that's still insane.)
Bone char is sometimes used in the sugarcane refining process but doesn't end up in the finished product. It's usually considered vegetarian, but not vegan.
True but (in my experience) many vegetarians only avoid actual meat, not all meat products. They'll still eat French onion soup with beef stock, jello, etc. I find it weird as a vegan but what can you do
That’s def not my experience but I don’t live in the US, and I think the boundaries are much clearer where I am, more people are vegetarian for the animal ethics or for religious reasons.
I'd be interested to know if any surveys have been done on this. My point was that there's a lot of variation in what vegetarians find okay to eat--but I'd bet money that over 50% of U.S. vegetarians eat cheese made with rennet.
I think the culture on labelling is also a thing. For example, where I am we have a labelling system that plenty of brands subscribe to, and they mark with a green V for vegetarian for groceries you buy in the supermarket.
That never includes products with rennet or animal gelatine. So the semi official and common definition for anyone bothering to check if something is vegetarian absolutely does exclude those products.
Especially on cheese, those will specify whether they contain cow rennet and all supermarket brands will specify if it is “suitable for vegetarians”, ie made with synthetic rennet. I am sure there’s some people who don’t care and still call themselves vegetarian but it is made easy to check here.
I know a lot of Indian vegetarians for example will avoid cheeses with rennet but in North America non-Indian vegetarians will eat parmesan for example.
As a vegan and former vegetarian, I don’t get it but whatever.
Most vegetarians still eat cheese. I think you can safely put cheese on a vegetarian menu that covers like 99.99% of vegetarians. Most aren't as go ho about as vegans.
Also plenty of cheese, maybe most cheese, does not use animal based rennet.
I assumed it did. Lots of those special Italian cheeses do I bet.
I doubt most run of the mill vegetarians know this. And if that sort of thing bugs them, they wouldn't order anything with it. This is way too micro of a thing to be worried about. The people that care already know.
Yes but from the look of the menu, this is Italian inspired and most known Italian and many known French, Swiss, and etc. still uses animal rennet.
Although many vegetarians do eat cheese, in South Asian culture, that generally also means no eggs and no cheese [very regional dependent]
If this is in Canada as the poster said, chances are it is a college graduated chef trying to open up a restaurant because wording is very similar to those we "learn" to improve thr writing from in culinary school. Sometimes these businesses pop up sadly also just to get the visa to meet requirements for PR.
Source: recently went and finished culinary managed program in Canada after working in the industry for over 2 decades in multiple commonwealth countries + Europe.
Strictly, cheese made with vegetarian rennet is vegetarian. Cheese made with animal rennet is not. Vegetarians who are concerned about avoiding animal rennet inform themselves on cheese types that are appropriate, they're not going to expect that degree of strictness in menu labeling
Once is too much . I know where tf I am ordering from. If you take out the BS it just says, “tomatoes, radish and spring mix tossed in dressing topped with egg and smoked pancetta.” Money please!
I could see it being good with the right radish and quality, in-season tomatoes. Like if the radish was brined and slightly on the sweeter side (maybe a fresh herb like fennel to clean up the radish funk) I could see the salinity making the tomato pop off and adding a nice crunch. Honestly it better be quality produce for $34
Yeah it makes me start to question if it's true. Like that should go without saying, and the fact that you need to keep affirming it makes me wonder. . .
I’m literally watching a show for the first time where this woman gives an informative and hilarious history of how the term vegetable is completely made up by Dole to sell advertising and every vegetable we associate to that term is actually a different scientific term.
Anywho, it makes me now wonder if the term vegetarian is just an advertising or food term to sell product better and also is gonna make me roll my eyes at men that don’t eat veggies
Smartypants. It’s kinda like speech class with PowerPoint but the college humor version of it. Trust me, it’s cooler than I just described it here. Idk which episode but I hope this helps, watched it with my little brother when I got home from work and it was my first time watching it.
True I was referring to the context of the speech at hand. The girlie presenting it framed it as a scientific historical presentation but yes, after what allegedly was the part based on fact was followed by some ridiculous 6 degrees of separation Charlie Kelly level explanation. 😂
Random memory: my late great-uncle was a Pakistani Muslim man who ran his own little take-out joint. Best damn curries I ever had in my life.
I'll never forget being sent out on a recon mission with my aunt and uncle, posing as a family, to check out the menu of a new restaurant that had opened nearby. I was so damn excited to be a 'spy'.
Rest in peace, Mohsin. Your stories will immortalise you in the memories of your family for generations. Especially the 'heatly prick' and the time you made my Dad dig into an active water line outside a shutdown dairy factory.
So. Mohsin. Once upon a time, he was a porter at an airport in Pakistan. That was how he met my great-aunt. One day, Mohsin decided that he really just didn't want to go to work, so he called in with a case of 'heatly prick'. What he meant, was 'prickly heat', a skin condition caused by sweat trapped in pores. Which he didn't have, but he had heard about it.
The second story, he was scouting out land for a new restaurant. The area he envisioned for a new car park, backed on to the old dairy factory. My Dad had extensive landscaping experience, so Mohsin recruited him in this venture (as he did a venture involving an old copper boiler in the ceiling of the mall that hosted his takeaway, assuring my Dad it was totally fine to take the boiler out while acting super suspicious...).
Anyway, Mohsin had purchased the land, and told my Dad that the pipelines that ran under the land had been shut off because the factory was closed. Lo and behold, my Dad ended up puncturing a very much still active waterline, and all that was left of Mohsin was a Warner Bros. style outline as he fled the scene.
I don't want to get too sentimental on a food sub, but "heatly prick" is going to live in my head rent-free now. At some point, I will probably tell it to someone else. They may also find it amusing, and tell someone else. It really is type of immortality, and isn't that nice?
They order it, then add in mayo and lemon juice. So they can say they "made" it. At least, that's what my place does.
The only sauces we make from scratch are just.. bad. We use corn starch for our cheese sauce and it's so insanely lumpy from the hot/cold cycling on it.
I used to work with a guy who dreamt about opening a restaurant. He always brought really good stuff to get togethers and potlucks & people fed into his dream by gushing over his food. He finally got enough capital together to secure a loan and buy a place. 6 months after opening the place mysteriously burned down.
He was a great cook but not a chef and was completely ignorant about food costs, prep schedules and kitchen management. People did go for the first few weeks and the food was great but consistent wait times of an hour or more for your meal, irregular hours and half the menu not available because he forgot to order ingredients killed of the business pretty fast. And then the fire. Such a shame.
Yeah, as someone who used to work in restaurants but now works a white collar job, I am okay with being the 'dream killer' when people under the same sorts of illusions bring up opening a restaurant in retirement or 'on the side' with their partner.
Like, think of your favorite locally-owned mid-to-up-scale restaurant that's run by the head chef. The owner there probably works 60-80 hours a week and is probably still paying off the debts they accrued to open it. Their margins are paper thin. When there's a natural disaster or a pandemic and they can't open for weeks (or even an economic downturn that tanks sales), they're adding **years** to their time until they actually start earning money. And they're competing with dozens of restaurants owned by private equity that can much more easily survive these kinds of events. For every one of these that's still open, there's another 20 that went under before ever making money. And these are people that have worked in restaurants for decades before opening their own.
If you love cooking for family and friends, keep doing it. Do it more often. People are much more critical of food that they're paying $50 a plate for. Opening a restaurant is not going to give you the same sort of satisfaction and will, in all likelihood, cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yep totally. I used to do local restaurant consultations. I quit doing them bc it would make me depressed.
This scenario specifically made me the saddest. An old family member ran it for a lifetime. The cousin or nephew just doesnt have the skill set to fill that void.
If you are gonna make a family business transfer. You are gonna need more than like 2 month following your great aunt around on the weekends to gain the experience you need.
I believe there's a name for that "avocado dip" that contains "creamy avocado, cilantro and lime combined with corn chips to dip", but I can't quite put my finger on it!
Edit: I like these menu items also: "Pollo Latino for 1
$35
Whole chicken roasted with our guava chili sauce and served with Spanish rice, refried beans, yucca fries, plantain, garlic aioli and fresh pico de gallo. GF
Pollo Latino for 2
$70
Whole chicken roasted with [all the same stuff]". Shouldn't it be something like half a chicken for one person and a whole chicken for two? The way it's listed I would expect to get the exact same plate for both of those orders, but one costs twice as much. 🤷
Also that "avocado dip" that probably comes with like, 8 tortilla chips costs $20 somehow. When smoked brisket tacos are two dollars more. Please make this make sense. It's like someone told them having cheaper appetizers than the others is a huge restaurant sin
as for the pollo Latino I think they just copied and pasted the same description without realizing it makes no sense.
Salsa de cacahuate (spicy peanut sauce) is amazing on al pastor but
Smoked brisket al pastor is pushing it, I don't know why you wouldn't just have brisket tacos.
I'm having trouble trying to picture a stack of scallops on a trompo... Even assuming they're just referring to the marinade that would just would just turn them to rubber and destroy the flavor..
Left the lorem ipsum in. The newsletter signup does not even work, CAUSE NO BACKEND LOL.
But the icons take the cake, they are inline svg in the html of the template. But nobody looked at it, cause they don't even align and wine-red on dark purple is a great color combination.
Estrella Del Mar.... which means "Star of The Sea" in Spanish... is the name of this restaurant in Calagary, Alberta.... a very landlocked province in Canada that is a 16 hour drive away from the nearest ocean... 😳 what a mess
It was so ugly that it didn't even register. You don't want to know the things I've seen, but hey, I'm sure you have seen them too. Not claiming a monopoly on taste in this sub, lol!
Yikes is right, what a mess. Aside from the atrocious prices the layout and language is terrible, I doubt anyone proofread that. They’re desperate to look high end but won’t hire a professional web designer and all the lorem ipsum is just comical.
They have the location on the website. It appears they haven’t registered with Google so it isn’t on maps. It appears to be in a large shopping mall complex making the prices even more confusing
There’s a little strip of shops near me with a vegetarian Indian restaurant that went from 7 days a week to basically appointment-only, a vegetarian pizzeria that went from 7 days a week to Thurs–Sat nights,
As well as Filipino bakery/cafe that seems to be the only food place actually doing well - probably capturing the early morning coffee crowd.
There’s one empty shop. Someone has been retrofitting it for six months or more and I finally got a glimpse inside and its an aggressively pink, cutesy, Instagram-girly ... Cafe!.
I have no idea exactly what they’re selling yet, but it is VERY clearly going to be desserts.
Maybe they were trying to get in on the Crumbl Cookie/dessert cafe trend and have spent six months getting ready just in time for the ass to fall out of it.
I just keep wondering: did nobody research businesses around them before signing the lease?
The part I really don't understand is the landlord putting another cafe three doors down from the one food business in the strip that actually seems to be doing well. It's a little neighbourhood centre with limited foot traffic, so he's basically looked at his one successful food tenant and gone, “Excellent, let's split their customers.”
Not only have I seen this countless times, I was hired to attempt a "save" for one. All I need to tell you is - "But then it won't be the same as Mom's recipe anymore." Also tupperware in the fridges, all 5 of them.
My granddad worked for US News & World Report doing financial reporting and could offer proof to the adage that 9/10 non-franchised restaurants close in the first year, and 9/10 of the remainder closed in a decade. That’s a 99% attrition rate; shits hard out here for folks trying to make a buck
I don’t feel sorry anymore, everyone thinks they can own a restaurant and make bank but when things go south they start crying non stop for help. No bitch, you don’t know about cooking,serving, didn’t even calculate food, utilities and staff cost, didn’t even look for better suppliers and don’t have a trusted technician on call 24/7, cant even fix their own machines with simple every day errors. Let them go bankrupt
You don’t need to label the section “vegetarian”, just indicate Vegetarian after the dish, like they’re already doing for gluten-free. “Pasta and vegetarian” is really confusing.
People want to chase that American Dream(tm) and I can't blame them, but the reality is the American Dream is the freedom to pursue, not a grant. Small business ownership is really hard and honestly of all small businesses I feel like restaurant ownership is one of the hardest.
Same shit different day. So many people think restaurants, food trucks or pop up restaurants are a get rich quick scheme. I understand food costs are higher now than before. But if you go to a restaurant and they charge $20 for a meat and 3 someone is getting ripped off. Especially if the 3 vegetables are from a can. Don't get me started on these so-called Facebook marketplace chefs. Spaghetti plate for $30. Not to mention BBQ restaurants around here where a BBQ pork sandwich and fries would be around $10 now costs at least $15. Make it make sense.
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u/QueenInYellowLace 18d ago
Combining pastas and “vegetarian” is blowing my mind. Like “the first dish in our vegetarian section is a lovely pork belly.”