back
151 comments
During a team review last year, I remember mentioning that I wasn't "excited" by work per se, but that I didn't expect nor desire excitement from work. For me, books, traveling, and music are exciting, and I get a sense of value and self-worth from the relationships I build with other people. But I work in a big tech firm. A coworker of mine actually questioned whether I was in the right field, saying that a lot of the successful people in our industry are excited by work. I can't remember his exact wording.

Maybe I'd be able to work harder if I wrapped my self-worth up in my work, but I saw what that kind of attitude did to my father. He would come home drained and tired, and wouldn't be available during the week to do something like watch a TV show together. On the other hand, my mother had a fulfilling job, but she didn't have the same kind of emotional stake in it. She turned down a promotion because while it would have advanced her career, it wouldn't have served her interests as an individual.

"I understand it’s very unhealthy, but I base my self-worth off the success of my job." That's the quote at the bottom of the article. There's a gulf between knowing something is unhealthy and building a healthy life for yourself, something I wish more people would respect.

People have a tendency to project themselves onto others and poorly conceive of the fact that it's ok for people to be different. Someone that "lives to work" and someone that "works to live" should be able to work together without thinking something is wrong with the other.
Honestly, I think it's healthy to not view work as part of yourself - but I think the people who do, know that as well.

I've got a job offer for a very nice job, doing software development next month. The pays great, the people, the are great. However, I'm desperately looking for a product design job - because it's 100% my dream. I am fully aware that it's not healthy to tie my self worth to my job, and I should focus on financial stability, and work / life ratio.

But i'd just feel so unfulfilled, and at the end of the day, I just can't help it. Being excited to get up in the morning and go to work, also means getting hurt when it goes wrong.

A chef is a kind of artisan. It also pays poorly for the amount of training that goes into it, the amount of work required daily, and all the risks.

It definitely takes a certain type of individual, and is a pointless career if you don't care about job satisfaction. But also keep in mind, job satisfaction means you provide a service where you make people happy, and can interact with your guests and see their happiness every day. You're not just a cog in a giant machine extracting money from advertisers or whatever.

> He would come home drained and tired, and wouldn't be available during the week to do something like watch a TV show together.

Have you ever sincerely asked him if he did it because he had to or because it was his genuinely wanted to?

Some people may find the latter to be absurd, but I'm usually the same way during the weekdays.

"A fire department permit worker told Tortosa that it would take him two to four weeks to even look at Robin’s paperwork — or, for $536 ($134 per hour of overtime with a four-hour minimum), Tortosa could pay for him to look at it right now."

Can someone please explain to me how this isn't extortion and bribery?

> Can someone please explain to me how this isn't extortion and bribery?

Easy: it's part of the "pay per use" idea that a lot of people seem to think that government should have. Just like express toll lanes or a $7 express bus along side a $3.25 local with three times as many stops, if you want something and don't care how long it takes, choose the low- or no-cost option. If you want it RIGHT DANG NOW, choose the high-cost option.

It's not bribery, it's just business...and people seem to think that government should operate like a business, so we get this fee-for-service setup.

FWIW, this isn't a one-off sketchy employee thing. It's actually an official city-sanctioned process. You can find the form for this online. http://sf-fire.org/file/2156 (PDF).

SF's not the only one that does this either. Delaware, for instance, offers one-hour expedited filing for some things if you're willing to pay $1000 ( https://corp.delaware.gov/expserv.shtml).

> Can someone please explain to me how this isn't extortion and bribery?

Charging a service fee directly based on the additional cost to the agency, that goes to the agency to pay the costs rather than benefiting a decision-maker personally isn't extortion or bribery.

Now, one can certainly debate whether such user fees are a good idea, but that's a different question.

The SFPD would be happy to look into it in two to four weeks... or for $536 ($134 per hour of overtime with a four-hour minimum), they can look at it right now... /s
...Or we could raise tax so that a fire department can maintain enough personnel to handle paperwork in a timely fashion, while still doing the primary job of keeping people from dying.

Either way, somebody's gotta pay the bill.

It depends on if the employee is truly too busy to handle this permit within the next 2-4 weeks or whether he just puts an arbitrary hold on all permits unless they pay the overtime fee.
I agree with the comments stating that paperwork is not the fire department's main task they may already be at capacity, therefore this is a way to expedite the process.

Furthermore almost any endeavor that requires permitting takes a lot of time and a lot of waiting. Paying a few hundred dollars to make it happen 2-4 weeks more quickly is a screaming deal, especially for a business.

Well, honestly, that doesn't seem all that unfair. If the department is busy - or is known to have emergencies that drain resources - a 2-4 week timeframe for looking at it seems reasonable.

The very way they move someone up to the front of the line is by pushing other things aside, and possibly having folks work overtime to finish those very things no time. It would be reasonable to charge for such a thing. It really isn't much different from paying an extra fee to get a package more quickly or paying an extra fee to skip lines at airports or theme parks.

It's more tragedy of the commons. (Though yeah, it's right up to the line.)

I guess that's another way of describing NIMBY. Focusing only on the short term pennies society misses the overall value in actually having proper capacity for growth and spike uses.

It's that same kind of decision that tries to use overtime from other shifts to cover the gap of a worker's vacation (instead of actually having enough coverage that vacation is built in). I suspect the same effect also contributes to shafting part time workers who "can't get hours" or who get massively screwed (because they're not friends with the boss doing the scheduling).

I'm a programmerby trade, but I own a restaurant in Vancouver. A friend owns 3. Several other friends own several other restaurants. It's a restaurant town.

Anyways, it costs from about $50,000 to $1,000,000 depending on the brand and the size of the room. Averaging around 100k for a non mom-n-pop sit-down place

Mine was about $40k, but it's tiny

Boneta (which was award-winning and loved) was cheap at around $70k

A big Boston Pizza, which is not a great place to eat, is gonna cost $200k+ or so, and a big Cactus Club could hit a mil

A higher price doesn't mean a better restaurant. In fact, I'd say a strict budget can make it more appealing due to creativity

I am used to think in cost per square meter, 700,000/116 sqm makes 6,000 US$ per square meter (if you prefer 700,000/1,250 makes 560 US$ per square foot).

That is a very, very high unit cost, even if SF is costly (but the US$ 8,000 month of rent seems to me like "appropriate" and all in all in line with "common" market values).

There is no reference to the number of seats for the new restaurant that I could find, but judging from:

> In the end, the 24 burnt orange leather chairs, 13 wood sushi bar stools, and nine tables — finished with the Japanese wood burning shou sugi ban method — set him back $19,760.

It should be 24+9=33 seats, which makes it an extremely small restaurant.

More than 20,000 dollars per seat is more than "high" as I see it it borders to "crazy".

May I ask about ROI and profit margin for the restaurant business?
> Boston Pizza

The real question, here, is what in the world is a Boston Pizza? Boston is known for many things -- baked beans, Sam Adams Lager, clam chowder -- but pizza is not one of them...

The best starter restaurant is those little lunch places with no seating: just a counter and a long line, you see them around downtown. Less risk on many levels. Every desk in those office towers is a person who needs to get lunch.

A friend in the business says that's usually the second restaurant business someone opens.

>Every desk in those office towers is a person who needs to get lunch.

Do you have any insight into why so many people buy lunch instead of bringing it? I've had a desk job for about 20 years now and I think I've bought lunch maybe 10 times when for some reason I wasn't able to make my lunch that day. It seems to me that buying lunch is more expensive and a person will probably eat more calories. I can't imagine it is a time issue, I probably spend less than 5 minutes putting a lunch together every day. That is far less than the time required to go somewhere for lunch. I assume it also isn't an issue of wanting to get away from the desk - most office places I've seen have lots of places a person can go and eat.

This guy should have hired someone else to design the dining space. There entire experience is disjointed and not appetizing. The walls make me think that there is a plumbing problem from the tenant above, all of the furniture is geometric while the dinnerware is handcrafted and asymmetric. He spent a lot of money custom making chairs that belong in a 60's airport lounge, that all of his friends also dislike. For the amount of money spent, he could have had a beautiful restaurant.
"Lizarraga hand-poured the rose gold resin that drips down the main room walls, a technique she has never used with this medium before."

Presumably she will never use that technique with the medium again.

A couple golden quotes about the same subject:

“I was very excited when the chairs came and then everyone I showed them to hated them. Like everyone. They either hated the color of leather, or they hated the design, or both,”

“A lot of people are going to hate the design. It’s not for everyone, and I understand that. But the feeling of the restaurant is so important to me and I wanted to be 100 percent involved in every aspect,”

It's not a flattering article... laid bare, it seems to depict a man who obsessed over decisions outside his competency, and paid out the nose for self-indulgent decoration.

I liked how it turned out, but the startup cost seems INSANE. He'll never reap the benefits of his hard work.
Hearing all about dealing with the government permitting process and government workers made me so mad. Government should help business, not get in its way.
Yet nobody mentions the far higher rent.
This sounds like an opportunity along the lines of @pud's DistroKid:

"By paying a company $5,000 to secure his beer-and-wine license, Tortosa was able to skip the work himself of that particularly involved process, which includes minutiae like mailing notices to every single resident within 500 feet of the restaurant. For Robin, the company mailed out 586 notices."

It's hard to scale, liquor license rules vary a ton from city to city and state to state, and many jurisdictions personal connections matter a great deal.(Not to mention out and out corruption). And some cities have a license cap, so you have to know of someone who's selling an existing license to even be able to bid on one.

Plus you have to deal with the fact that some of those residents might actually object to your business opening. Even if they don't, your company probably still needs somebody who can show up at a meeting, greet the people in power by name and convincingly reassure everyone you're not secretly trying to open a nightclub and pretending it's a sushi spot.

Wow, this is like a how to guide on how to not run a business.

Raise a bunch of cash, go into a location that has so much wrong with it, blow literally all the cash plus $1k just setting up furniture and permits...

Why wouldn't you find a restaurant that just went under and buy out the lease? Take over the kitchen in place (buying the equipment from the bankrupt owner who just wants out), do a revamp on the sitting area, and spend pennies on the dollar compared to this? Added advantage that all the zoning and permits are already complete?

Despite what you've probably heard, restaurants actually fail far less than other types of start up businesses. In a booming economy there will be very few built out restaurants available to buy, and they'll probably have some sort of fatal flaw. Plus, you get TI money if you take over an empty space, and as you can build out how you want, the rewards are potentially better too.
There's a menu here: https://sf.eater.com/2017/6/23/15864260/robin-sushi-menu-hay...

Omakase courses $79-$179. The profit margin of a successful restaurant is around 5%, so he's going to need >100,000 customers at $100/head just to pay off the $700k he's put in.

Is the margin that thin even in that price range? I would think the 5% number is for cheaper restaurants but not for higher prices ones.
Pretty much hit the nail on the head. So many restaurants are funded with little regard for profit (backers provide capital for vanity, amongst other non-profit related reasons) which makes financial success in the field rather difficult.
Majority of the people i know just go with individual sashimi they like on the menu, so the average diner is gonna pay quite a bit less than the Omakase courses.

Also it was nice to see vegetarian options in the menu. A couple of times I've been in situations were there was one vegetarian person in the group so we would have to skip over restaurants that don't offer even a single vegetarian dish.

>A fire department permit worker told Tortosa that it would take him two to four weeks to even look at Robin’s paperwork — or, for $536 ($134 per hour of overtime with a four-hour minimum), Tortosa could pay for him to look at it right now.

This makes me very angry. This is approaching the corruption say in India that Modi is trying to get rid of where every local official requires a bribe for them to do their job. I hope this kind of behavior is severely punished.

All of that $ and a shit website, http://robinsanfrancisco.com/, that has poor on-page and off-page SEO...
This should be titled "What it Cost to Open My Restaurant in San Francisco". Costs are ridiculously variable in SF, depending your location and what kind of restaurant you build.

A couple years ago I invested in a new restaurant in SF. I believe the total amount spent as of opening ended up around $400k, maybe a little more.

Sadly, it folded after about a year. Restaurants are difficult, especially in a hyper-competitive market like SF. I probably wouldn't invest in one again, even if it was being built by a team with previous restaurant successes. There are just too many variables, and SF is over-saturated with restaurants.

Was expecting more of the operational costs of running a restaurant, rent, utilities, food, labor etc. This article focuses on all the stuff he bought to get to day 1...interesting, but not that useful.
Does anyone know: What kind of numbers (revenue, expenses, profits) are typical for a medium-successful restaurant of this size in SF? I'm just curious. I know zero about the restaurant business, except that I've heard that the failure rate is high.
I think those gold stained resin walls look great, however it also depends on the background wall color. If they don't keep the wall clean enough, those stains would look cheap.

Honestly I'm excited by the crockery and interiors. The chairs don't look comfortable but I would give this restaurant a shot.

What I don't understand is the overzealous budget Mr Tortosa has in this project. In my opinion it would be wiser to spend a lot less on the restaurant and slowly upgrade it over the next couple of months or years. Also, by the looks of it they could have easily shaved off couple of 10 grand just by properly planning and anticipating the license wait period.

If you're looking for a chart of the breakdown, I made one with Canva here: http://i.imgur.com/nK56ERu.jpg
He doesnt even have a full bar, that would have been another 300k for the full bar alcohol license.. Restaurant looks amazing, just the right location. I think he is going to make a killing.
For another, IMO much more interesting take on the nitty gritty of opening a restaurant from scratch, Serious Eats had a series from Tyson Ho on opening his Brooklyn BBQ restaurant Arrogant Swine: http://www.seriouseats.com/building-a-bbq-restaurant
What it costs to open a fancy restaurant with top quality finishes including walls dripped with rose gold resin.
Delayed because of a permit application’s font size? Is there a regulation on the proper font specifications?

Why do people tolerate this kind of government? It seems like this ridiculously Byzantine process is filled with too much discretionary power, ripe for abuse.

On another note, why is paper being used at all?

I chatted to a guy from Chicago who'd opened a successful rib place in Saigon. Apparently it would cost over $1m, which he couldn't afford, to do in Chicago but cost $30k in Saigon. Not that operating in Vietnam is without it's difficulties.
Tl;dr Amount Spent to Date: $701,095

Final total: $701,095

A more interesting read is the continuing trials and tribulations of DNA Lounge, DNA Pizza, and the (now defunct) Codeword.

Seeing the city of SF totally fuck up over and over on things as simple as "when is the street outside going to be under construction" is absurd.