former restaurant owner in GR - ask me anything you want about what’s going on in the industry in this area

Lmao I love that. Despite serving no alcohol Wikiwiki had its share of incidents. I remember when someone passed out drunk in the bathroom during the pandemic and we weren’t even open for dine in.

/u/dunnbass, definitely not the dumbass in that relationship.

What an asshole, I can only imagine the shit you had to deal with. Hope you’re in a better place now.

Fat boy has new owners?!

Wait what?

I heard that they have new owners, but as far as I can tell nothing has changed, except one thing, they are a lot more vocal on social media, using lots of hashtags all of the sudden. If they just made decent food that place would be great. I live down the street and never go there.

I thought that block was all getting eaten up for development

He's called Danger for a reason

First things first: our tipping culture is a result of failed government policy. Full stop. Legislatures of ALL parties have allowed a system to perpetuate allowing one class of worker in this country to be compensated entirely differently legally than other classes of worker in our society. Despite widespread antipathy towards this system from their constituents, they’ve done nothing.

My thoughts on tipping are very complex. Tipping is a royalty over the cost of the bill. It has also become in many ways the only consistent stream of revenue in a restraurant, because there is no cost of goods associated with the tip. It’s just a straight royalty. As 2020 progressed and tipping became an expected part of carryout (which I support - “service” for carryout these days is actually infinitely more complex than serving tables in house because of the proliferation of carryout and third party digital sales channels and the nightmares they induce), it has reached a point where in many restaurants now, the tipped employees actually make more than the owners.

Owners can not participate in tip pools, so this is clearly an unsustainable situation. It also causes very weird accounting scenarios: for example, a week back I went to get some bike repairs done at a bike shop that also has a coffee shop. I didn’t even step foot in the coffee shop, just the repair part. When I went to pay for my bike, there was a tip screen. The repair guy told me to “hit zero on the tip” but I like his work and appreciated him fixing my bike so I hit 20% (about a $40 tip). Later, he explains to me that that ENTIRE tip actually goes to the barista in the coffee section. I know legally why that happens…. But customers have no idea. And it’s insane. I firmly believe automated tip screens should disclose WHAT employees actually receive the tips.

Service is actually the easiest part of a restaurant to automate, and it is happening amongst us right now. Restaurants driving people to apps is a major form of automation in itself. My restaurant moved to just online ordering because we needed to cut back on servers. Wikiwiki was also unique in that from day one, we pooled tips equally across the entire restaurant including the kitchen and paid everyone well above minimum wage. Tip pooling causes its own resentments too. That said I always tip 20% at least anywhere that asks because I won’t ask anybody showing up to work to bear the burden of lazy policy making by shitty politicians.

Unfortunately their acquisitions are great restaurants that diminish in quality. Latest victim Real Food.

because everything is for sale in this environment. Individual owners don’t have the cash reserves or desire to tread water making nothing for another couple years waiting for inflation to abate. It induces consolidation for a levered up bigger player

1st year: bonkers sales, wildly inefficient. you make money but it’s hard to get a read for what’s happening

2nd year: 10%

3rd/4th year: 20%, if you’ve been paying attention to your numbers… you really know how to schedule and order at this point, you know where to allocate your time, and you have some predictability of volumes

2021: “wtf is happening I’m selling more than ever but my vendors raise prices every week so I’m making like 7%? But now web hosting and merchant fees are going up too so it’s like 3%? But I can’t raise prices anymore because my customers are furious and the media/government keeps saying there’s no inflation so I must not know my numbers?”

2022: oh wait I absolutely did know my numbers and inflation is both something I’ve never seen in my lifetime and absolutely out of control and I gotta get outta this biz

thank you!!!!! Wikiwiki was like my child and it always makes me happy when I hear what it meant to people

I didn’t bleed money, but once I realized that I had no negotiating power against my vendors and truly could not listen to my customers complain about prices anymore, I decided to get out at the end of my lease. I didn’t feel I could screw my landlord despite the changes the pandemic had wrought. I did let all the employees go through attrition because once I had no employees I could keep the tips, as that was really the only revenue stream left (margins on food were gone, and really still are). Of course that was just in time to spend a couple months in 2022 listening to people complain about tipping as I made and fulfilled every single order… but I have great patience and empathy now so that was a learning experience too.

thank you!!!!!!!

I don’t know them

I worked for a shitty Thai restaurant in a small beach town that stole tips from me and “pooled” it with “employees”

Wife owned the biz. Husband was an employee. It all got “pooled” to the husband

Now I ask where the tips go because I didn’t even know that was possible. And yes I made a DoL complaint and never heard back from them.

Asian Palace 99, Seoul Market, Tacos El Granjero on bridge street, KAFFEINE for Korean I love what she’s doing there!!!

Servers are the only ones making consistent money, but even then volume is spotty. They’re still playing roulette on their shift hoping people actually show up.

You nailed the financial downsides of carryout. I’ll also throw in the operational downside: let’s say you’re a farm to table gastropub with a pizza oven. Maybe pre-pandemic 5% of your sales were carryout. Now post-pandemic, carryout is 30% if sales. Good problem right? Well…. All that carryout is coming in Friday night…. And most of it is off your pizza station. So now you’ve got a nightmare at that station every single night, your carryout and dine in customers are both waiting longer for their meals, and that pizza cook quits every other week because that’s now the hardest job in the restaurant and the space wasn’t designed to do takeout volume like that.

I would donate to that kickstarter. French dip and Canadian cheese soup was the day off jam in grade school

I will never understand why they decided to ditch such a recognizable local brand only to turn it into the most bland corporate looking restaurant. I legit can't even remember what it's called now off the top of my head.

Change the real estate market. Smaller parcels. Our market is based on giveaways for developers so they build places that are way too big, and then restaurant tenants have to be everything to everyone to put butts in the seat.

I just spent two weeks in Japan; their frenetic approach to zoning is essentially the polar opposite of our weird American oligarchic central planning, and it results in a lot of small, cool, niche retail and food experiences that can be profitable at small scale. I’d love a real laissez faire zoning model that incentivizes building and encourages structures of all types.

did they ever stop coming

Coming from growing up in Metro Detroit, there is a severe lack of Coney dog spots in GR. There are like 4 one of them is Leo's which I think is highly over rated.

Edit: also as someone else pointed out, a good Coney Island isn't just hot dogs, it's also greek fusion and all day breakfast

there’s gotta be demand for that kind of food. Weirdly, one thing people “say” is they want healthy, convenient food…. But in my experience, if you have a restaurant menu that’s 50/50 healthy/unhealthy; 9 out of 10 people will choose the unhealthy option. My theory is that people who have made a commitment to eating healthy food regularly in their life have learned how to cook at home and go out to “splurge” on something unhealthier they can’t make at home. And some people just don’t care about being healthy at all so things skew that way. It’s more a reflection of the American diet than the restaurant scene, though I used to see it as the other way around before I owned restaurants for so long and the data became conclusive to me.

I know exactly what server you were talking about. he really honored wikiwiki every day with his work and presence. thank you so much for sharing this publicly. It made me cry in a good way.

Me too. I loved the restaurant

that was me so thank you!! one thing I always said before I did any kind of marketing: if it didn’t make me laugh when I was making it, I wouldn’t do it.

this is legit how it goes - I call up my friends at a restaurant, and I’m like “guys should we do this” and then we all get really excited and just fucking go for it. Wikiwiki was super popular with industry workers so there’s a large diaspora of goodwill to do projects.

I don’t foresee me doing anything permanent restaurant wise. The margins are so broken you just become a debt mule keeping some commercial real estate holder at their ideal cap rate. It’s very corny but the popups make me feel like I’m still sharing a gift I have with the world, and it’s fun stretching the marketing muscles again with less day to day stakes. I’d love to put those talents into a more productive and scalable organization or product but I’ve yet to find anything that invigorates or rewards me like wikiwiki.

I realize you asked some fantastic questions I didn’t address. It was really, really challenging for me to step into someone else’s space and do this. I’d become a creature of deep regiment and muscle memory working in my own lab for years.

One thing I got really into after Wikiwiki was the practice of Hanna Somatics and breathwork. I began to really reenvision my motivations and agency in the world and reconnect with the purest motivations that would drive me to create.

Walking back into those kitchens and hanging with the younger kids was like walking back in time. I remembered the earlier years of wikiwiki, just shit happening everywhere and you’re trying to figure it out. So much fun. So inspiring to lose the ego and go back to the beginning and try and crush the line on New Game Plus mode. It was a blast and I give every cook and server at the restaurants I worked with all the credit for putting their A+++ game on for wikiwiki.

fuck them. I always hated entities that tried to insert themselves into a restaurants pitiful margin without adding real value.

weirdly the cost of food trucks has gone so high the last couple years that it would be more expensive for me to acquire/build out a food truck than I spent on my entire brick and mortar restaurant in 2017. Plus then you have all the uncertainty of where to park it. I actually steer people interested in food trucks these days towards brick and mortar. the brick and mortar building at least has marketing value 24 hours a day.

in GR we hype the shit out of everything because nothing cool ever came here when we were younger and it gave us a complex

Not OP but I will say that the small-scale food scene (the BBQ guys and small restaurants from all different cultures) are mad decent. I’ve loved exploring the Vietnamese, Mexican, and Balkan food here with the lack of pretension. It’s just good food that people eat from those places in our local joints.

The big names in town are mostly blasé. You’ve got the San Chez (although I really love San Chez) places, the Mark Sellers places, and the 4GR8 places. And then the national names.

Pub food is all Sysco and Gordon’s.

We really don’t have fine dining in town. Gotta go to Chicago for that. But the smaller joints do delicious work.

If you frequent this subreddit enough you’ll find the opposite is true.

margins on food had functionally disappeared by the start of 2022 and I couldn’t find enough skilled cooks to be open the amount of hours weekly we needed to be

I think as a side hustle they’re fine enough but there’s no way anybody could make a full time living doing this. The margins are worse because you’re not doing enough volume to drive down the costs of goods and gain operational scale. They’re so much fun though and it’s a blast to just be creative for the love of the game

They’re terrible. I think they may have killed the restaurant industry as we know it by creating this demand for ultra convenience. They were parasites when I was open, frequently adding wikiwiki through frenetic tactics even though we clearly wanted no part in them.

anytime I’m stuck in traffic I always wonder how many of the other cars are just driving somebody one single burrito or six inch sub.

Costs are really high. Portion control and pricing are your only levers. They prob feel the price is as high as they can run.

I would sometimes be approached by farmers. It was always welcomed, but rarely helpful because it always sounded like a project for me to organize. Here’s what would have been most helpful to me:

1.) if a farmer looked at my menu, saw the produce that I tended to use the most, and came up with a real plan to grow enough seasonal veg to replace a produce vendor for one season

2.) if a farmer approached me and asked if there were any special dishes or herbs I wanted to make but couldn’t find the produce for, and if they could grow it for me (I actually approached several farms to do this for me for several dishes on my pop-up tour. It was a lot of fun!!!)

But as a restaurateur, I did already do a ton of shopping from local farms or the farmers market when possible. It was necessary to have fantastic produce to operate at the level i wanted my food to taste. I also needed to have produce vendors because of the necessity of having ingredients like avocados stocked for my concept, so I’d always try to balance those delivery minimums too. Others I’m sure have a different calculus.

I absolutely loved working with the chefs at Terra. They were insane workhorses and also just a blast to be around. I was stunned how much they do from scratch (everything, I mean everything). The head chef Spencer just left and he really inspired the wikiwiki tour in many ways by throwing on a vintage wikiwiki tee during a Terra photo shoot. Chef Lee who took over is one of the most skilled people I’ve ever seen. Duncan’s their sous chef… Jeff the baker (try his donuts on weekends).. chef Clark putting in the systems work and everything at the bagel shop.

I love all the cooks at basalt too. Shout out to my guy Cody the absolute best egg guy I’ve ever seen. LOVE the cooks at Littlebird. Those guys are consistent monsters. I’d work with them anytime. My friend Billy is the chef at Louise Earl butcher and we worked together years ago and are going to be working together again on this tour (spoiler).

Also my pastry chef Magi is starting a company called S’morris that does marshmallows and custom desserts. She is both stunningly talented and so thoughtful of people’s individual tastes and desires and brings things together so creatively. I’ve had so much fun working with her on all these events and I think one huge reason they’re successful is she leaves everyone with the last bite. I’m leaving a lot of people out but that’s the quick answer

there are not pop up spaces. I do my events at established restaurants but that wouldn’t be an option for 99% of people. There are actually too many “incubator” type spaces in GR that charge exorbitant hourly rates and they’re all under capacity. It’s really not a sustainable model with the way they do pricing.

Grand Rapids desperately needs a food hall with a model where they take 10-20% of an operators SALES as a revenue instead of trying to basically charge them exorbitant rent as a sublessee. These kind of halls are super popular in seemingly every other city but GR. The downtown market should be this food hall model but of course it’s not and the results speak for themselves.

I think chefshack in East hills is kinda that vibe. Altho perhaps not entirely a pop up space.

isn't that what Broadleaf is doing this summer effectively? that place in the old Sovengard spot, or at least the back of it?

I’m going to flip your comment a little: I was surprised to learn how little the health department does once you actually get a license. They literally won’t shut a place down even if roaches were running across it during their inspection. As it was explained to me, the only potential way they’d shut down a restaurant during service is if they were in the kitchen watching an animal or insect actually walk across ready to eat food unwrapped on a cutting board about to be served. Kinda shocking.

you hit on some notes I always felt: people expect restaurants to not only be clean, but also cater to extremely niche diets at the risk of medical incident. It blows my mind. I eat 99% of my meals at home for nutritional, quality, and health reasons. I know the types of cooks I had to hire and I was a higher end place

I love the crispy battered fries, but “psoriasis fries” is hilarious.

Hand cut fries is a lot of labor. folks don’t have the workers anymore for it.

Guy Fieri obviously - he has had such success as a restauranteur!

/s

for that kind of experience I would recommend either Margaux in the JW Marriott or Littlebird downtown. I can vouch for both of those chefs. They were Wikiwiki regulars and thus had fantastic taste.

GR mexican food definitely not bad. my fave has always been El Granjero on bridge street cuz I worked at GRTV in high school and it was the first authentic Mexican I fell in love with. We have really strong Vietnamese restaurants too