Eatery

taiwan_girl

@Jolly Interesting question.

I am familiar with a small town on the west side of Illinois, called Mount Carroll. Very picture-like town square, etc.

They have a big corner building for sale (probably still for sale) for not a high price. As a "thought exercise", I was wondering what could go into that space (restaurant? coffee shop? something else? apartments on 2nd floor?) that would make money in a small town with an aging population.

In fact, I found a picture of the building. LOL
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Jolly

@taiwan_girl said in Eatery:

@Jolly Interesting question.

I am familiar with a small town on the west side of Illinois, called Mount Carroll. Very picture-like town square, etc.

They have a big corner building for sale (probably still for sale) for not a high price. As a "thought exercise", I was wondering what could go into that space (restaurant? coffee shop? something else? apartments on 2nd floor?) that would make money in a small town with an aging population.

In fact, I found a picture of the building. LOL

Aging population? Wonder how much disposable income and do they eat out very much? And do they eat breakfast and lunch, or lunch and dinner? What kind of food would they pay for?

The upstairs...Room for a nice apartment? Some storage for the restaurant or maybe another apartment? And who would want to rent an apartment in a small town?

taiwan_girl

@Jolly Good questions! Rural farming community. I was thinking with remote work, somehow set up something to draw in younger people (but I have no idea of the internet capability there). Anyway, an interesting thought exercise.

They also used to have a college there called Shimer College, quite an interesting college. All the teaching is based on the "Great Books". I think that maybe @Aqua-Letifer would have liked it.

"Shimer College was founded in 1853 in Mount Carroll, an Illinois Prairie town....... They offer only one core program, and just one teaching method. This is a ‘great books’ college. The great books of the western tradition, not the professors, are the teachers: Da Vinci’s Notebooks and Aristotle’s Poetics and Homer’s Odyssey and de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity and Kafka and Derrida and Nietzsche and Freud and Marx and Machiavelli and Shakespeare and the Bible.

Textbooks about the great books are forbidden. That would be too easy. It is primary sources only here. Students can concentrate on humanities, or natural sciences, they can take electives in feminist theories, or Auden, or Zen masters, but it’s all great books and nothing else. There are no lectures. Each class takes the form of Socratic dialogue between the students, guided by a professor if necessary."

Aqua Letifer

@taiwan_girl said in Eatery:

@Jolly Good questions! Rural farming community. I was thinking with remote work, somehow set up something to draw in younger people (but I have no idea of the internet capability there). Anyway, an interesting thought exercise.

They also used to have a college there called Shimer College, quite an interesting college. All the teaching is based on the "Great Books". I think that maybe @Aqua-Letifer would have liked it.

"Shimer College was founded in 1853 in Mount Carroll, an Illinois Prairie town....... They offer only one core program, and just one teaching method. This is a ‘great books’ college. The great books of the western tradition, not the professors, are the teachers: Da Vinci’s Notebooks and Aristotle’s Poetics and Homer’s Odyssey and de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity and Kafka and Derrida and Nietzsche and Freud and Marx and Machiavelli and Shakespeare and the Bible.

Textbooks about the great books are forbidden. That would be too easy. It is primary sources only here. Students can concentrate on humanities, or natural sciences, they can take electives in feminist theories, or Auden, or Zen masters, but it’s all great books and nothing else. There are no lectures. Each class takes the form of Socratic dialogue between the students, guided by a professor if necessary."

St. John's in Annapolis has a very similar program. Sounds great to me.

Jolly

@Jolly said in Eatery:

If you decided to go into the restaurant business, what...

Who would be your targeted customer?

What would be your menu?

What would be your decor?

What would make you different?

I'm not entirely sure. Depends on the locale.
Would like to do a combination of traditional Southern food and what we know as prairie cajun.
Acadian.
Certain menu items that are only offered on specific days of the week. For example red beans and rice are offered only on Mondays.

A piano and an acoustic guitar in the dining area, with a standing offer for "sing for your supper". 60 second audition where the diners vote whether you can continue or get the hook. If you get thumbs up, you have to perform two more songs and the diners vote whether you get a free dinner. Limit one meal per month, alcohol not included.

A nickel cup of coffee with the purchase of any meal or appetizer. Or maybe a free cup of coffee with purchase.

A free small desert with any entree. The dessert is whatever the house has prepared that night...bread pudding with rum sauce, peach cobbler, brownie with chocolate sauce, cookie, etc. When I say small, I'm talking two bites.

Offer some meals family style.

Aqua Letifer

@Jolly said in Eatery:

@Jolly said in Eatery:

If you decided to go into the restaurant business, what...

Who would be your targeted customer?

What would be your menu?

What would be your decor?

What would make you different?

I'm not entirely sure. Depends on the locale.

Would like to do a combination of traditional Southern food and what we know as prairie cajun.

Acadian.

Certain menu items that are only offered on specific days of the week. For example red beans and rice are offered only on Mondays.

A piano and an acoustic guitar in the dining area, with a standing offer for "sing for your supper". 60 second audition where the diners vote whether you can continue or get the hook. If you get thumbs up, you have to perform two more songs and the diners vote whether you get a free dinner. Limit one meal per month, alcohol not included.

A nickel cup of coffee with the purchase of any meal or appetizer. Or maybe a free cup of coffee with purchase.

A free small desert with any entree. The dessert is whatever the house has prepared that night...bread pudding with rum sauce, peach cobbler, brownie with chocolate sauce, cookie, etc. When I say small, I'm talking two bites.

Offer some meals family style.

There's a small chain up my way with a weird business model. The food's straightup diner breakfast food. But...

When you walk in, there's a hostess. She tells you your number, which is also written on a chew toy. Then you're given a menu and you stand in the counter line.

Once you get to the front of the counter line, a cashier takes your order. You tell her everything you intend to get, she rings you up right there on the spot and has a printout with what you're getting and your number. That gets sent to the kitchen.

Then you go to sit down. You gotta find the chew toy that has your number on it, the one the hostess put down somewhere. That's your table. When your food's ready, someone from the kitchen staff comes out and swaps your chew toy for your food. The former goes back to the hostess.

That's it, and no waiters, really. If you order coffee, though, you do get that yourself. There are mugs they got from Goodwill and donations by the coffee jugs. DIY, and it's fun to see what weird shit is on the mugs. I've never gotten the same one.

I like it because the food's about half as pricey as it should be for what you're getting, and it's about the easiest process there is to follow.

I'm sure they like it because there's really no incentive to lounge around. So they crank on orders during peak times.

Jolly

Interesting way to do things.

Speaking of coffee mugs...Close to the college I attended, is a donut shop that's been in business since around 1970. When you walk in the door, there's a glass and stainless steel display counter, with whatever donuts they have ready. There's an opening to the left you can walk through, then another counter holding mock-ups of birthday cakes and their cake book. (No super fancy Food Network cakes, just standard sheet stuff).

Behind that counter on the wall is a wooden rack that holds a bunch of mismatched coffee mugs. All kinds of colors, some with business logos, some with funny or goofy stuff imprinted on them, some with just an initial, some with a picture if some significant place or event, others with a picture of a family, grandkids or maybe a dog. To the side of the cups is a commercial BUNN coffeemaker, the kind where you can have one pot staying warm on top while another is making.

In front of that counter is a smallish area with four round tables and some chairs. Starting at about six-thirty or seven, those chairs are mostly occupied by old men. They stop at the first counter, buy a donut or two, place their bag on a table and then go pour themselves some coffee in their mug they grab from the pegs on the wall. While they're grabbing their coffee, it's the usual greetings and salutations that go on between old men.

The place gets pretty full or at least it did before COVID. I think it's coming back now. Just a bunch of old geezers, swigging coffee while munching donuts, swapping lies and stories, along with arguing their solutions to all things sports and politics...and everything else. They leave one table nearest the door
empty, for the occasional bleary-eyed college student or other customer, although most of the college trade grab their donuts and go.

If the coffee starts to run low, they make their own. When they decide to leave, there's a small sink next to the pot where they rinse their mug out before hanging it back up. There seems to be some unwritten herd rule, because guys come and go, and there always seems to be a seat available...When a man dies, the rest of the guys break his mug and trash it.

Jolly

While we're talking business models...

Forest Hill is a small village in Louisiana, known for plant nurseries. There are more than 60 of them, ranging from mom & pop places, to some pretty big operations.

The village had a small cafe, with typical diner food and a daily blue-plate special at lunch. What was different, was that everything in the cafe was for sale, with the exception of the kitchen appliances and the cafe staff.

Like that picture on the wall? No problem. Want to buy your table and chairs? We'll help you load it. Down to the silverware or the plates...If you like it, make them an offer.

Sadly, COVID closed them, but it was a unique little cafe, with non-matching almost anything. Kinda like eating in the middle of a garage sale.

Mik

@Jolly said in Eatery:

Who would be your targeted customer?
What would be your menu?
What would be your decor?
What would make you different?

Middle income health conscious folks

High level healthy but delicious food, the best of multiple cuisines

Eclectic. Something like this.

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Healthy food in an upscale, fun, hip environment.

LuFins Dad

@Karla has always wanted to open a Skyline Franchise.

Customer- Primarily drunks in their way home at 2AM. And Midwesterner’s that have a weird nostalgia. And high school kids wanting to make jokes about having a 3-way or 4-way.

Cuisine- Thin and runny meat sauce that is called chili but bears no resemblance to actual chili. The meat sauce is not really good to eat by itself and must be poured over other food items. Then covered in cheddar cheese. I mean a lot of cheese. When it looks like too much, put on 2 more cups.

Decor - Red and white, I believe? Either way, make sure that everything has a thin coat of poly on it for easier wipe down. You will need to… A lot.

What makes it different? The internal struggle in the gut between the stool loosening and diarrhea inducing meat sauce vs the constipational properties of eating 2 pounds of shredded cheddar cheese. I can only assume it is these two forces working against each other that keeps the customer from having to visit the emergency room for severe dehydration or bowel obstruction…

Mik

Hates Skyline, loves Steelers. How did she ever marry a Philistine like you?

The New Coffee Room

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