347. Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant

Kenji Lopez-Alt became a rock star of the food world by bringing science into the kitchen in a way that everyday cooks can appreciate. Then he dared to start his own restaurant — and discovered problems that even science can’t solve.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some people just can't leave well enough alone.

• 2:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Consider, for instance, the case of the famous food writer, the one who used the scientific method to take apart everything we know about cooking and put it back together.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  If you use vodka in place of some of the water in your pie crust, you end up with a dough that is much flakier and much lighter.

• 3:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  He investigated whether the key ingredient in New York pizza really is the water.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  So I did a full double-blind experiment where I got water, starting with perfectly distilled water and then up to various levels of dissolved solids inside the water. What we basically ended up finding was that the water makes almost no difference compared to other variables in the dough.

• 3:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  He found that the secret to General Tso's chicken lay in geometry.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  The geometry of food is important because one of the big things is surface area to volume ratio.

• 3:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  And he explored the relationship between meat and salt. He proved why it's important to salt a hamburger at the last minute on the surface of the meat.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  We rented a baseball pitching machine that would throw hamburgers at the wall at 45 miles per hour, and you'll see that the salted hamburger kind of bounces off the wall like a rubber ball, whereas the burger that has salt only on the outside kind of splatters.

• 4:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  This was the man who finally brought science into the kitchen in a way that non-scientists could appreciate. It helped that his work was fun, not preachy, and delicious. We interviewed him a while back for an episode called Food Plus Science Equals Victory.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people think of science as sort of the opposite of tradition or the opposite of natural, and really, it's not.

• 4:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  He had just published his first cookbook, a massive thing, called The Food Lab, which went on to win a James Beard Award. His reputation and reach only grew.

• 4:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  But then, something else beckoned. Was it opportunity? Or a trap?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  It's that temptation you can't resist.

• 4:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, the food writer who flew too close to the flame.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  My name is James Kenji Lopez Alts. I am a food writer who also happens to run a restaurant right now.

• 4:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  And everything's been going just great, hasn't it?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  These problems are insurmountable, like, how the are we gonna fix this?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Kenji Lopez Alts grew up in New York in a family of scientists, and he went off to MIT to study biology. He got a little bored, maybe burnout, and during the summers, started working in restaurant kitchens in Boston. After college, he worked in an architecture firm for a bit.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  For a few months, yeah, like, half a year, maybe.

• 5:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then back to restaurant kitchens.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  My very first restaurant job was at a place called Fire and Ice. It's a Mongolian grill, so I was a night of the round grill. I stood in the middle of a giant cast iron grill and cooked stir-fried food for people and flipped asparagus tips into the air and stuff.

• 6:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Over the next several years, he worked in a series of higher-end restaurants in Boston.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  You know, after that, that was the end of my culinary career, or my cooking career.

• 6:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  He began building a career as a food writer at Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen. Then, on the food site Serious Eats, he started a column called The Food Lab. He wasn't expecting to turn into a food-writing rock star.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  I absolutely wasn't expecting it. You know, I was a freelance writer, living in a one-bedroom apartment with no windows in Brooklyn at the time.

• 6:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, after doing all that and having that platform and enjoying it, what made you think it was a good idea to not only get back into the restaurant business, but open your own restaurant?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, it's, you know, it's that temptation you can't resist. It's like, oh, what if I just went back into cooking for a little while? Would I be able to do this? So I had, I had a daughter. She's 17 months old now.

• 6:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Congratulations.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Thank you. And when she was born, my wife and I decided that she would continue to work and I would be the, the at home parent. So I've been a stay at home dad for the last 17 months. You know, about like six months into that, I was approached by some friends of friends who owned a bar in San Mateo, near where we live, and they were interested in opening up a beer hall. And they were looking for a chef partner. And so I thought, oh, you know, this might be something fun I could do in my spare time, which, you know, you don't have too much spare time with a, with a baby on your hands, but I thought this could be something fun and this is a good opportunity, relatively low risk. Mainly it was because my wife and I sort of longed for a place like this in San Mateo. Family friendly, casual, upscale place.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  And that was the concept that they were working on. So it seemed sort of perfect for me. And initially I thought my involvement would be relatively minimal. I would work on some menus. I would use, lend my name to the menu. You know, what, what was actually really surprising to me was that I, when I first signed on with them, I sent a, a short little tweet saying, hey, like this is happening. Like, so I'm opening a restaurant, something like that. Eater picked it up, a bunch of other publications picked it up. And then all of a sudden it became not Kenji Lopez Alt is partnering with these two guys who are opening a restaurant. It became Kenji Lopez Alt is opening a restaurant. And then I was like, oh, man, like, I guess I'm really going to get sucked into this.

• 8:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so the restaurant is called Wurst Hall, W U R S T. So first of all, for those who haven't been to San Mateo, California, just give us a, a quick sense of the vibe of the place and then we'll get into the restaurant and why the choices were made to have a German beer hall with sausages.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, San Mateo is a is a city that's basically dead center between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. My wife works at Google, and so she works down in Silicon Valley. We initially moved up into the city, and her commute was crazy, so we're like, all right, we'll move down to San Mateo. And, you know, if you if you look at sort of the real estate curve, very expensive in San, well, very expensive everywhere, but extremely expensive in San Francisco, extremely expensive in Silicon Valley, and San Mateo and a couple of the surrounding cities are like, there's a small dip, so we're like, all right, we can, that's where we can afford to live, and that's where, you know, my wife's commute will be all right. And so I think there's actually a lot of people in our situation there right now.

• 9:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why a German beer hall? Why was that the right concept? Or why was that the concept they wanted?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Well, it's two factors. One of them is the space itself. We're located in a really nice old historic building, lots of nice light, so it it seemed very conducive to this beer hall atmosphere. The other thing is that my partner, Adam Simpson, he is really into beer. You know, and finally, beer halls are kind of just popular right now. So it seemed like a concept that worked in the space, that worked with Adam's knowledge base, and it seemed to be something that was hot and kind of lacking in the San Mateo area.

• 10:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  So far, so good, right? So for everyone out there who's thinking, hey, maybe I should open a restaurant, we asked Kenji Lopez Alt, what's the first step?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  So the first step to opening a restaurant is don't. Opening a restaurant is a series of putting out fires every single day. Even even once you're open, it's still a series of putting out fires. Step one, don't.

• 10:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so can you walk us through the opening process? What kind of work goes into those preparatory weeks, months, I assume?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  So the first step is you have to have a reason for people to believe that you're going to succeed and to give you money to do it, because it's not cheap to open a restaurant. And then from there, it's, you know, working with the architects and designers and doing all the build out, which inevitably takes way more time than you expect. And for us, we had this extra problem because we're in this really old building, and the previous Tenants and the landlord, they didn't take the best care of the space. You know, but working back from my side, from the kitchen perspective, initially, a lot of it was conceptualizing like, how German do we want to be? How California do we want to be? Because we knew we sort of wanted to do both. Figuring out what the service style was going to be and how customers are going to order.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  And really thinking to ourselves, all right, like when people come in here, what are they coming in to do? Initially, you know, when Adam and my other partner Tyson Mao, when they were thinking beer hall, they thought, all right, this is going to be essentially a bar. Some people may become to have like a nice meal, but most people will be coming to drink and have some food on the side. And that's sort of what the initial menu was designed around. A selection of sausages, a couple of sandwiches, some appetizers to share.

• 11:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So now he got to work creating a menu.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I had developed the initial opening menu on my own in my home kitchen. Before we had even hired any sort of kitchen staff. And I had like a, I'm pretty methodical, so I had like a recipe booklet written out. Everything done in metric units, something that anybody could look at and replicate, you know? Part of the idea was like, because it's going to be relatively low priced and high volume, the kitchen has to be able to sort of run itself, even without like very, very minute oversight.

• 12:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about the sausage making itself? I mean, that's a big component. Can you just talk about how involved you were in the design and execution? And maybe experimentation and figuring out how to not only make the sausages that you want, but how they're going to be prepared?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, from the start, you know, we knew that we weren't going to be able to make the sausages in-house because we didn't have the facilities. So in order to make a large volume of sausage, you need to have a dedicated refrigerated room where you can grind and mix and stuff and everything. Because if sausage mixture gets too warm while you're forming it, it doesn't bind properly. And your sausages end up kind of crumbly and dry. So it was literally like physically impossible for us to make sausages in-house. So very early on, we decided, all right, we're going to have to find some partners to work with who can execute our ideas at a level of quality and volume that we're happy with.

• 12:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that an easy thing to find? Someone who can handle that kind of quality and especially volume?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  No. I mean, the sausage part was mainly me going to every single sausage maker I could find in the Bay Area. You know, we did want to keep it local. We've, you know, visited many, many butchers and sausage makers. And there are many, many bad sausages around.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  You know, sausage making is a non-trivial skill. You think, okay, it's just meat and fat, spiced, ground up, stuffed into a casing. Like, how hard could it be? But it's one of these things where like the minutia of the technique can make a huge difference in the quality of the final product. You know, it mainly comes down to the binding element, like making sure that you have the right level of salt and that it's the meat has been salted long enough that the proteins start to dissolve before you mix it, making sure that you mix it right and that you have the right ratio of fat to lean. And then also making sure that it stays chilled through the entire process. And if any one of those things is off, your sausage doesn't bind properly. And that's what you find is the problem with most sort of mediocre sausages. Like, they could be flavored very well, they could be, they could be crazy and interesting,

• 13:59Speaker 01

  but if they're not mixed properly, they kind of crumble instead of having that sort of nice juicy, snappy texture that I look for in a sausage. And so finding someone who can do that was hard.

• 14:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  There was also the consideration of creating a sausage restaurant that could be vegan friendly.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  So one of my goals from the beginning was like vegan items on the menu that are not vegan by omission, they're just vegan by default. And they're delicious, you know? So we have a number of things like that. But the one that I was really excited about is a vegan doner kebab. And for that, I worked with a company called Impossible Meats. They make a vegan ground meat blend, mostly out of wheat protein, but they add heme, which is a, it's a lot of what gives red meat, it's sort of irony, bloody flavor. But it can also be derived from plant sources. And so it's like by far the best sort of faux meat available. And so what we do is we spice it with Turkish spices, so cumin, urfa Bieber chilies, sumac. And then we serve it as a, well, initially what we were doing was we were forming it

• 15:03Speaker 01

  into a cylinder and doing it in front of one of those doner kebab spits that sort of spins around and you shave it off. But the fat in this stuff is coconut oil and coconut oil just melts at a slightly lower temperature than animal fat does. So the fat would end up kind of melting out of it and it would just eventually just crumble off the spit. So that didn't end up working. It would have been so cool if we could get that to work. Now we're just forming it straight into like sort of. Hamburger style patties. So all the flavors there.

• 15:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so you talked about the food and the building, et cetera. What about the people? How involved were you in hiring and training up kitchen and front of house?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  I was, I mean, very involved in back of the house and finding good people is by far the hardest thing. So when you're living in a place like New York or San Francisco, where the cost of living is so high, finding great people is very hard, even finding remotely reliable people. Even before we opened, when we were, when we were training staff, we must have lost probably 50%, 50% turnover over the course of a few weeks.

• 15:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Which is not abnormal, you know? And luckily, you know, it's like one day we're there and like two of our cooks don't show up. What do we do? You know, one of them was on a bender and the other one just was just a no show. Luckily, the restaurant down the street, all the cooks there showed up that morning and the manager said, we're closing, like you don't have a job anymore. So suddenly we had like 12 cooks just walk up to our front door saying, hey, can we have a job? So there's never really a shortage of resumes and applicants. It was finding reliable people that's hard. What I've discovered in my years as a cook, and you played out exactly as expected here, was that it's much better to hire people like who give a [BLEEP], even if they have no previous experience or skills than to hire someone who has a great resume, who doesn't really understand the concept.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  You know, our number one kitchen hire, I think, is this guy Eric Droby, who is a career changer. He was in his 40s. He worked at an office job, always loved cooking on the side, was a Food Lab follower. He stopped by my house once to give me some sausages he made and some sauerkraut he made because he was proud of them and they were great. I thought they were great. And then he said, hey, like, I think I've decided I want to be a cook. Would you give me a shot? I'm like, absolutely. Finding people who really care, that's the key because you can, you can always teach people skills, but you can't teach people to give a [BLEEP].

• 17:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what about front of the house?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Front of the house is also, it's actually probably even a little bit harder at the start because you have to really dangle this carrot in front of them because during training and during the first month that we were doing friends and family meals, people are working and they're getting paid, but they're not getting the same tips that they would. And so they have to realize, okay, like I'm putting in this work now, so in a month I'll be making much more money, but. It's hard to find people who are willing to think about that.

• 17:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So shortly before opening, you tweeted, in all caps, by the way, "Opening a restaurant is insane and I don't know why anyone in their right mind would choose to do it." So what's going on in the weeks and days just before opening?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  I can tell you what was on my head when that tweet went out. It was not actually related directly to the restaurant itself. It was more about its toll on my personal life and particularly my family life and my marriage. Because, yeah, a restaurant is a harsh mistress. During those three months I was in there, I would wake up, take my daughter to daycare, go to the restaurant from 9 a.m. till 4, go pick up my daughter from daycare, bring her home, put her to bed, and then go back to the restaurant from 8 p.m. till 1 a.m. It had been like two and a half months where I had been basically never at home. You know, I saw my daughter for a few hours a day, but I basically never saw my wife. We lost the chance to sit down and talk together. The only time I ever saw her was when we were with our daughter, so we never really had any alone time.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  It's very difficult when you're raising a child, like to not be able to talk to your partner, not even have the time to talk about things related to raising the child. And the worst part of it was that no matter how well you plan and you think to yourself, "All right, this is the amount of work I'm going to have to put into this restaurant, and I'm just going to say no after that." It's really hard to say no when there's like 40 people whose jobs rely on you making this a success.

• 19:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Finally, Worst Hall was ready for its soft opening. Investors, friends, and family.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  About 100 people. And everything was great. We had completely gutted the old bathrooms, re-tiled them in this beautiful blue tile, really nice wallpaper with these sort of pen and ink drawn animals and stuff. It was a really nice bathroom. And the first night we had 100 people in, the toilets backed up, stopped working, and we had to shut down the bathrooms. And as it turns out, the waste line leaving one of the toilets had never been repaired or replaced in probably decades and decades and had a huge sag in it. And so we had to close for two weeks so that they could rip out all the tile we had just put in, dig into the foundation, replace that. All of a sudden, we thought we were going to be ready to open the next week. And now it's like, all right, another two weeks and another 30 grand

• 19:57Speaker 01

  to fix the bathroom that we had never even considered might be a problem.

• 20:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, the busted bathroom wasn't the only problem.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  It was a disaster, major, major disaster. Some people were waiting over an hour for their food. Some people never got their food.

• 20:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how does a new restaurant deal with bad reviews when literally everyone's a critic?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Basic user 12345 says, "This restaurant was terrible. The potatoes sucked." Well, I don't know what you define as good potatoes, so how is that helpful to me?

• 20:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next, right after this. If you want to hear more Freakonomics Radio, you can find every episode going all the way back to 2010 on the Stitcher app and at Freakonomics.com. And you can always listen to the most recent three months' worth of episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:52Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 21:37Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 22:31Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 23:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. Kenji Lopez Alt, rock star of the food writing world, decided after years on the sidelines to get back into the restaurant business with a place called Worst Hall in San Mateo, which started out as a simple concept, a German beer hall serving nouveau-ish sausages.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  I was always one of these, I'd rather have influence and bring joy to people than have a lot of money type of career people, you know? And if the money comes along with it, then that's great as well, but I'd rather just be doing something I love.

• 23:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so walk us through opening night, and I'm sure everything went exactly as it was planned and everybody was thrilled and it was perfect, yes?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had a sizable number of people in there and that we were cooking food. People were ordering food, tickets were coming in, we were firing it. It was, I mean, it was a disaster, like major, major disaster. Some people were waiting over an hour for their food, some people never got their food. It's those kinds of, it was a kind of night where we were like, these problems are insurmountable, like how the are we gonna fix this? But, you know, we decided like, all right, we'll focus on like a couple of the big problems first. When I tell them to you, they're gonna seem like stupid, small things. It's like, well, why couldn't you just do that? You know, it's like, so one of them was that we have sausages and you get your choice of topping. So one of the problems was communicating to the cooks on the line. So in case you're not aware of how a restaurant kitchen works, there's a, there's a line,

• 24:32Speaker 01

  which is, you know, where all the stoves are, where the counters with the little cutting boards are, it's where the cooks, the guys in the Girls are actually making the food. And then there's a station called Expo, the expediter. And the expediter's job is to, first of all, act as the liaison between the front of the house and the back of the house. But more importantly, their expediter's job is to coordinate everybody in the back of the house so that dishes come out at the same time, so that everyone in the back of the house sort of knows what they're doing. So essentially, they're sort of the general managing the army back there. On opening night, we had all the toppings back on the line.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  And the expediter was, I was expediting, and I was just calling out, saying like, all right, like, one hot Italian with speck and cherry pepper relish, one bratwurst with sauerkraut.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  And it's a lot of information to take in when you have a full restaurant and there's 100 people there, and you're cooking, say, like, 25, 30 sausages at a time, and each one has their own designated topping. It's a lot of information for the person on the line actually cooking it and plating it to take in.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  And so every single sausage had this huge delay where, you know, maybe they put the wrong topping on it and we'd have to refire it.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  They would yell out, and everything is really noisy, and we can't hear each other. And, you know, and once you have these tiny little problems, that can lead to huge, huge backups because the customers, they don't care what problems you have back there. They want, once they're seated, they want to start ordering food. And they don't care that you already have a full board of tickets and that the grill is completely full.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  They don't care that you screwed up one order and you have to refire it. Those tickets are just going to keep coming and coming and coming. So you have this ticket printer machine that's spitting out these tickets constantly, and you're constantly struggling to try and catch up with it. And that puts more and more stress on you, so you make, you make more mistakes, the people on the line make more mistakes, and it can be these tiny little things that add to the likelihood of making a mistake that can throw a wrench in the entire operation. And that's essentially what happened that first night.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  So the second night, what we did was we took those toppings, we took them off the line and put them next to the expediter's station, so next to my station, so that all they had to remember was which sausages they were cooking. Then they would pass the sausages to me right before I handed it to a server. I would put the topping on. I had the ticket right in front of me. It was easy for me to read and that, I mean, it smoothed things over like unbelievably so. It's like, it's like a couple of seconds of extra work on the, on the cooks part. You know, it translated from a sausage taking over an hour to get to a customer because there was like this huge backlog of tickets to customers getting their sausages in about eight minutes.

• 27:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  There was another major problem they discovered only on opening night.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And it's one that we didn't resolve until relatively recently.

• 27:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  It had to do with the pretzels.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  So I'm also a partner at a bakery called Bach House and they make all of our pretzels and all of our bread. Really wonderful pretzels, but we serve them hot. So we, we, we were trying to figure out how do we get these pretzels that were baked that morning and delivered to us? How do we serve them hot and fresh? And, you know, the, the obvious thing is, all right, well, when someone orders a pretzel, put it in the oven, let it get hot and then we serve it.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  This was a problem in a couple of different ways. One of them was that Bach House, they were salting their pretzels before they came to us. What happens with pretzel salt is that it draws out moisture from the pretzels. So after eight hours or so, some of the moisture from the pretzels beads up on the surface of the pretzels and then it leaves this kind of splotchy, wet marks, which is not good and the salt is all gone. So we're like, okay, so we have to salt our pretzel sort of. That's adding another layer of stuff we have to do.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  And the only oven that we have back on the line is next to the fryer station and the fry guy is extremely busy with the potatoes and we also do a chicken schnitzel sandwich. And so adding pretzels on top of that to him became very difficult. So for the early nights, we were firing pretzels to order in the oven. And that was another one of those things that like seemed like it's a thing that takes two seconds, but it just piled on to the likelihood that we were going to screw something up.

• 28:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what was the pretzel salting solution?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Well, we found a much more efficient way of salting them. So one of the cooks had this idea to take a squeeze bottle, cut off the top until it was big enough that pretzel salt could flow through it. And now what we do is we just spray the pretzels and draw a line, you know, trace the outline with the squeeze bottle and that clears up all the space.

• 28:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what you just described, plainly, these are things that most people who eat in restaurants would never, ever, ever think about.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And they shouldn't have to think about.

• 29:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  But you have to think about it. But as you're describing it, it strikes me that you, being who you are, and the way that you like to work, and the way that you do take an empirical and scientific approach to food and cooking and so on, that you were driven to solve these problems and get it right. Is that often the difference between a restaurant that works and one that doesn't, which is that you have to be driven to constantly adjust, solve problems like that that are going to come up? Do most restaurants really try as hard as you just described?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Most restaurants really try as hard. Any good chef cares deeply about the quality, and any good restaurant owner cares deeply about the quality of what they're putting out. So I don't think I'm unique in that regard at all. I think maybe we tend to, me and my partners Tyson and Adam, we have a lot of sit-down meetings where we analyze problems and try and solve them. So maybe, maybe we do that a little bit more than other restaurants. But you know, that's my skill. I've worked for chefs that seem to have an innate skill to just be able to figure things out on the fly, you know, or be able to work harder and faster to be able to solve those problems. You know, people attack those problems in different ways, but any good restaurant owner is going to recognize those problems and try and solve it in their own way.

• 30:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm curious how much you pay attention to, I guess, reviews of any sort. I mean, if you'd opened a restaurant 10, certainly 20 years ago, there's so much less feedback than, and now, some people feel swamped by it, some people feel a lot of it is disingenuous. I know you've said in the past that Yelp, um, let's see, in fact, this is from a tweet of yours, Yelp is and has always been the worst place to look for decent reviews. Shady business practices and reviews by people who I know nothing about and have no reason to trust their opinion, even on the off chance they actually dined at the restaurant you're rating. So talk about that for a minute, your experience with Yelp and/or other online reviews.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  So it's difficult to gain value from them for me.

• 30:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  You mean as a consumer or a producer?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  As a consumer. I mean, to some degree, you know, as a producer, there is, there is a little bit of value to it. But it's Especially if you start looking at trends and see, all right, the people are complaining. What are they complaining about? You know, at the beginning, when we opened, it was it was service. And that was, you know, some very legitimate feedback on that.

• 31:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  You didn't need online reviews to know that was a problem, I gather, right?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  We did not need online. There's very little that that I've read, I've seen in Yelp that we didn't already realize was a problem. You know, as a consumer of Yelp, I find Yelp useful as a map of what restaurants are around. But it's it's hard to trust opinions. A very good professional review, like you don't necessarily have to agree with the reviewer's point of view on what is good and what's not. But if you have an idea of what they think is good, then they then they tell you whether this restaurant met those expectations. And then you can sort of gauge, all right, well, do I agree with whether that's good or not? And that's what a good restaurant review will do. Whereas on on Yelp, it's like someone, basic user one, two, three, four, five, says, this restaurant was terrible, the potatoes sucked. It's like, well, I don't know what you define as good potatoes. So how is that helpful to me, you know?

• 32:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  The problem is that everybody eats, right? So everybody considers himself, I guess, a legitimate critic, which.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I mean, you can't totally discount that fact, can you?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  No, no, you can't. You know, but but at the end of the day, it's like, you know, I'm I'm involved in this project because I want to be, I want I want to have my name on it. I want I want to be proud of what we're putting out. And so at some point, you just have to sort of stick to your guns and say, this is this is what I believe is good, and I'm not going to change that just because some people say they they disagree that it's good. And if your idea of what is good is so far off from what most people think is good, then maybe you're in trouble and you're you're going to go out of business. But I'm of the mind that I'd rather lose a little business and stick to what I believe is true than to just pander to everybody to try and make the most money or, you know, which is hard to explain to partners and investors. But at the end of the day, you know, like as a food writer, I think I do have a pretty good pulse of what people think is good.

• 32:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. So overall, on Yelp, Worst Hall is doing pretty well, averaging about three and a half out of five stars. So let me read you one Yelp review and hear your response.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  OK. I haven't, I honestly haven't looked at Yelp reviews since like the second month after we opened, so we'll see.

• 33:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is from just over a month ago. This is from Andrew R. He writes, "I was really disappointed. I expected more. Not that I had high expectations. They were modest, honestly, but it fell below that bar as well. For one, the service was not that great. For two, the food just isn't that good. It's okay, like, you would eat it if you were hungry, but another sausage would probably satisfy you more. And I like a split top bun because you can grill both sides like they do here, but when it's split only halfway down, there's a lot of bread with no meat at the bottom, and that's terrible. Cut that bun all the way down. It'll be better. Trust me." So, that's Andrew R. What does Kenji L. say?

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Well, I'll start from the end of it and work back. Believe it or not, we tested how far to cut the bun extensively before opening. And, and, and trust me when I say it's not better to cut it too far because the buns end up falling apart. They, it doesn't stand right. I mean, that, that sounds all fair, you know, like those seem like legitimate concerns. If I, if I was at the restaurant, I would have, I would definitely have loved to talk to him and gotten a little more details about exactly what they were disappointed with. You know, what, what is it about the sausage that you didn't like? And to his point about, you know, sausages being not great, you know, yeah, I like, I fully admit sometimes, like any restaurant or any business, we have consistency issues now and then, and we work our best to, to make sure that those don't happen. And, and every day gets better.

• 34:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, here's a professional review. This is Peter Lawrence Kane in SF Weekly. He writes, "The quality of the food is high and it is consistent. The thing is, considering Lopez Alt's eminently well-deserved reputation for being a demystifier of culinary techniques, Wurstall feels a little short of the gosh wow factor longtime fans might clamor for. Maybe that's not entirely fair. After all, it's exactly what it claims to be." What's your take on that, Kenji?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  So I fully agree with that. This is again, one of those things where it's like, what happened to the restaurant between the initial concept and what customers expect? And initial concept was like, right, we're going to serve some damn good sausages. We're going to make our own sauerkraut. It's going to be good sauerkraut, but it's still sausages and sauerkraut, you know? And there's only so far that can go, you know, as far as like, gosh darn wow factor. This is one of those things where the concept of the restaurant on paper turned out very different from what the restaurant is now. Once my name got attached to it and there started being this sort of media attention to it, it turns out people are coming there for dinner. They're not coming there to drink. We started as a beer hall, but we're not really a beer hall anymore. We're a restaurant. You know, that's been one of the challenges since opening is like coming to terms with

• 35:52Speaker 01

  that and realizing, you know what, like some of the stuff we initially thought isn't going to work because customers are coming in with different expectations. Any restaurant takes a while to find its legs. I think for us, maybe it's taken a little bit longer just because it was such a big shift from what we had initially planned compared to what customers perceive.

• 36:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  I see that maybe yesterday or within the last little while, you tweeted a new menu item that's starting soon. Maybe it's already started by now.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  It started today.

• 36:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, congratulations.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  So I was at the restaurant all morning, you know, training the staff and making sure that the cooks knew how it worked.

• 36:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  So this is tomato mayo toast with grilled corn vinaigrette and a corn soup with paprika oil and shishito peppers. So that's not what I think of as beer hall food. Was it the clientele who drove it primarily? In other words, were people confused when they came originally because they know your name and they think it was going to be more of a sit down knife and fork situation?

• 36:44Speaker 01

  You know, I think that's part of it. I definitely saw comments saying like, I expected the menu to be a little more Kenji than what it is, you know, because it's like sausages, like, you know, I don't write that much about sausages. I don't eat that many sausages. I like them and we cook them well, but it doesn't exactly like scream Kenji or Food Lab or whatever. So yeah, so part of, you know, part of this revamping process has been like, all right, how do we make this menu more me?

• 37:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  So from what I've read, you own 12% of the restaurant and 20% of any new venture with these partners?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  It's something like that, yeah. That's ballpark correct.

• 37:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Would you have had the same share of ownership had you just acted as a sort of consulting founding chef? As opposed to roll up your sleeves, fully involved?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  No. My partners are actually very understanding of the entire situation and the fact that I'm now got more involved than I was planning on. And so actually, initially, it was going to be basically just a fee plus a smaller percentage of ownership.

• 37:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  The big question I have then really is so far, do you feel overall that it's worth it? And I guess another way of putting that is if I came to you tomorrow, Kenji, with an idea that you liked, an idea for a restaurant, maybe a site for a restaurant and a potentially worthwhile partnership, what do you do? Do you succumb or do you refrain this time?

• 38:13Speaker 01

  I would say the restaurant on its own, in a bubble, detached from every other part of my life, absolutely worth it. I don't mind putting in hours and hours and hours of work, even for little to no play. You know, like I haven't made any money off this restaurant yet and I don't plan on making any money for a while, until we pay off all our investors. But we don't live in a vacuum. So if someone came to me right now and asked me if I wanted to do this restaurant again, I would probably say no, only because it cost me three months of being with my daughter. And that was a price that I wasn't expecting to have to pay at the beginning and one that made me deeply sad as it was happening and also in retrospect. So I don't regret anything I did with the restaurant. I do regret how it affected my personal life and my family. But we learned those lessons.

• 38:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, final question. Let's say that maybe this is when your daughter is in school, maybe this is when your daughter's in college even. But let's say I come to you and... I want you to work with me to open a new restaurant. What is the dream concept, whether it's cuisine, or style, or location? Like, what is the restaurant that you absolutely would sacrifice again, almost your entire life, to do?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  It would be something much smaller than Worst Hall. So, we're opening a couple more Worst Halls in the coming years, but we've talked about other restaurant concepts as well. And I think if we were to work on something together again, it would be something much smaller. The idea I've been throwing out at them is a Korean fried chicken sandwich place, which is a recipe that I've done at a number of pop-ups. I think it's extremely delicious, but it's essentially chicken brined in kimchi juice, and then done like a Nashville hot chicken style, but instead of the Nashville hot chicken oil that goes on there, we make like a sauce with Korean chili flakes and a bunch of different Korean flavors, and it's super delicious. And the kind of thing that I think would do well is a fast casual thing. You know, that would basically be it for me. Like, I want to feed a lot of people and make them happy. You know, I don't want to open like an ego restaurant.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  I don't want people to come to worship at the altar of Kenji Lopez Alt, come for this experience. I want a place that people say, hey, that's a [bleep] good sandwich. I'm gonna have that once a week.

• 40:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was Kenji Lopez Alt. His new restaurant, Worst Hall, is in San Mateo, California. His book, it's called The Food Lab. He's currently working on a follow-up, so keep your eyes out for that. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, in economist circles, Mariana Mazzicato is what passes for a radical. She knows how most economists think of the government.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  My god, the government, what a basket case. Group of bureaucrats, they don't know what they're doing.

• 40:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  But she sees it differently.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  You know, what would Uber be without GPS publicly financed? What would Google be without the internet publicly financed?

• 41:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  In the modern economy, are governments the ones who are getting a raw deal? That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 41:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rosalsky, Greg Rippon, Alvin Melathe, Zach Lipinski, and Andy Meisenheimer. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can find Freakonomics Radio wherever you get your podcasts. Our entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also post transcripts and show notes. If you subscribe to Stitcher Premium, you will get every episode of Freakonomics Radio ad-free, plus lots of extra bonus episodes. Just go to StitcherPremium.com/Freakonomics. We can also be found on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, or via email at

• 41:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  [email protected]. Thank you so much for listening.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Stitcher.

• 42:16Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 42:47Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 43:25Speaker 04

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• 43:54Speaker 05

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