[brulo]

Hi all!

Lately I've been thinking a lot on this kind of places, mainly because I'm about to start Culinary Studies in my city (for context: Buenos Aires, Argentina, South America).

I'm taking an important turn in my career and I see myself making my own enterprise in the near future, thing is, putting an actual restaurant here it's pretty complicated considering the economic context, tax pressure, and a decrease in consumption since we are having quite some crisis down here.

Still, there are a lot of local people (and tourists) willing to pay a fine price for a fine meal experience.

Long story short, I would like to hear from the opinions of the pros on this kind of places,

do you know many of them?

how well do they do in your city/country?

how "shadowy" are they there (here someone even called them "the Uberization of restaurants")?

do you own one / worked at one / visited one?

I'm still trying to figure out the general consensus about this kind of places, here are in a kind of hipster trend.

Analyzing the business opportunity is another topic, but I will come to that anytime soon...

Thanks all for your input!

 

[foodpump]

I guess the best thing for you would be to work in one.

Give it a try, doesn't matter jf you're bussing tables or washing dishes, you'll be paid to experience life in a restaurant

 

[brulo]

I guess the best thing for you would be to work in one.

Give it a try, doesn't matter jf you're bussing tables or washing dishes, you'll be paid to experience life in a restaurant

That's actually a cool idea, thing is most here are too small (like a couple tables only small) so I need to check if anyone would need a helping hand, but that's actually a cool idea indeed!

 

[azenjoys]

I'm not sure I know exactly what you mean by "private restaurants" - but I worked in a restaurant where we did only one service (typically a 9 to 14 course tasting menu) a night for just 12 people all seated at a shared communal table. 'Tickets' were sold in advance online. From business perspective, this type of service seemed to work really, really well. We always had full occupancy and we had very little waste. The challenge was that with so small an audience and with reputation being so important in convincing people to spend the kind of money that justifies such a small place we had to be 100% on point at all times - even though the chef was changing the menu super frequently. Like, there was no margin for error whatsoever. The other challenge for our chef, I think, was finding the right type of employees - with such a small team everyone had to have a lot of versatility and be really comfortable interacting with guests, which somewhat limited who could/would work there.

 

[chefross]

I believe what the OP is talking about is what we in America would call "underground dining." This is basically a restaurant that pops up in someone's home. They usually offer one or two choices.
I don't know about the legality issues of such a thing but I see a lot of these popping up.

 

[brulo]

I believe what the OP is talking about is what we in America would call "underground dining." This is basically a restaurant that pops up in someone's home. They usually offer one or two choices.
I don't know about the legality issues of such a thing but I see a lot of these popping up.

Exactly this!

I would really like to have one try at this kind of business in the mid term, but want to make it as legal as possible (considering there's no specific legislation here for that exact type of business)...

In the meantime I would like general opinion on whatever you want to comment about this specific kind of places, from what one should expect of the service, experiences going to have a dinner at one, what would you like to see in one of such places, anything, I'm starting to "check the field" for this...