A restaurant experiment

For the last couple of weeks, I've been watching a veritable living experiment in my neighborhood. Without naming names, about a month ago, a mediocre Chinese restaurant that had abruptly closed down reappeared as a new sushi/hibachi bar. Rugged Astorians, included ourselves, trooped there for the restaurant's grand opening and in the days immediately afterwards. We thought the place was awful. Our sushi was tasteless. The vegetable tempura was so greasy that it tasted as if they had dipped it back into the frying oil as a sort of dressing after it cooled, and they made two different mistakes in our service, which was remarkable because we only ordered two things.

Everyone else apparently agreed with out assessment. Poor reviews poured into the local Astoria chat rooms, dismissing the place for its wretched service, bad food, high prices, and puzzlingly dark interior. The result is a total massacre. The restaurant is empty. There's now a sign advertising Chinese food again outside. And it's still dark. We estimate the place has another month of life left.

The obvious lesson is that the New York restaurant market is highly efficient. That is to say, it rapidly aggregates knowledge about a restaurant, and brutally punishes underachievement. The more subtle correlary to this all is that I am now more convinced than ever that a large part of the superiority of French bread is an equally efficient market in baguettes in Paris. Just like for our nameless Astorian sushi hut, the typical pattern in Paris is for a boulangerie to open, pioneers to test, and then spread the word, after which the boulangerie either collapses entirely or has lines out the door. Fixing your reputation after that first wave, I suspect, is extremely difficult. Just like in every other industry, these ceaseless churning has, over years, created a tremendous, seemingly inexplicable, bread superiority in Paris over almost anyone. By contrast, very mediocre bakeries survive in New York routinely, and mostly because they are not expelled by the market as they would be in Paris. Hence, the gap in bread between the two cities.