What happened when I opened a restaurant in Portland
&gt; That chicken is a confit (with duck fat, aka $$), then served with a stock&#x2F;stew that takes days (of labor dollars) to prepare, plus cost of employees to serve, stuff to serve it on and rent to pay, not to mention the utilities (the water bills on that cursed grease trap were the opposite of &quot;the gift that keeps on giving&quot;). That damned chicken should be $40!<p>Maybe $60 even. But the restaurant has to look and feel like the restaurant which serves $60 chicken. Maybe there is a marketing problem there, people thought it was just plain chicken. Then yes, $29 is too expensive. If they were eating chicken confit, with carefully crafted stock which took days and a team of 3 chefs to make, and it came from some Sunny Mountain organic free-range farm in the next county then $29 sounds like bargain.<p>But as they say, everyone in Portland wants to open a restaurant. Probably anyone who could and wanted, already did. So there are plenty of options. At least I remember lots of options to choose from.<p>There is another element I noticed. If there are just a few good restaurants, and a plethora of other ones, people will just go to the ones they know. Not just because it is easy and a default choice. But also because they learned that trying new ones did not turn out as well, so they stop trying.<p>&gt; bringing the plumbing up to code. $20,000 later we had a huge pit, filled with the gigantic, state-of-the-art grease trap the city now requires—all of which now benefit not us, but the landlord and his next tenant.<p>That sounds like they got swindled. They paid for an improvement to the rental property, how come the landlord didn&#x27;t split that with them. It just seems unfair.