How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt My Business

Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by tptacek on Sunday December 20, 2015 @02:35PM (#10768002)

I started Matasano with two partners, both from NYC, one of whom had taken a break from software security to go to culinary school.

What I heard from them is that stuff like this is also part of the restaurant culture of different cities. The rap on NYC and LA is that they have competitive, take-down cultures (NYC more so than LA).

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by Animats on Sunday December 20, 2015 @04:19PM (#10768335)

"The rap on NYC and LA is that they have competitive, take-down cultures (NYC more so than LA)."

That's why they're better in the arts. In NYC, they tell you if you suck. In LA, they don't call you back if you suck. In SF nobody says anything and you can suck forever. Go to little theater or art openings and this is quite obvious.

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by tptacek on Sunday December 20, 2015 @05:01PM (#10768449)

Neither Chicago nor San Francisco have takedown restaurant cultures, and both have relatively spectacular restaurant scenes.

Some of this gets to what you're looking for from a restaurant. If you're looking at food as an art form, and only want to spend time getting exposure to the very best of it, NYC may indeed be a better filter for you. If what you want is a Great Neighborhood Restaurant, which is perhaps Great in ways that make it distinctive regionally or even nationally, I think Chicago is a better bet than LA.

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by istorical on Sunday December 20, 2015 @06:41PM (#10768800)

I think you could almost describe this in the context of only positive-reinforcement cultures vs positive-reinforcement and negative-reinforcement cultures. Both approaches seem to work well in the long-term, but the city which also has negative-reinforcement might have 'failures' more often, which could be seen as a positive from the POV of looking at the health of the whole system, but on the other hand could be seen as needlessly cruel to individuals.

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by tptacek on Sunday December 20, 2015 @07:08PM (#10768871)

But it's also a question of whether you want the culture to optimize for peak artistic quality, or whether you want the median restaurant to be really good. There are some kinds of food for which the NYC median is higher than everyone else's, but for a lot of it, I wonder whether the Chicago median is better even when the NYC maximum is better.

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by TillE on Sunday December 20, 2015 @07:08PM (#10768872)

New York has a level of diversity and quality (for $25/meal or less) which I've never seen anywhere else. It also has a ton of tourist trap ripoffs, but those are easy to avoid in the internet age.

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by tptacek on Sunday December 20, 2015 @07:17PM (#10768893)

I may also be ~8 years out of date; maybe NYC's culture has improved.

Also, look, let's be clear: NOBODY is arguing that there's a more important restaurant scene in the US than NYC's.

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by radicality on Monday December 21, 2015 @09:37AM (#10771210)

Is there anywhere I can read some account/thoughts of your partner's break from software security to go to a culinary school? It sounds very interesting!

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by belleandsebasti on Monday December 21, 2015 @10:47AM (#10771591)

Whoa, you started matasano?

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by scott_karana on Monday December 21, 2015 @12:31PM (#10772198)

Yeah, he did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek

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Re:How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt... by belleandsebasti on Monday December 21, 2015 @06:18PM (#10774310)

Crazy, that's so relevant to this post.

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