Clearly the rents are too low even in the West Village. Bar Sardine and Fedora still have audacity to insist that one cannot order a glass of wine at the bar without checking in with a pretentious hipster with attitude at the door when the customer is already inside at the bar just wanting to get a twenty dollar glass of wine. It is as if someone forgot to tell the "management" who is a profit and who is the overhead.

The issue with most of restaurants is that they do not operate like businesses: people who own them think there's something special about service that they offer.

Restaurants fail because their product sucks or the restaurants overcharge for the type of product that they have. That's why a $3.50 for a quart of noodle soup Chinese place manages to stay open in the high-rent area of Manhattan while a place with a $22 burger that comes with a sprinkle of attitude from an "artist" who just happened to wait tables flops.

I think the rise in delivery-only places and food trucks makes a lot of sense in that context.