Nobody thinks too much business is what hurt Stanich's. Rather, it was too much attention. The pressure of a small-town short order cook all of a sudden having to live up to what Stanich's "could" and "should" be.

One day, he's making the same burgers his dad was 70 years ago. The next, he's getting franchise offers and vitriolic reviews and personal issues. It seems he started cleaning and renovations, and just couldn't bring himself to reopen... much like how many of us here fail to launch startups.

Oh man, the renovations I’m making without having any customers are damn awesome...

Ouch.

Portland native. Had my first Stanich's burger around 1980.

All I can say is the food reviewer romanticized the place.

The burgers were good, but messy. Like the atmosphere.

Once Perry's opened down the road (now also closed) we kind of stopped going to Stanich's.

Until earlier this year, I used to live in that neighborhood. I've been to Stanich's -- we could walk there from our house.

This whole episode is bizarre. The food really was not that good. Not by a long shot. Which makes what happened to them all the more sad.

Yea _reading_ the linked article goes into all of this.

Not really, the author is pretty convinced that he killed the restaurant, despite Stanich mentioning family problems.

Did you actually try to read it? It says so right there:

Apparently, after my story came out, crowds of people started coming in the restaurant, people in from out of town, or from the suburbs, basically just non-regulars. And as the lines started to build up, his employees -- who were mainly family members -- got stressed out, and the stress would cause them to not be as friendly as they should be, or to shout out crazy long wait times for burgers in an attempt to maybe convince people to leave, and as this started happening, things fell by the wayside. Dishes weren’t cleared quickly, and these new people weren’t having the proper Stanich’s experience, and Steve would spend his entire day going around apologizing and trying to fix things.

It seems you and the author have something in common: refusing to believe the man at the center when he says that it wasn't the author's fault. Which he says repeatedly. And he hints at the actual reason, which you and the author just refuse to believe, I guess.

And then, in a quieter voice, he started to explain why it wasn’t just two weeks. He asked me not to reveal the details of that story, but I can say that there were personal problems, the type of serious things that can happen with any family, and would’ve happened regardless of how crowded Stanich’s was, and that real life is always more complicated and messier than we want it to be.

It appears to have been a perfect storm of events. A family problem in a family business can be very stressful, been there, got the tee shirt. Then add on top of that an explosion in business you never really wanted and as a result of the overload, a decline in customer service. That then turned into vitriolic reviews and nasty/hateful answering machine messages. Imagine all of that happening in just a few months. What an awful out of control ride that must have been. No wonder Stanich pulled the plug.

And if people were paying attention, they would have noticed a lot of drug talk from Stanich. Why was Stanich so fixated on talking about drug problems? That usually happens when stuff hits close to home. All speculation on my part but I found it an odd topic for a burger restaurateur.

> It seems you and the author have something in common: refusing to believe the man at the center when he says that it wasn't the author's fault. Which he says repeatedly.

It’s weird you don’t think the author understands this, given the only reason you know any of that is because the author themselves told you. If he didn’t think it was important, he wouldn’t have included it.

Portlander here and experienced very similar circumstances to what is described in that post just before Stanich's closed.

I was there just over a year ago, and it was pretty bad then too. We waited probably 90 minutes for burgers at lunchtime the last time we went.

Do they really call the place where the orders are picked up "the pass"? :)

Yeah, it's short for "the pass thru". Older restaurants and diners used to cut a hole in the wall between the kitchen and dining area to pass food through. So yes it became known as "the pass". This is where your food sits and collects before it comes out to your table.

It's also where waitstaff pass tickets through to the kitchen. Lots of passing going on back and forth. Hence "the pass".

Yes.

https://firstwefeast.com/eat/kitchen-slang-101-talk-like-rea...