July 2015
This morning (Click to enlarge)
The vast majority of start-ups fail to celebrate their 5th anniversary, and if you calculate the average pay an owner takes over that short lifetime it probably works out to far below minimum wage for all the hours invested.
Yes downtown rents are a tad expensive. But like most things in life, you get what you pay for.
With the right product, a strong business plan and a little luck of the Irish a small business can do more than just survive in our downtown. They can downright thrive.
18 comments:
These people have never been serious. No well run business rents a space for 4 years before opening. They're exhausted? They've only been open for two months. It's a joke.
I predicted when I saw the Closed Tuesdays sign, it would soon read just closed.
If I were give them some advice, it would be to open for breakfast at 6:00 like Nancy Janes and Classe Cafe once did. Hard work, but probably will pay off in the long term. Downtown needs a good simple breakfast place.
First, if you're going to call yourself a cafe, be a cafe and not a hamburger joint. (Ditto the bankrupt Seven Sister Market Bistro--a barn-sized restaurant which called itself a bistro.) Neither place knew what it was. There was some kind of fatal identity crisis and naiveté in both these restaurants where you just knew they wouldn't fly.
Did they really expect college students to pay their absurdly expensive prices for hamburgers that are nothing if not ordinary.
I think you can tell even more by the way the note was written. The owner can't take 5 minutes when writing a note to the public about their business in a hand writing that is respectable. A 4th grade teacher would of made the student do this note over. Sloppy. Perhaps tired. Perhaps lazy. However, I am not sure this Cafe is gonna get a "do-over".
I win the bet. I said they'd last no later than October some time ago on this blog based simply on how lackadaisical they were and how long it took for them to actually open the place. Amazing how many people get into the restaurant business who know nothing about how to run a business and think if you make food, people will somehow come eat it.
This review from YELP says it best:
Everyone loves your sign, but Metacomet Cafe, you need to get your !@#$% together. I suspect you will be out of business in a year.
The catchy signage inside is already a problem--how many sizes of font are we looking at and why? Who made these choices and why? It seems to be trying to be hip, but it's not practical or user-friendly.
Though they'd been open for over a month when I first visited, they had no salt available on the tables and after much scrambling, brought the giant shaker from the kitchen.
Open for 2 months and they informed us they only had one bun left. Ran out of buns. In a hamburger joint. Yes, buns.
We've seen workers leave the restaurant (through the front door, why?) and come back with cartons of seltzer cans. Yes, they seem unable to keep their kitchen stocked. Very sad yet comical.
This place is run chaotically and inconsistently. The eager and friendly college students behind the counter are often perplexed and don't seem to know what is going on, likely because the owner has no idea how to run a restaurant.
Decor is sketchy. Why are the walls so bare, esp in a small arts town? Why is there only one booth and the rest of the place has table and chairs? I have no idea and I'm sure the owner doesn't either.
What is with the ketchup? Why must I try to negotiate ketchup out of a giant, metal tub from under a plastic hood? And there's barely any ketchup in the tub? It's a mess. Please tell them to put the following on each table:
salt and pepper
ketchup
napkins
Metacomet has a very strange menu, but rather than being charmingly quirky, I find it annoying. It is FOOD, not edible art. Someone who devised the menu is confused methinks. Confused that people will flock to an idiosyncratic restaurant simply because it's idiosyncratic, but will someone tell the person in charge that the public is hungrier and smarter than that?
The burgers are good, but nothing special and you can't order them at the temp you want. At least at Local Burger in Noho, you get 2 choices. The burgers here are probably too thin to cook any less than medium to medium well.
The fries are like those shoestring potatoes my mom used to buy me in a can. So why don't I just go to the Stop and Shop and see if they still sell them, in a can. In a can. They are like fries from a can and very hard to dip into ketchup.
Much of what I've tried has been strangely flavorless.
Metacomet Cafe, you have the best sign in town, but we waited 2 years for this? Ugh.
Those weren't burgers- they were sliders!
You can a burger like these at McD's for a buck.
363,321
God what a beautiful thing.
- Squeaky Squeaks
p.s. Sorry, off topic.
Was never a real business. A rich kid's hobby.
Just what the world needed: another burger joint
They never had a chance. Too many false starts opening and had an odd name. For the first few months they were open they didn't post their menu on the window. A cafe is not a high end burger joint. A cafe is like Haymarket in Northampton. College students are not going to pay a high price for a burger. If they wanted to have a burger joint follow Local Burgers plan.
They are never going to reopen.
They do win "Best Sign."
Can I have the sign?
Rumor has it the name and sign came from the art gallery owner who then looked for someone to act on her idea.
I met a comet once, but it was not much for conversation; rather cold and distant.
I was excited about having a quality burger place in town. I only eat grass fed meat. The menu looked delicious. However, I tried to go there four different times during their advertised business hours and there was always a sign indicating they were unexpectedly closed. I tried, Metacomet.
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