Whipped Cream Difficulties

I haven’t cared much for the food writing in the Statesman recently, but today’s paper has an interesting article by restaurant critic Mike Sutter.

Sutter decided to follow Raymond Tatum, a well-known local chef (Jeffrey’s, the Backstage Steakhouse) from start to opening of his pork-themed trailer eatery, Three Little Pigs.

Tatum’s apparently a big pork guy, and Three Little Pigs intrigues me. But there’s also a couple of things in Sutter’s article that jump out at me and make me say “What. The. Frack!”

For starters, there’s the $700 cell phone bill, because Tatum didn’t get an unlimited talk/text plan. Then there’s the $12,500 “built to order” trailer (when my folks ran a shaved ice trailer, I believe they paid about $10,000 for the trailer used, plus about another $2,000 for equipment): that by itself isn’t unreasonable, but then

A long strip of chrome trim blows off during transport, the floor plates buckle at the seams and have to be rewelded and Tatum spends $1,000 to fix some bad wiring.

There’s no mention that Tatum pursued or obtained compensation from the trailer vendor.

The kitchen gear costs $11,500, including a six-burner gas stove and oven, a two-basket deep fryer, flat-top grill, two-door commercial reach-in refrigerator, stainless steel prep counter with low-boy coolers, steam table, dish sink, hand sink and a cash register.

In Tatum’s first month, the gas line fails, the fryer goes out and the water pump dies when the water system freezes solid.

Also no mention that Tatum pursued or obtained compensation from the people who installed the kitchen equipment. (To be fair, the problem with the water system freezing probably didn’t have anything to do with the people who installed the equipment.)

The costs of doing business are relentless: $460 for city and county fees and permits, $600 a year for a commercial commissary, $1,200 a year for insurance, $150 to pressure-test the propane system, $500 for the gray-water tank. He pays East End Wines $575 a month to park in their lot on Rosewood Avenue and use their bathroom. The city electrical meter costs about a grand, which he’s paying in installments. The propane he cooks with runs $75-$100 a week. His employees get $10 an hour and all the tips.

I wanted to call out that section because of this statement later in the article:

Tatum isn’t sure what he needs to bring in each night to break even.

What? What? He’s running a business and he isn’t sure what he needs to bring in each night to break even?! He’s been a professional chef, he knows what his food costs and his fixed costs are, and he isn’t sure what he needs to bring in each night to break even? He’s open five hours a night Tuesday-Saturday, and he doesn’t know what he needs to bring in to break even?

I’m sorry, but I believe if you’re running a business – any business – and you don’t know what your break-even point is, you shouldn’t be running a business.

On one Tuesday, night, the trailer brings in $212 from a dozen tickets.

and

His best night so far has been $700; his target is $1,000 a day.

I may try to run the numbers later on: if one of my readers wants to try and figure out break-even for Tatum’s trailer, as a public service, feel free. I think most of the information you need is in the article, except possibly the electrical bill and Tatum’s food cost percentage. (It looks like his plates run about $6 per.)

Edited to add: Lawrence and I hashed this over some, and he came up with a set of numbers.

Lawrence figures $25,650 in “sunk costs”, basically the trailer and equipment. (The trailer and kitchen equipment work out to $24,000 alone: the grey water tank and pressure testing the propane system add $650, and $1,000 for the electric meter.) The article notes that Tatum didn’t take out SBA or bank loans, but borrowed money from friends and family. We’ll be generous and figure he doesn’t pay interest, and is amortizing his sunk costs over three years, so that’s $8,333 a year for that time period.

Lawrence came up with $2,720 a year in recurring costs. ($600 a year for the commercial commissary, which you need if you’re actually preparing food in a trailer. City of Austin/Travis County regulation. $1,200 for insurance. $460 for city/county fees and permits.) When I add the numbers, I actually come up with $2,260; I wonder if he added the permits twice.

Monthly recurring costs work out to $925 not counting whatever the electric bill is. ($575/month rent for twelve months = $6900. At $100/week for propane, that’s about $400/month.) Just to make the math easy, let’s use $1,000 a month as recurring monthly costs, with the understanding that this is a conservative estimate.

He’s paying four people $10/hour (plus they get to keep the tips). They’re working six five days a week, five hours a day. That’s 30 25 hours/week. Lawrence comes up with an estimate of $13,000 a month year in wages. I can’t tell from the article if there’s one or two people in the trailer, but let’s figure one (possibly plus Tatum, but we’ll assume Tatum doesn’t pay himself a wage). 30 hours/week * $10/hour * 50 weeks/year (we’ll figure two weeks of vacation, that makes the number simpler) comes out to $15,000 by my calculations, but let’s use Lawrence’s number as a conservative estimate. Note also that it isn’t clear if Tatum is paying Social Security and other taxes, but we’ll assume that he’s above board and legal. That would add a substantial additional sum over the $10/hour that we haven’t considered.

So the recurring yearly costs (at least for the first three years) work out to $36,053 by Lawrence’s estimate, which we both think is conservative. Six Five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that works out to 300 250 days a year, or a fixed cost per day of about $120 $144.

I think target food cost for the average restaurant is typically 30% of the total item cost. Lawrence’s estimate of food cost yearly is $51,054. (Edited to add 3: Lawrence corrects me and says the $51,054 figure is the total of both the fixed costs and the food costs.) Looking at it another way, for every plate he sells at $6, we can figure probably 1/3rd, or $2, goes to food and related costs (plates, plasticware). So that leaves him $4 a plate to pay the other costs. At $120 $144 $204/day in fixed costs, he needs to sell 30 36 34 plates a day on average at $6/each in order to meet those fixed costs, minus his food cost.

If Tatum pays himself just minimum wage, that’s another $15,080 a year.

All of this, by Lawrence’s estimate, works out to a conservative (we think) $66,584 a year cost to run the trailer. Figuring again 300 250 days a year, that’s about $222 $266 a day to break even, or about 37 67 44 plates a day at $6/per.

If you consider things like that cell phone bill, Social Security and other taxes, routine trailer maintenance, and other unanticipated expenses, $300/day or 50 75 plates/day at $6 per seems like a pretty reasonable break-even estimate.

Here’s the worksheet Lawrence provided for me. Sorry it’s a PNG, but I can’t get the formatting to work any other way. Click to embiggen.

Edited to add 2: For some reason, I was basing my calculations on six days a week, not five. Blame it on a synaptic misfire. Or Rio. Corrections are incorporated above.

The Spaghetti Warehouse location in downtown Austin is closing.

That’s kind of a shame, but I think I last ate there maybe two years ago. When I was a kid, going to the Houston location was a rare and special treat. When I moved up here, it was nice to have a reasonably close location to eat at; I had some nice dinners there.

But some years back, the parking situation got out of hand. They didn’t provide any free parking near the restaurant, and it was hard to find parking on the street. Then a few years after that, they changed the menu and got rid of two of my favorite dishes (the mushrooms in garlic butter and the cheese sauce; if any of my readers happen to have a close clone of the cheese sauce, I’d be delighted to get an email). I don’t know what the one in Houston is like these days; I’ll miss the funky decor of the Austin one, but I won’t miss the food.

By way of Jimbo: VegNews has been caught using stock photos of dishes. Worse yet (the horror! the horror!) some of those dishes…contain meat. Here’s a link to a NYT blog entry reporting the scandal. And here’s a link to the mentioned blog post.

I’m actually kind of torn by this. On the one hand, I think if you’re publishing a magazine, you owe a duty of honesty to your readers. Using stock photos to represent things that they are clearly not breaks that duty, from my point of view. I don’t buy the “…it is simply not financially feasible for VegNews at this time” argument. How much do stock photos cost, as opposed to having someone with a digital SLR shoot photos of actual dishes for you? Clearly, VegNews knows how to use PhotoShop if they need to do “enhancements” to photos shot in house. After all, they removed the bones from the stock photo that was supposed to represent a rack of vegan “ribs”.

On the other hand…that blog post is like every bad vegan cliche rolled into one. “…eggs from those poor battery hens that are dead basically from the moment they are born”, “…infused with antibiotics, pain and anguish”, “…pork sausage, oozing in pig fat, fresh from the slaughterhouse”. That blogger is so strident, I find it hard to decide who to root for in this instance.

Oh, wait, no, I don’t find it hard to decide who to root for after all: I’m rooting for this guy.

It would fill my heart with delight if someone managed to grow truffles reliably in the United States.

I know there are many people working on the problem (supposedly including one person out near Dripping Springs; this article is from 1984, and I haven’t been able to find anything more recent in Google) but it seems that the growing of truffles is more difficult than you might expect for something that’s basically a fungus.

All of this is by way of introducing today’s NYT article about two truffle growers in North Carolina who’ve been engaged in a lengthy legal battle.

Important safety tip:

Local chefs give North Carolina mixed reviews.

“They don’t seem to have a lot of quality control,” said Andrea Reusing, chef and owner of the Lantern restaurant in Chapel Hill. And actually getting them can be maddening.

“We need to start calling them wacky truffles on the menu,” she said. “There is a certain kind of spaciness to whole thing.”