True Courage

[don]

Anxiety Grips Restaurants, New Ones in Particular

By GLENN COLLINS
It was 5:37 on a subfreezing weekday evening in the dining capital of America, and in a sleek new Manhattan restaurant named At Vermilion, the staff of 26 had but one option before the dinner rush: to wait.

“Every night, there are butterflies,” said Rohini Dey, 40, the majority owner of the two-month-old, $4.5 million restaurant at 480 Lexington Avenue, at East 46th Street.

“These are strange times,” she said, surveying her empty 200-seat restaurant, which offers a fusion of Indian and Latin cuisine.

In a season when diners have been ordering hamburger platters instead of T-bones, the stone-cold economy is a consuming preoccupation for most of the city’s 26,000 dining establishments. But especially for new restaurants, January is a roll of the dice.

“The restaurant business is tough to start with, and survival in New York is especially difficult, thanks to high operating costs,” said E. Charles Hunt, executive vice president of the New York City chapters of the New York State Restaurant Association. In the best of times, he said, 70 percent of new restaurants fail or change ownership during their first five years.

“But this is the toughest climate we’ve seen since I was a kid,” said Mr. Hunt, 72, who was born during the Depression.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/ny...vermilion.html

[metalman]

Re: True Courage

elegant dining... 1930 before the lights went out...

[Shakespear]

Re: True Courage

Metalman

It is probable easier and less costly to run that restaurant in the train car than the 4.5 million dollar one :-(

Discretionary spending is going to be cut severely.