jayandstacey

Good article. The "next step" for such an article would be to talk about why those places succeed - i.e., what is it about the guests that makes TGI Fridays the #1 chain? I'll tell you. And I've said this elsewhere on this site...it isn't any great revelation. The key is that consistency wins because most people like predicability and will avoid almost ANY unpredictability. Interestingly, I'll go so far as to hypothesize that this has very little to do with the food itself. When (if) they cook at home, sometimes the corn is sweet, sometimes not. They're OK with that and have some tolerance there. The bar isn't super high in the kitchen. So what predictability do they want? That the staff act a certain way. Again, not perfect but predictable. A crumber breaks that (what the %$%& are you doing?) and would make some of them feel uncomfortable, as they don't know how to react in an unpredictable situation...and they're in public. That the words (menu, ads, etc) present an expectation that's then met. An unknown word doesn't create an expectation, it creates an unpredictable scenario that must be avoided. ("Kimchi? Does that still have the head attached?"). That the process is predictable. Sit - menus - drink order - food order - refills - dessert - check. The article mentions the extensive training and the one main key is that it keeps the predictability high. For example, an "amuse bouche" completely breaks this apart. ("I didn't order this, will it be on my check? What is amusing about it? What is it? Why so little of it?") The purpose of their meal is not...their meal, rather it is the going out. To meet friends, to dress up, whatever the occasion...the food doesn't matter as there will always be another meal in a few hours. But there's only one friday night per week, or chance to chat with Aunt Sally, etc. So our judgement of the TGI Friday's food is a little like providing detailed criticism of the water at the water park. Who cares? is the water wet and refreshing? Yes? Then you're done and can focus on why you're really there! Talking about the salinity and pH balance is just stupid. There's validity in this view for most. Predicability at places like TGI Friday's supports the reason for their visit - a chat with Aunt Sally or whatever - not the food. So what makes us different (not better, just different)? Two things: 1. We have a higher tolerance for unpredictabillity. 2. We have a lower tolerance for quality (defined as nearing the ideal), particularly with the food. So we'll assume the risk of ridicule if, say, we don't take our shoes off at a restuarant where's that's the norm - in exchange for a chance at a higher quality experience. We don't see our (possible) faux pas as horrible, rather as a learning experience. Lots of people would sooner die than be embarrased (or even just appear to be confused or lost) in public. I'd venture a guess and say many of us act like TGI Friday's patrons in other aspects of our lives. I go each summer to the Jersey Shore - I could cancel 3 such trips and instead go to some fantastically perfect beach in the South Pacific...but the plane ride might be bumpy, or the language/currency might become an issue. Or I might not have the right outfits, or I might forget a basic need. With the Jersey Shore I know precisely what I'm getting and it is just fine. The perfect beach just isn't worth all that...ever.

One more question to toss out there - can you get JO spice separately anywhere? I recently bought a few bushels of crabs and asked about extra JO spice like that place uses in their cooking. They had Old Bay tins. "That's what JO supplies us." I was confused - aren't they competing brands of crab spice? Or is JO a distributor who happens to make their own wholesale spice but sells Old Bay for retail? Or something else?

There's another slice to this...the different 'types' of royalties, like mechanical vs. performance and others. Each is a little different - so to your point, the record sales (mechanical licenses) will pay the recording artist and writers, while a radio play will not benefit the artist unless they are credited with some sort of writing credits. There's even another slice to this, and that's how the venue pays their royalties. A bar/restaurant might pay by a formula based on their size and hours of operation. But if they have a jukebox or DJ, it changes a bit. Likewise with live music. The current state of music distribution - with digital copies, few CD sales, many "radio" paths and such...I believe artists have figured out that they must make their money through concerts and ancillary sales (t-shirts, etc). I'm not an expert in this field at all - but for a while in my career it was swirling around me. Back on topic - Music in a restaurant works (IMHO) like the service - it should complement the meal, serve its purpose but not really "stand out" except to be considered perfect. That means very different things in L'auberge Chez Francois vs. The Hard Rock Cafe, but both can achieve this goal.

Yes, this is the same pie sliced at a different angle. Not disagreeing with you. So if I'm a songwriter working for a publishing house, or a performer working for a label (or both) - then part of my agreement with that company is a share in the rights and royalties that come with the song. The lyric writer's royalty is likely shared with a publishing house, as is the music writer's, and the performance part might be shared with a label or management team. So Springsteen, for instance, will share his royalties with other companies - Thrill Hill publishing (which he owns, to your point), probably the label or management team in some cases, and of course ASCAP takes a cut of sorts, as they don't work for free. They are both a beneficiary and the police, which means restaurants need to be mindful of their licensing, as they can be pretty agressive.

I think they were encouraging you to feel your love that night. Makes sense for the college crowd.

Maybe a forever-repeating Beatles cassette is some sort of feng-shui? or zen? There is a radio station in south Jersey that plays hits from the 70s/80s/90s and speeds them all up by about 5%. There's a threshold (for me) of about 2-3% where I can't really notice it - it might sound more "urgent" (both from the speed and the change in pitch)...but I probably can't say for sure if it is sped up. This station is DEFINITELY sped up and it drives me bonkers. As for Muzak...maybe you know this already, but a piece of newer recorded music generally has 3 rights holders: the music writer, the lyrics writer, and the performer. Sometimes those three people are all the same (like Springsteen) and sometimes all three royalty earners are different (like many pop or country songs). Muzak is appealing simply as it cuts out 2 of the 3 royalties. They record their own versions using only the music - and can therefore offer a music service that's likely less expensive than a business paying ASCAP/BMI fees. Which is why you hear them in places that have thin margins, like grocery stores and ...cheap insurance companies I suppose.

Agreed on all points. I want the owners to succeed as their business (and their house) is in my neighborhood - and my neighborhood is better when they succeed. They do some self-promotion but not much...I wonder if they're just in a rut. They have a Greene-Turtle-like sports bar coming in across the street soon and I suspect that will hurt their business in the short run. I'll talk to them; see what's possible or not; see if there's interest. Anyway, as for music in restaurants... This should be as thought out and consistent as the lighting and air handling. Volumes should be consistent, the system should be periodically checked, employees should be trained on how to use music throughout the night - for instance, to transition late focus to the bar if the place has one. I wonder if any restaurants use automatic feedback loops - where they take measurements in a room of the ambient sound level, then adjust the music volume accordingly. That way, as a room got busy the music volume might rise a little bit to compensate for voices. Of course, this can "run away" if not programmed correctly but the concept is pretty simple.

Thanks for the article, very interesting. When I wrote the first post, the only thing on my mind was a knee-jerk reaction to seeing someone else say "no music" in restaurants. Didn't make any sense to me. However, there's much more than meets the eye here. A few other thoughts on the subject: 1. There are a minority of people that have music issues - where music sounds like an annoying mess in their ears. I'm reading the book Musicophilia right now about such maladies. What's interesting isn't so much the maladies themselves, rather how primal and ingrained music can be to the core workings of our brain. I think that the net is that music of some sort is a necessary part of almost any restaurant. In most cases, it should support the meal/experience without being a major part of it (there are exceptions to this, like the Hard Rock Cafe) and that's not an easy task. 2. Many years ago I was tasked with making the background music for a new restaurant - a California Coast themed place in a hotel somewhere in Asia. That wasn't easy...songs can be too fast, too slow...stick to major chords....and you can't simply put Beach Boys songs on there and call it a day. You can't appeal much to lyrics, but rather instruments and arrangements. An interesting effort. 3. Meanwhile, in my 'today' neighborhood I live near a 50s style diner that has a jukebox with 45s. There are selection boxes at every table...yet the diner owners don't do much with the jukebox. Background music plays until someone selects a song from the 80 hit records that never change. My idea is to approach the owner and suggest jukebox themed promotions: I have tons of 45s, and would volunteer them - so September might be "60s month" and January might be "Summer Songs" and April might be "80s month." I'd swap in the records, then swap them back out at the end of the month. What do you all think - would a music-based promotion for such a diner be worth it? Or will it only be as good as the money spent to advertise it and be mostly a waste of time? (note - I'm aware there may be licensing questions, that the jukebox might be owned by a vending company, etc. Set those aside for now...)

Yes, or maybe it is a way to compensate for vs. get around. Dunno. Margate Went to Sophia of Margate last night and had an enjoyable meal. Their specialty is Greek seafood and the interior is pretty intense - with stucco walls, arches, wrought iron railings and chandeliers. The Saganaki appetizer ("flaming cheese" as my kids call it) had a lot of lemon added and was refreshing in that regard - it didn't get too heavy the way a pan fille with cheese can. My wife's "Pasta Aphrodite" ($29) included crabmeat and fresh mozzarella over capallini in a wine sauce - like the cheese, it had a lot of lemon in it but not too much - it was light and nice. My Ahi Tuna ($28) was delicious though the soy and wasabi sides seemed to not match too well - I preferred whatever sauce was a part of the plating. Service was excellent. Overall, we really enjoyed it and would return. The prices are maybe a bit high for what I'd expect at home---but I wasn't at home. And I wasn't disappointed. In searching for their website on Google, I found the Yelp site for Sophia and clicked on it. I usually don't do that. I found Sophia had a 2.5/5 star rating. OK - so I read the reviews and basically saw some with bad food/bad service/too expensive... Then I see that about 30 reviews had been "filtered" and so I looked at those. Most were 5 stars and they averaged probably 4.5/5 overall. Now - every restaurant can have bad nights, especially in seasonal areas. But my take-away from what I saw was that Sophia didn't pay money to Yelp. Do I know that as fact? Nope. But it works for me and I trust more, having looked at Yelp, that my good experience wasn't a fluke.

I was in a restaurant tonight that was noisy- lots of hard surfaces. Worse, there was only one other occupied table in our section with 3 female friends catching up... So my wide and I talked but found ourselves listening to the other table between exchanges. Then music came on the sound system mid-meal. It was soft and didn't drown out or even barely compete with the other table. But it was a god-send, as it allowed my mind to turn to something other than the conversation at the next table. I just read a diner's comment elsewhere asking that restaurants not have music... But to me that's the audio equivalent to saying "I want no windows and white walls only- no pictures" - don't you need something passive for your senses when they become unengaged?

How does this get around the lack of BYOB? Not doubting you, just not understanding.

The review said something like "the menu looks more like that of a steakhouse. Welcome to the neighborhood." And then gave 4 stars out of 5. I guess if they would just open they'd earn the 5th star

A: it isn't a review. It mentions what the menu looks like - a menu was posted on the front door for a few weeks. The review was (I presume) based on the experience of standing in front of the closed storefront, staring at the butcher's paper lining the windows and thinking "I bet this is a Yelp 4-star experience" B: ergo, yet another reason why Yelp sucks. (but...you now have 8 posts on a restaurant that never was...Yelp only has one...if we don't appeal to actual content but only to volume...Yelp has the upper hand )

To answer your questions: 1. No one gives a whit. 2. Update - ain't going to happen. There's been a notice on the door that the building owner took the space back over. I've heard second-hand that this didn't happen as the Bleu Pearl people weren't able to get the kind of liquor license they wanted/needed. Which of course brings up the eternal debate - is MoCo's strict liquor enforcement/control a good thing or bad thing? While I'm not one for more government controls, I'm also not one who drinks much. So the net for me is "OK". I'd say this one is dead. Sorry for starting a thread on a possible restaurant that only ever existed pretty much in concept only - they never touched the space or did much of anything (I could tell) other than apply for a liquor license. Hard to say if even the owners gave much of a whit. The space up the hill is making progress - the space formerly occupied by 44, Tony and James, Last Mango, etc. I believe another thread covers this, but a Green Turtle guy is branching out on his own with the same basic premise - neighborhood sports bar. There's construction now on the inside, with indications there will be a bathroom on the dining level (a big issue in all prior incarnations) and valet parking (another issue.) I think this place has a chance, as the guy (theoretically) knows how to run a restaurant.

Two thoughts: 1. I believe an overall restaurant experience is a mix of both subjective experiences (is this a little too salty?) and objective experiences (it shouldn't take 45 minutes for a drink to be served.) Like pornography - while the line where something becomes objectively good (or bad) is hard to define....when tend to know it when we experience it. I'm a relatively untrained novice relative to most here - so my scope of subjective is much wider...and I therefore look for reviews that mention things, good or bad, that are extreme enough to be objective. I don't know if Tom Seitsema or I have the same tolerance for some salt. But I'd guess if he says "did that dish have more than 1 pound of salt?" he's made a firmly objective declaration. 2. As such, I feel I'm keenly aware of at least my own shortcomings when it comes to evaluating restaurants. Last night I went to Niwano Hana in Rockville and loved it. Loved it! But I walked out and told my wife - I have no idea why. Other than the sushi tasting rotten (which has never happened) - I wouldn't know good sushi from bad. But I do know that I did like it. But I agree - when I see that someone ELSE says that they loved the place - I assume they spent 20 years studying various cuisines and are the renown expert in the field. That may not always be the case

After gobzillions of searches - do you believe their algo gets confused? By comparison, Yelp has the level of representation I'd expect - which is to say that yes, it shows up as DR.com mentions Yelp and vice-versa. But that's maybe one or two returns in 5 pages. By page 2, Google is showing pretty much only Chowhound returns. Also - as someone else noted - this is for "donrockwell" plus anything - it doesn't have to have to be the word restaurant. Try typing donrockwell +a, +b, +c etc and watch the auto-fills that come up

Don, I don;t know your history. Were you associated with Chow Hound? Do they have an ax to grind with you other than simple competition?

That's my point. The first few results will be OK, but then it is chowhound. And this is not due to something that's happening here on the DR site. So why does this matter? People (including myself) look to others for confirmation. This site exists purely on that notion. Google is viewed (generally) as an independent and unbiased search engine that gives confirmations (if I knew the answer, I wouldn't need google...) BUT....when someone searches on DR and then Chowhound comes up in the dropdown-autofill choices, and then creeps into the search results, eventually (by the 3rd page) accounting for every result....the person searching will tend to think that Chowhound might be the better choice, is a strong alternative - or may simply be the same thing (ie, DR is a ChowHound owned website). Google presents not just a single result, but a broad spectrum of results and Chowhound owns all the colors on either side of the DR rainbow. And that has some value to ChowHound. And so they pay for it. They have bought some package that says "yes, we understand you will return DR.com....but then after that's done, we want to own all the rest of it. We want the drop down suggestions, we want all the results we can buy." Don, you could spend 100 years programming this site for Google optimization. Chowhound just writes a check to undo it all.

Note, I'm taking a number of assumptions/guesses above. If someone can replace these with current facts, please do so. Accurate understanding is most of the battle. Years ago I owned a small internet-only mail order company, so I'm somewhat familiar with this, I'm just not current.

You keep having this notion that Google is linking to Chowhound because of things like - links from here to Chowhound - mentions of Chowhound - your members also using Chowhound. - Google algorithms are complex It's none of that. None of that matters. Chowhound paid Google to bring up Chowhound returns when someone searches DonRockwell (and Site or Restaurant and probably others). The ads are similar but a little different - they use a combination of your site content and what I've done recently - they are taking a wider context and giving results on more circumstantial elements. Of course every ad is paid for, but how they are chosen is a wash of factors. The Google search uses the terms in the search, plus whatever someone paid for. As an example, I've never been to a chowhound site. I've never written about chowhound until now. I've never linked to them. Yet, on my search for "Donrockwell restaurant"...after the first few returns the actual search terms are changed to Chowhound and restaurant. Google's done this for a long time. I don't know the specifics but I'd imagine it costs more and more to move "the line" up - the line where returns become predominantly chowhound and not donrockwell. My suggestion: Even if you can't afford it, pretend you can and contact google. Explore in depth what you can do to modify the results. They probably have a different answer for Chowhound searches (since they are probably already a client) so pick another site that you want to pay to shift...say dcdining.com....and dig, dig, dig - so at least you understand what the rules of the game are. Of course, such a search returns your site as the first return. Either Chowhound didn't pay enough OR google knows they can't simply re-direct on the first hit or they become irrelevant as a search engine. I don't know. But I often go a few pages into a search to see trends. I've never seen such an obvious re-direct to chowhound as is happening here.

So see what I mean, search "donrockwell restaurant" on Google and by the 3rd page, the search is clearly switched to "chowhound restaurant" - even the highlighted terms are chowhound and restaurant. You probably knew this, or I'm pointing out the obvious. I just wouldn't have any room for high standards with chowhound. Of course, it is a free country and they can spend as they like and all that. Its just clear they are spending to ensure you do less well.

It is clear that Chowhound is paying to take from you. If you search on Google for just "donrockwell" - the first 5 pages have little to do with chowhound. But... If you search on Google for "donrockwell" + "review" or "restaurant" - by page 3, virtually all the returns are to chowhound, including chowhound sites for cities outside DC that have nothing to do with "donrockwell" at all. While I have no idea what deal they have, this isn't an accident - as certainly "donrockwell" and "restaurant" should have 20 pages (10 links each) that either link to your site or pull up articles about you (or random sites about other Don Rockwells). I'd have no qualms about whatever you choose to do relative to chowhound. They seem unique in their coming after you.

That's Caspian. DanielK - yeah, I guess Sakura is reliable. But so are many fast food places. I've been to Sakura probably 10 times as my mother likes to take all the grandkids there...I've never gotten a bad meal. And I can't name a better Japanese Steak House. But...I dunno...maybe I need to look past the fact that I can't seem to catch the piece of shrimp in my mouth. I have to try Yuraku, I haven't been. As for the Gas Station Tacos - yes, they are pretty good but by the time someone's driven down to that exit there's Rio, Kentlands and other areas with a few decent choices. While the food at the gas station is better than its price would infer, the downside is eating with plastic forks while leaning against a stack of Corona cases. I'd go 10 other places first, then consider the gas station tacos simply as I don't want to go to any of the other 10 again. As for the outlet malls...I'm no developer. I'm all for development that succeeds. This just looks like a disaster. Going into why I think this is beyond the scope of this thread.

I almost forgot the bread basket! Dinner Rolls. No fancy fruits in the bread or crusty multi-grain-artisan-whatever offerings. Just straight-up, yeasty, fluffy rolls and a fistful of individually wrapped whipped butter cups. They're like cotton candy in that they pretty much dissolve in your mouth.

This is an interesting topic as there's SUCH a wasteland in the N Germantown / Clarksburg area. Thousands of people and very thin eating options besides gas stations and fast food. So let's say you're in Clarksburg - which is Boyds but on the east side of 270, and has thousands more people. Where to go? The closest options are immediately south in Germantown: 1. Sabai Sabai, mentioned above, is really pretty good, with interesting offerings (like corn 'fritters.') 2. On the other side of 118 is Royal Bakery. They make decent bagels, crumb buns and such, plus sell Boar's Head deli meat sandwiches on their bread. These can be really, really good and you'll feel like you're back in North Jersey. 3. Back on rte 355, Caspian House of Kabob is pretty good. Both this and Royal are counter-service places, while Sabai Sabai has a waitstaff. Also in the area: I haven't tried EN Sushi...and Agrodolche has its fans. Otherwise there's not much else. If you're willing to drive another 10 minutes south, the world is your oyster and many new options open up in south Germantown, Gaithersburg, Rockville, etc. Driving north up 270 won't get you much in the vicinity. As you approach Frederick (20 mins north), I'd suggest Moncacy Crossing or Alexander's (though I haven't yet been to the latter) for a dress-up meal on the south side of Frederick. Of course by the time you've made it that far, another 10 minutes and the entire city is available, including Family Meal, Volt, Tasting Room and other excellent choices. So what does the future hold? It seems it will get better but not much. A new Wegman's will open at 27 and I-270, in September. Maybe this will bring some more dining options. In 2014, Clarksburg will get an outlet mall and maybe (just maybe) a good place or two will squeeze in there. (Clarksburg has screwed up everything else so far, so why not an outlet mall, a concept that died with the 90s???) I have to believe the area has enough people to eventually have some decent dining options. Right now there are very few.