Any good buffet restaurants?

[Arnie85]

On 4/16/2018 at 00:27, KittenKong said:

Certainly they make more money more easily out of drinks. Just look at PizzaPizza which does a very nice pizza for 79B but charges 99 for a beer. Still good value taken as a whole though. But I dont think that restaurants here are as close to break-even on meals as those two posts would suggest.

I do a lot of cooking at home and I know what the prices are. I can easily make a single Sunday roast with all the trimmings for 60B in ingredients, and this is the sort of thing that restaurants sell for 150-200B. I could cite other similar examples. Even a bowl of noodles at 40B shows a decent profit margin. OK, they do have other costs on top but even so, life is not as bad as some people make out.

If anything kills businesses in Pattaya it is high rents (particular rents that increase astronomically at the end of the first lease) and poor customer service.

You’ve obviously never owned a business.  On the example you cited you also have to pay your chef, pay the guy who goes and buys the ingredients, pay the power and refrigeration, pay for the cleaning, the wait staff, the guy who washes the dishes, advertising, the tax man ... there are two dozen things that come out of it before you start thinking about profit.  It’s more than the cost of the raw ingredients and just rent. 

[KittenKong]

1 hour ago, nzwolfgang said:

You’ve obviously never owned a business.  On the example you cited you also have to pay your chef, pay the guy who goes and buys the ingredients, pay the power and refrigeration, pay for the cleaning, the wait staff, the guy who washes the dishes, advertising, the tax man ... there are two dozen things that come out of it before you start thinking about profit.  It’s more than the cost of the raw ingredients and just rent. 

I have owned and run several businesses successfully. Successfully enough to retire at 50 in fact.

And I did mention the other costs in my comment. But unlike other countries, here most of the other costs are quite low, apart from rents which are often ridiculously high. I have seen literally hundreds of businesses fail all over town simply because rents are way over the top and are completely out of proportion with the average customer spend and the number of customers.

And in Thailand is it very common for a landlord to increase rents massively at the end of a lease if he thinks that his tenant's business is doing well. I've seen that happen hundreds of times too. And as a direct result of that I have also seen large and well-situated premises stay empty for a year or more because the landlords are too stupid or too greedy to reduce the rent to a sensible level. More fool them.

[SirL]

Ingredients costs are typically around 30% of menu price, though in Pattaya they may be slightly higher than that.

I'm surprised if the economies of scale of a busy restaurant aren't very relevant in the ingredients cost of a Sunday roast, as compared to cooking at home.  I cook in a condo in Pattaya not for cheapness, but when I'm too lazy/tired/hungover to go out or when I want something healthy.