Elite Dinner

Restaurants tend not to be set up as community service organizations.

Unless weeknights are much busier what is the likely wastage of all the expensive seafood they have sitting around in the tanks? Or is a lot of that stuff being eaten at lunch? I suppose the margins might be really high to be able to justify feeding only a handful of tables at dinner.

Probably more elite members of the community dine there for dinner, and that prestige rubs off on the restaurant. Kind of like how movie studios will accept losing money on a movie if they think it can get an Oscar nomination/win.

i might disagree about this. for sure, an argument could be made for prestige, but
that could be countered by saying desiring prestige is trying to draw ā€œbiggerā€ talent
to make bigger box office.

also, the ā€œrealā€ reason studios desire oscar nominations/wins is a hopeful bump in the
box office.

Elite has been my go to place for the last few years for higher end Chinese food, since IMO Sea Harbor has declined, but I must say I prefer Grand Harbor over Elite. Having Elite yesterday and Grand Harbor the night before, many of the dishes were executed better IMO at Grand Harbor.

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True, but occasionally art wins out. I work in the businessā€¦and I cook for pleasure. In my 20 plus year career I have worked on a few movies where the object was telling a story not making money. Believe or not there are people like that. There are even studios like thatā€¦a very few. When we have people over my wife often asks me why I go to the trouble of making bread, or smoking pastrami, or growing salad greens. It may be pride, or it may be that art is art. Its not fricking community service.

I have had dinner at Elite. It was excellent. As I was with white bread people we had white bread dishes. They were great. My dining companions poured soy sauce over everything. I enjoyed the finesse the dishes were executed with. Not everything is weighed on the scale of profitā€¦

I was just thinking as well, you arenā€™t that correct. You know that most super high-end restaurants, like Saison for example, donā€™t make money, or make very, very little. But most of them lose money, or just self-sustain, effectively making them community service projects. Or, as someone else has pointed out, art projects.

iā€™m sorry, i just donā€™t believe this without some kind of documentation. restaurants
are a business. if they continually show zero profit, they are either a continued plaything
for the very wealthy ā€“ see joe pytka ā€“ or they go away.

Yes, thereā€™s making a lot of money and then thereā€™s only a few tables occupied for dinner at restaurants whose calling card is very expensive, live seafood. If someone can explain how restaurants like Elite and Sea Harbour maintain the quality at dinner despite low sales without sacrificing quality I would appreciate it.

I assume the chefs are not the same between dim sum and dinner. Are the markups on dim sum and lunch so high that they essentially subsidize dinner? In other words, is the business model set up so that these are effectively cavernous restaurants for weekend dim sum, mid-sized restaurants for lunch and small restaurants for dinner? But if so, I would think they canā€™t have very much live seafood just hanging around for only a few tables every night without quality slipping there.

I suppose they could also be money-laundering operationsā€¦

Yes, but these places donā€™t sit empty.