The customer who does not eat

A restaurant in this region has two customers and only one of them eats.

The first is the person at the table. The second is a family in another city with money to place, working out whether to buy the right to open this thing where they live. That second sale is worth more than a year of the first, and it appears in almost no marketing plan.

It shows in what gets built.

Some places are built for one street. The room works because of the corner it sits on, the cooking depends on a person nobody can replace, and the following lives in the founder's own phone. Others are built from the first week to be copied: a kitchen that can be taught in a fortnight, a look that survives being photographed by somebody else, a supplier list that exists on paper.

Both are real businesses. Only one of them is an asset a stranger can buy.

Autumn is when that trade happens here. The halls fill, the meetings run back to back, and what the visitor is reading across the table is not the food. They are reading whether the thing in front of them is a business or a person.

I have watched founders spend a whole season making the room more particular, more theirs, more impossible to reproduce, while telling me the plan is three more countries. Those two sentences cannot both be the strategy.

Either choice is respectable. What is expensive is making the choice by accident, in a hundred small decisions about a menu and a fit-out, and then finding out which one was made on the day somebody finally asks for a price.