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DeduS said:
JWeinCom said:

Seems odd that nobody likes Mexican food.  Maybe instead of assuming people just don't like Mexican food, you should probably figure out precisely what is wrong with your restaurant.  Maybe your ingredients aren't as fresh as they need to be.  Maybe you need to add more items to your menu.  Maybe you're charging too much for your tacos and need to lower the price.  Maybe you're selling tacos without shells, and then charging people a ridiculous amount for shells that they need for their tacos.

One thing is for sure.  If you're right next door to a restaurant that has been making pizza for years, has a great reputation for pizza, has tons of loyal customers, makes much better pizza than you, and sells it at a lower price, then you're probably not going to have success selling pizza.  You should make sure you've done absolutely all that you can to make your Mexican restaurant a success before switching to pizza.  If you absolutely can't sell Mexican food, then you should try a burger joint or something, because you're not going to beat the pizzeria at making pizza.

I don't want to switch to pizza exclusively - I just want to offer it alongside my Mexican food to appeal to a bigger crowd. I mean, the pizzeria is offering Mexican food as well and it seems to work for them to some extent. I know my food is fine because I have another restaurant in another town and people love it there. It's pretty obvious that people in this town just want something else. They don't want my Mexican food - they might not want pizza from me either but at least I know they generally like pizza. Maybe they would like burgers like you said, but I don't know that and I have no idea how to make a good burger - remember: I'm the Mexican food guy.

Should people not like my pizza, I can still check wether the endeavor in this town is worth it or not but at least I tried. If it isn't, I simply close down and focus all my efforts on my new opening restaurant in the other town, where people appreciate my Mexican cuisine. I think it's important to remember that my short term goal is not to sell more food than the pizzeria, but to make a decent living from my work.

Why is your other restaurant succeeding?  Maybe that restaurant has much better chefs, and a better variety of food.  Maybe your cooks for the other restaurant are world class chefs, and the cooks you have working on the food in the new restaurant are teenagers you hired of the street.  Maybe you're just trying to reheat leftovers from the other restaurant, and people find it icky.  Perhaps, if you put the same amount of effort into preparing the food in your new Mexican restaurant as you did in your old one, people would eat there. 

Oh, and one more thing... the pizza place?  They also have a bigger italian restaurant that's really popular.  In your successful restaurant, you already copied several of their most popular dishes.  Each time  you copied one of their dishes, nobody bought them.  In fact, less than a year ago, you hired a team of chefs solely to replicate one of their most popular dishes.  The results were so catastrophic that you had to fire the whole team after nobody wanted that dish.  So, you know copying their food isn't the right way to go.  You've tried it.  A bunch of times.  And it didn't work.  But, since your other restaurant at least had good food to start with, it didn't hurt them too much.  This restaurant is struggling and needs to build  a reputation for its own food before trying to copy the other restaurant.