DeduS said:
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.