Schnitzel & Things is Packing Up Shop and Moving to Brooklyn
If you wanted to try the bratwurst or the side sampler from Schnitzel & Things (on 3rd btw. 45+46th) that we wrote about yesterday, it’s going to have to be today or tomorrow. We got this sad news from S&T’s owner Oleg last night:
Unfortunately Friday will be our last operational day at the restaurant. We are closing it done with much sadness but also with hope. We are moving to a kitchen in Red Hook and plan to reopen a retail store in the near future. The truck will continue to operate as usual, and we feel we feel bad for the regular customers who come see us religiously at this location so we promise to try to bring the truck to the area for the customers that will be saddened by this news. I don’t want this to be a pity thing. We tried hard to make this a success.
Unfortunately we are not the first and certainly not the last to suffer this fate. We really deep down appreciate Midtown Lunch’s support over these years and appreciate the support Midtown East has given us. We are not down nor are we finished. We feel blessed to have been given an opportunity to sell our product to wonderful customers. We know we have a good product and we will continue to provide the good people of New York with our schnitzel.
At least we have the truck, which has been spending Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in Midtown since the beginning of the new year. The real sadness in this news is the fact that it is becoming harder and harder for independent businesses to afford the rent in Midtown. It’s probably only a matter of time before a chain takes over this space also…
Posted by Zach Brooks at 9:45 am, February 21st, 2013 under Schnitzel & Things.
11 Comments | RSS comments feed for this post
11 Comments
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Oleg didn’t mention the rent in the lines above. Is that the reason they are leaving?
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Yes. 100%
He told me that the rent is such that they would have to be busy at all times of the day, not just lunch, to be successful. Or, they could have raised prices… which he obviously didn’t want to do.
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Zack, when will the Forums be back?!?!?!?!
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Er, forgive me. Zach….old habits die hard
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Didn’t he figure out how many sales he needed to operate the restaurant profitably and his costs before he opened?
He was in the finance industry before he started the truck. He should know better.
If the lease expired (seems like a short lease term), he should have taken that possibility into his calculations.
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Harsh.
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I would not say harsh, I would say that is how you run a business.
He had the truck for years, so he should know his costs. If he had to sell schnitzel non-stop the entire day, that doesn’t seem like a achievable goal.
Of course things change, but he should have figured that he would not be that busy except lunch time.
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I agree. Not harsh at all. That is business 101. You need a business model.
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If I were to speculate, I’d say he overestimated the audience for a brick-and-mortar vs. the truck’s sales numbers. Perhaps not enough of the midtown workers are located close enough to the store that they ever made the trip, whereas before they’d be close enough once a week with the truck.
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Ach du lieber! Much like the 5th Panzer Army’s movement from the Ardennes in November 1944, there is no shame in retreating under heavy fire. Best of luck that Brooklyn will be a glorious success… and not a surrender of schnitzel in the Ruhr Pocket.
the rent is too damn high!