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SUMMARY KEYWORDS places, gourmet, restaurant, fact, type, denny, mini, closing, town, growing, redefinition, local restaurant, sad, eat, diner, street, idea, visualized, exponentially, grahame SPEAKERS Christopher Garcia Christopher Garcia  Come with me, we're going to Silicon Valley Christopher Garcia  restaurants like mini gourmet have been squeezed out over the years. And that hurts because I loved mini gourmet. And it's not that what they're being replaced with is fundamentally inferior. In fact, a lot of the sort of family restaurants that have been blooming up your Applebee's, the slight expansion and contraction of Denny's places like Cheesecake Factory, that's sort of the new range that are growing still to this day, even with COVID-19, putting her on a lot of stuff. It's this idea of a differentiated diner type experience. And that's really what mini gourmet was, it was an old school type diner, the type of place we visualized from the 1960s. I'm not 100% Sure, when it opened, I think it was in the late 60s, possibly the 70s. But I remember in the very early 80s, the food was dependably decent, I would go there, I would get corned beef hash thing a toast is great. For a guy who doesn't eat eggs, it's always hard for breakfast. But it's this idea that we have places that are different. And right now more than any other time in the world, it is harder to be a different restaurant than ever before. And when you look at the list of places that are closing, because of COVID-19, it's not your Denny's your cheesecake factories, even though some of them did use this chance to close in fact, to at least to Wendy's, I know I've have closed because they just didn't get business anymore. It's this idea that they have less to lean back on that they're closing at a much greater rate. If you look at the list, you see places like Clark's how Capones all those sort of places that were identifiable by specific menu concept that weren't really themed, as much as they were just places to go eat. And mini gourmet was one of those. And again, it's another thing of the area losing its uniqueness. So let's be honest, no one came from out of town to go to mini gourmet. In fact, meaning remains two main sort of drawing points, I would say were people who were visiting the hospital across the street and wanted to go get food right after, or local folks, families in particular. And of course, you cross the street, you also had Saturday City College, which probably led to a fair bit of people to go and eat there. But this idea of a restaurant that is a local restaurant, it's slowly going away. And that makes me sad. And I wouldn't be doing a podcast like this if it didn't. But it does help realize that we either don't want these type of places, and I don't think that's the case. Or we just don't care enough to make sure they stay. The big problem with a lot of them, of course, is rent costs are growing exponentially. And the classic person that these type of things appeal to is on the lower side of the economic spectrum, while the upper side of the economic spectrum can help a restaurant survive. So in fact, the high price of a place like original Joe's is actually helping them stay alive. We're gonna see that it's just going to get worse, I think. And there are places that I will be incredibly sad to see go away. I'm sad to see many Grahame go away. But that whole part of town needs a redefinition. And the dream would be that that site would grow something that was local life. But I think we all know that's unlikely to be the case.

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