Round one.... FIGHT!
So the evil empire is finally open and right now.. I'm kinda nervous but not crazy terrified actually. A much better state than I was anticipating. While the place is ridiculously nice, after going there and experiencing everything for myself I can see there's a lot our restaurant has going for it that's going to help us compete.
Here's something that really caught me by surprise... Their menus! 
Uh, so this place has a rep for being super fancy right? I mean you guys remember the pics of their building from the earlier posts. That place was crazy fancy. I would have figured fancy place equals fancy menus or at least something as nice as ours.. uhh I guess I was mistaken. WTF!? Why does this menu look like something from a Dennys? No wait even Dennys has nicer menus than this place! Just a crummy piece of laminated paper! Could it be any more boring too? Jeez at least use the paper with texture huh?
Of course there there are a lot of benefits to making their menus like this.. I'm sure they cost next to nothing, also...I'm thinking these menus might be temporary. Perhaps they know they may need to make adjustments later depending on how things go against us. That could be bad. This place has a history of pricing things super cheap to drive the competition out of business.
Luckily for us it appears that right now, they aren't super cheap! This brings me to one of our big advantages right now... price. Their prices are not cheap and even ridiculous in some cases. They charge more for everything, food, alcohol, and even birthday songs! Of course their restaurant is nicer than ours but in this poor economy how much is that really gunna be worth to people? Especially if the food tastes essentially the same. Also a lot of the things that are significantly more expensive at their place are things that relate to large parties. Things like Share charges(ours $5 vs $7!), Birthdays (ours $2.50 vs. $5.50!), Sake (our lg $8.50 vs $12.50) and party gratuity(our 15% on 8ppl or more vs. 18% on 6ppl or more!). This is significant be cause more than 45% of our customers are large parties. Sorry i don't have copies of our menus up so you can compare stuff yourselves.. I'll try and do that next week.
Another one of our advantages we can see from their menu is their the lack of variety. Their menu is extremely limited! There's only two, 3 item combinations and they are crazy expensive. 3 item combinations are very popular at our restaurant. Their cheapest one is 26 dollars which comes with filet mignon, jumbo shrimp and chicken, vs. our equivalent that is only 20.95. Ours even comes with more food.
oh hey i found our menu inserts.. (We print ours on textured paper!)
Looking at our menus you can see that we pretty much have any kind of combination of items possible. I'm sure their limited menu makes things vastly simpler for their staff but does the customer really care about that?? How do you guys feel? Which menu do you like the best?
Okay now imagine you're going into Miyabi... except there's less construction doods blocking the entrance. To me Miyabi is wacky. There's not many things I can think of to compare it to. Definitely not any restaurants I've ever been to. The closest thing I can compare it to is... an Indian casino... I dunno if you've ever seen an Indian casino but they are these luxurious, gigantic buildings always way out in the middle of no where. They feel weird cause in Vegas you go into a casino and its nice but your in a big city so it feels natural.. with an Indian casino your like..what the heck is something like this doing here in this field? Going inside this place your just like W, T, F, it feels kinda over the top and out of place.
I took all the following pics with my cell phone..sorry if they suck and don't really give you a sense of the space.
First thing you hit when you come in is the waiting area\bar. In this pic you can see part of the host stand to the right of the image, next to that is the entrance to the main dinning area and next to that is the bar which is hosted by 2 very bored, pro looking bartenders.. Oh we went there around 6pm so while it wasn't that busy it was still a bit early.
If you pan your view to the left you can see more of the waiting area in front of the bar and a window looking into the sushi bar. One thing i didn't take a pic of cause i thought it was cheesy but everyone else seemed impressed by it was the vaulted ceiling above the waiting area. I thought it was cheesy cause its painted like a night sky..only not cool like what you see in Vegas... I will admit the waiting space does have some real potential for extreme coolness if only they had ninja actors wandering around on the ledges above the space. You can kinda see one of the ledges at the top of this pic. Can you imagine how cool it would be to be sitting in that bar then suddenly out of the corner of your eye you see a ninja silhouette moving around above you? Awesome. Remember Ka?
Here is a pic of the sushi bar right next to the waiting area. Really nice.. and really expensive. The most impressive thing I found about this sushi bar was how the sushi chefs appeared to actually be Japanese. Nan desu ka? Anata no sushi wa totemo takai desu! Bakka!
Here's another pic of the bar.. really nice but again their selection of stuff was much more limited compared to ours. They do have Asahii though.. I wish we sold Asahii.
Here is a pic of the entrance to the main dining area, err from inside the main dining area. This leads out to the waiting area\bar. The dinning area is separated from the waiting area so you cant see it while waiting.. Its strange... Because you cant see where you're going to eat, it kinda makes going to eat feel like the moment you get to go into the theater for a theme park ride after waiting in a staging area. You don't know whats on the other side or what to expect. Is that good or bad.. .i dunno.. it does add to the wackiness. Are there other restaurants like this?
You can also kinda see in this pic how the main dining area is broken up in smaller areas. I would guess that's good for when its slow. They can close areas off to make the vast space not feel so vast and empty.
Check this puppy out! Yes your eyes are not being deceived that is a real Floor Vento Max Grill Five Thousand. A thing of beauty ain't she?. The standard grill at "we have tons o money" Miyabi. Instead of smoke being sucked out from above the grill using a giant hood like our stone age grills this sucks the smoke from vents around the grill through a duct system under the restaurant. The result is a smokeless experience. A smokeless experience does have a couple advantages ill admit. First well.. the restaurant wont get smokey which can kinda suck.. also because there isn't grease filled smoke every where they probably wont have as much grease to wipe off everything.. I hate grease. I wonder if they also make the restaurant easier to cool? A lot of hot air comes in through our hoods during the summer. : (
There is one DISadvantage to this smokeless wonder... NO Japanese fire! Japanese fire is when the chef makes a giant ball of fire on the grill and yells.. Japanese FIRE! heh also no Japanese volcanoes.. That's where a chef creates a volcano out of an onion slice and makes smoke come out of it! Hey that's 2 disadvantages. woot. Actually the chefs performance at Miyabis sux ass! He doesn't really do any tricks.. No Japanese Fire, volcano or Japanese chu chu.. LAME! Whats the point you know?
Here's another pic of the main dinning area from where I was sitting. nice huh? I wonder what it will look like in 6months? broke down? ghetto? I hope so but probably not..
Here's a pic of their curtains.. I wish we could have curtains like this.. apparently we used to have curtains like this but they always got soaked with grease and are kind of a pain to walk through constantly so they were removed... permanently.
Here is a pic of their plate and sauce cup thing... its interesting how they have unmarked plates compared to our plates that have our logos on them. I would imagine its a lot simpler to replace these.. not a bad idea.
They give you your sauces in these 3 sauce things.. Going left to right you got your shrimp sauce, ginger steak sauce, and finally your mustard/radish sauce. I didn't like the first 2 sauces which we have but i have to admit i did like the mustard sauce. Something that is interesting about how they serve their sauces is you cant really pour one particular sauce on your food with this thing. At our restaurant we serve all the sauces in individual sauce cups so if you wanna drench your food in shrimp sauce you can just pic up your shrimp sauce cup and pour. You cant really pour an individual sauce from this cause they will all spill out.. you either have to be content with dippin your food in the sauce thing or ask a chef for his sauce dispenser.. The reason why this seemingly small thing is significant is cause our customers really like to drench their food with sauce.
Notice the vent on the grill?? No smoke getting away from that thing.
Here's another pic from inside the main dining area.
Oh the wait staff service was nothing special... Except MAN I did love it when our server implied we were being cheap not ordering drinks by asking if we had just come from church.. AWESOME.. I love being mocked.
Here's my food.. look yummy? Oh I also figured out how to use the white balance at this point. Anyways that food better look yummy.. it cost me 20 freaking bucks before tip. That is the Rib-eye steak dinner for $18.75. What you see there is what I took home.. I didn't eat too much as i was mainly focused on just trying to test stuff out and observe.. Unfortunately for as little as I ate... 2 hours later... yup you guessed it.. I had the shits.. I think they use too much oil when cooking this stuff.. That or someone spiked my food! Everyone knew we were from Masato since people we've fired now work there..
So uh.. Yes Miyabi is nice... but it also feels out of place. Its very expensive, it doesn't have much personality, and it doesn't seem to cater to what is very popular at our restaurant. Am I worried? Yes... but well see. I think as long as we work hard to keep our restaurant clean and work on fixing some stuff up we should be able to easily compete. You know I could see Miyabi working in a bigger city like LA or maybe Sacramento but in small ghetto Savannah it really seems like a bad idea. Will I be going back to Miyabi? uh no I cant afford it!
Now how has Miyabi's opening been effecting us?? Well predictably our customer count has been down significantly recently. I wanna say like 40% average? This is to be expected though in the short term at least right? Of course people are gunna wanna check Miyabi out.. I mean I wanted to check out it too. Luckily?? uh Miyabi isn't solely to blame for how slow its been at the restaurant.. Apparently right now its a historically slow period. I guess cause school just started people are more focused on homework then going out to eat. Ive been told restaurants every where have been experiencing a big slow down.
Finally this just in... one good piece of news.. sources have told me that Friday Masato actually had MORE customers than Miyabi.. While our numbers sucked, only 300 something(usually we do over 400), they apparently only got around 200 customers! Woot! Rack one up for the little guys.
On to random southern stuff. I found this interesting maybe you will too. I mean its so bizarre and I've only seen it here in the dirty south.
You know how dem G's like to pimp out their cars and slam dems as low as they can go on the west coast? Well on the South East coast dems what balling like to raise dare rides as high as dey goes.
Let me introduce you to what I call.. Wagon Wheeling it. I see this all over the place here.. Doods rolling around with GIGANTIC sized rims that look like chrome wagon wheels to me. I mean doods cars will be like 2 and a half feet off the ground! In cali you'll see guys with rims like this on their Denalis but on their Monte Carlos? Wacky southern people. Anyone ever see this before? This is a nice example that i walked by one day going to Chic-Fil-A. You see how hes got that pic of the hulk there?
