THINK of one business that has an assured market from all walks of life. I’m giving you 10 seconds to guess it.
If there’s one business I’d like to venture into, it’s food. The principle behind this is people have to eat.
One food business that has attracted many diners is the all-you-can-eat (AYCE) concept or as we Filipinos phrase it, eat-all-you-can. The AYCE business has been around for some time. Its staying power is rooted in “value for money” that people look for.
Restaurant owners bet that people get stuffed after three plates of good food. Unfortunately, one restaurant owner lost to a triathlete.
Fox News, MSN and The Telegraph reported on Sept. 17 how German triathlete Jaroslav Bobrowski got himself into a noodle. (Did I just coin a new idiom to mean “get in a tangle”?)
Bobrowski is an Ironman competitor and has a strict regimen. He fasts for 20 hours! Naturally, when that period is over, he makes up for it by loading up on food. I don’t know how he can silence his hunger pangs especially because he has a day job as software engineer.
One day, he learned that Running Sushi at Landshut, Germany, was offering a sushi buffet. He headed to the restaurant to eat. At first, just maybe, no one was counting the number of plates he had finished off. When he had devoured 100 phenomenal plates, the management became alarmed.
According to the news, the restaurant owner said Bobrowski had eaten for five people. I think it was more than five people.
I did a tinamban or an estimate on the math that went into one sushi roll. One roll may need a cup of rice and one roll is divided into four. So Bobrowski may have devoured 100 cups of rice, that is, if he only ate four pieces of sushi. (Tinamban comes from the word tamban for sardine or herring. When tamban is prepared for drying, the fish are laid in an arrangement that looks random or guesswork.)
The restaurant owner wasn’t happy. The triathlete said he eats until he is full.
“I was stunned,” he said after he was told not to come back. The ban may have saddened him. He added he was a regular at Running Sushi. Clearly, he ran out of luck at the sushi buffet, and Running Sushi may have run away from its promise to fill a diner all-he-can.
Many years ago, my family went to a Mongolian grill to try its noodle buffet. My cousin Jethro polished off eight bowls. It was a good thing we were not blocked at the door two months later when we came back to celebrate a relative’s birthday there.