I make good soup and sandwiches regularly anyway. Why would I need to pay through the nose for substandard equivalents.
That’s the weird thing about eating out here. So many restaurants don’t even meet the price/quality targets of the convenience stores yet seem to think it’s quite okay to charge 3 or even 4 times what the convenience stores charge. Honestly, if they bought it in 7 and put it on a plate for me. At least, I would enjoy the food.
Unfortunately, many restaurants are me-too restaurants. I miss: https://suni.tw/treemancafe/. I miss their coffee, cute drawn menu and food. It was great! One of our favorite restaurants sold up during Covid. They’d worked out a formula for selling food and were quite busy … the poor boss had her work cut out for her during Covid. I can understand her reluctance to keep going.
The new owners (relatives?) completely rebranded the place, but focused on pasta and rice based Italian-style dishes. They sold similar food, except it wasn’t that similar. They didn’t roast coffee and their plates didn’t have yogurt dressing, side salads and silky soft eggs that were a delight to eat. But they really copied some parts of the original menu, but without really doing a better job. Now they closed a year ago. Temporarily they claimed. Well, we’ll see as it’s already been more than a year. Still closed. I predict it will renovated and reopened as a different restaurant.
I kinda wonder if the landlords took over the lease of the restaurant and bought out the business there. It’s happened before in Zhuwei that a successful business lost its location as the landlord claimed it back, then re-opened it in the same spot because “well, it couldn’t be that hard, could it?” Totally hard.