Giant killer dining rooms consume New York

Regina Schrambling's LA Times piece on Gotham's monster restaurants introduces us to the rather unintuitive concept of "high-quality (food) that can be executed for volume." Meaning that, even in a loud dining rooms with hundreds and hundreds of seats, populated by loud type-A New York businessmen "hungry for action" and tapping out messages on their BlackBerrys, you will still pay over $100 a head, and you will like it. From the article:

Burke thinks the days of "the 70-seat fine-dining restaurant" are on the way out. "You've got to do turn-and-burn or charge super-high prices," he says. "Once you start paying volume, it gets a lot easier."

Lost your appetite yet?

To be fair, it sounds like some restaurateurs really have figured out how to deliver haute cuisine to hundreds of seats. Others sound less convincing, like the one with the "waitress pageant at 9 every night."

If your stomach is turning, it may be hard to hear the rumbles when the numbers speak so loudly:

• Hawaiian Tropic Zone, 300 seats, 1,000 covers per day
  
• Buddakan, 320 seats, 900 covers, 16,000 square feet
  
• Morimoto, 200 seats, 900 covers, 12,000 square feet
  
• Craftsteak, 120 seats
• Porter House, 250 seats

See? There really is hope for Pat Kuleto, who has 400 seats, 18,000 square feet and wants to do 1,000 covers a day.