‘Check, Please: The challenge of creating a world-class restaurant — and turning a profit’

An interesting New Yorker feature (subscription required) by John Colapinto about today’s high-end restaurant business, focusing on New York’s Eleven Madison Park and its young, ambitious, perfectionist co-owners.

As you might expect, there are parallels between a great restaurant and a great technology thing: User experience design, making the correct tradeoffs to balance quality and profitability, getting a good review from the top critics, etc. And there are ways to screw both up by going too far.

Anyway, a good weekend read if you can get ahold of it.