Locally Owned / Corporate Franchise

Asia's Finest Restaurant Versus Noodles & Company

The SE corner of HW 96 and Centerville Road has been a destination for quite a while.  Asia's Finest Restaurant is locally owned.  I've been partial to their egg roll salads.  The retail space to the right in the image was formerly a PDQ store.  PDQ had very good baked goods and a delightful staff.  Holiday remodeled their store directly east across Centerville Road and raised the bar on food and service.  PDQ is gone.

Ownership is often difficult to define.  When one sees a standalone single retail outlet it's probably locally owned.  Marianne's Kitchen is a good example.  We have one location on the planet.  When you visit Asia's Finest Restaurant you can ask for something special or talk to the people responsible for the food.  It's possible that this Noodles & Company is locally owned, perhaps a franchise.  Franchise operations pay a significant percentage of revenue to the corporate entity who also defines the menu, specifies the suppliers and trains the staff.  Most corporate food franchises are set up so you really don't have to know anything...and that usually shows.  The food is often prepared elsewhere, items are pre-portioned and it does not take much more than a high school teenager to put the product in front of you.  Most food venues are lucky to have a 5% profit after expenses.  Franchises pay from three to twelve percent of revenue to the corporate organization.  The only place to make up that fee is in food quality and labor costs.

This is also an opportunity to show why small business is a challenge.  Really, who would put a quasi-Asian restaurant next to an Asian restaurant?  Usually it comes down to money.  Undoubtedly Noodles & Co. signed a long term lease and they have deep pockets and the building owner probably followed the money.  Hopefully patrons will continue to patronize Asia's Finest Restaurant.  It's not much different than Caribou which started here in the Twin Cities.  They had some money and located where the independent coffee places had shown market success...to the demise of most independents.  At a point Caribou sold out to a German company which was good for the Caribou stockholders and now locations have closed.  If your are looking for a locally owned coffee place I can recommend Limu Coffee in New Brighton.

And so it goes.  We have a good relationship with our building owner and it's unlikely that we've have competition in the same building.  Quite a few corporate food outlets have opened just north of us on Lexington (Noodles & Co., Pot Belly, LeeAnn Chin, Five Guys, Chipotle and soon Raising Cane's).  It's fine that people go there.  We all eat different things to keep life interesting, but we change it up all the time, we work to learn your names and we personally thank you because we really do care.  We can't franchise our special customers and we can't franchise what we do.