> There's a large difference between a single one off not liking something and a majority not liking something.

If an army of vegetarians walk into a brazilian steakhouse, and complain about the lack of food available, the story remains the same. The vegetarians are wrong for not meeting the expectations of the restaurant's intended audience. It does not matter if you have 1 vegetarian, or millions of them. The second they chose that restaurant, knowing its intended audience, and their own restrictions/preferences, they were in the wrong.

If an army of meat-loving southerners, clamoring about their love for all things flesh, walked into the same restaurant the next day -- would you suddenly turn around and claim the restaurant is now correct? The audience has spoken!

And if it were 50/50? The restaurant is simultaneously right and wrong!

It would be an act of absurdity. The audience is no singular contiguous thing; it can be shifted and manipulated into all sorts of opinions -- the majority opinion is a temporary state.

It would be just as absurd to demand that the steakhouse be made hospitable and of similar quality to both the vegetarians and the omnivores -- it is in serving these subsets of the world's preference that the provider refines their production. To serve equally to all is to provide the lowest common denominator -- something to please none, just as it offends none.

It doesn't matter that the area is full of vegetarians; should the omnivores not be granted meat because 51% of their peers refuse it? Because 67% refuse? 99% refuse? Let the market dictate it nonviable, but do not reject simply because of majority rule.

Again, I was not referring to a one off group. Or person.

But if you have a restaurant and in the course of your first year, only one person likes your food, it's probably you. I mean if you want to go into hyperbole let's go there.

I wasn’t talking about a one-off group either. Let the vegetarians come daily; they are no more correct on day 301 than they were on day 1. They can make up 1% of the restaurants visitors, or 99%; They have not been made more correct.

You could argue that the restaurant is unreasonable to not service this audience — they’re leaving money on the table — but you cannot say that the restaurant is incorrect in trying serving a particular cuisine for a particular audience.

To argue otherwise is to demand that no Chinese restaurant should exist in an American town, serving Chinese food appreciated by Chinese people, because the majority of the locality is American. If you want to argue what matters is the people who actually visit… then ignoring those incorrect visitors will eventually filter them out, leaving you with the audience actually intended (or rather the audience you deserve? Which hopefully matches your intent)

My argument is mostly, that if you don't have enough of an audience to remain open, and there is generally enough of an audience in the area of the restaurant, than it's upon you, not the (potential) customers to adapt.

Sure; I'm calling that unreasonable, but not incorrect. The market determines what is profitable, not what is good. Ultimately if you want something good to persist, you must also ensure it is profitable (or find ways around the market -- subsidies), but it not the case that profitable things are inherently good, and it is not the case that things are inherently not good because they not profitable.

So I say it is unreasonable to hold onto something good in the face of lack of profitability, unwilling to change, but it does not say anything about whether they it was produced well for the audience they intended to serve (it is simply the case that their intended audience either does not exist, or does not exist in sufficient numbers to be profitable -- or it was poorly produced for the intended audience).

I know many people who believe that the "American Chinese food" in some regions of the US is so bland and greasy not because the people making it don't know how to make good Chinese food; but because they're trying to sell Chinese food to a market of people who actively dislike everything that makes authentic ethnic Chinese cuisine distinctive; and that some watered-down tasteless glop (and I don't mean congee, lol) is the local maximum they've found for marketability in that environment.

(Of course, the global maximum — at least for someone who wants to continue to serve that particular market — would be to stop trying to sell these people Chinese food at all, if they're not going to like it. And instead, to learn to cook something where you and your target market can agree on how it should taste.)

> Of course, the global maximum — at least for someone who wants to continue to serve that particular market — would be to stop trying to sell these people Chinese food at all

It's entirely possible that those people like bland Chinese food.

They do like it more than they like Chinese food that has Chinese-food flavors in it, but even with it taken as far as it can be toward their tastes, they still don't like it as much as they like mediocre examples of other cuisines, let alone good examples of other cuisines. To go from a 3/5 to a 4/5 in the eyes of many of these markets, there's nowhere to go but to just start selling tacos or something. (Source: my Cantonese chef uncle-in-law who lives in the midwest.)

I spent most of my life in Arizona... There's some pretty garbage tacos out there... And taco bell,. Del taco and taco dons aren't good. They're ok... Not good or authentic.

So even your counter example can have the same bias.

Even when most people don't like something, all that it means is that it's niche.

But when you do have a lot of those people trying it, just to come out disappointed, then you have a communication/publicity failure.