{"id":4758,"date":"2012-08-08T09:51:29","date_gmt":"2012-08-08T15:51:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4758"},"modified":"2012-08-08T09:51:30","modified_gmt":"2012-08-08T15:51:30","slug":"restaurant-chains-have-managed-to-combine-quality-control-cost-control-and-innovation-can-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4758","title":{"rendered":"Restaurant chains have managed to combine quality control, cost control, and innovation. Can health care?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2012\/08\/13\/120813fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all&#038;mobify=0\">Atul Gawande:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the \u201cSkinnylicious\u201d menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. It\u2019s a linen-napkin-and-tablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. There\u2019s wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but there\u2019s also buffalo wings and Bud Light. The kids ordered mostly comfort food\u2014pot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon.<\/p>\n<p>The place is huge, but it\u2019s invariably packed, and you can see why. The typical entr\u00e9e is under fifteen dollars. The d\u00e9cor is fancy, in an accessible, Disney-cruise-ship sort of way: faux Egyptian columns, earth-tone murals, vaulted ceilings. The waiters are efficient and friendly. They wear all white (crisp white oxford shirt, pants, apron, sneakers) and try to make you feel as if it were a special night out. As for the food\u2014can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se?\u2014it was delicious.<\/p>\n<p><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Atul Gawande: It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4758"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4758"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4759,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4758\/revisions\/4759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}