Backchannel:

…former employees at The Melt, ranging from the top echelons of the company to in-store crew members, tell a complicated story of a company that had to roll out sweeping changes to its initial model after overestimating the competitive advantage of its technology — which proved to be both a source of strength and, at times, a liability.

When I first heard of this “grilled cheese restaurant’ in 2011, I predicted it would be a failure. I think the last paragraph shows why:

“I think if you’re looking for the angle of, like, what went wrong, I would say that nothing went wrong,” Kaplan told me when we last spoke. “But what we did learn is that the quality of the food is the most important reason why someone comes to a restaurant.”

If that’s something you had to “learn” before opening a restaurant, you were destined to fail.