Way back in April, I wrote about the breakfast shops in Taiwan. More specifically how I had a breakfast sandwich from one shop that was so terrible, it turned me off of breakfast shops for over a year. Well in honor of me just this week going back to a breakfast shop, I decided to write a post about a very unique type of breakfast shop.
An interesting thing about Taiwan is how for many years hamburgers have been a breakfast staple. Yep all breakfast shops serve hamburgers and chicken burgers. Well back in 2002 one place decided to make a whole breakfast shop just out of burgers alone. So pictured above we have Laya Burger.
Their premise is basically to take the one type of hamburger and chicken burger that most breakfast shops have and expand those to have a wider selection. Which basically means different sizes of burgers and added things like curry.
They also added uh.."sandwiches" to their menu, which are mainly just different types of "subs." Quotations are used because while they advertise that they are American style, there is absolutely nothing American about their burgers or subs. In fact you can always tell that a foreigner hasn't been here long if they complain about how terrible the burgers are at Laya Burger. It's because they haven't been here long enough to realize that it's not really a burger restaurant, that it's actually a Taiwanese style breakfast restaurant.
They did have a kernel of a good idea once though. They opened up a Laya Burger chain that was open for lunch and dinner. In Taiwan they really aren't big on the idea of breakfast at any time of the day, but us foreigners know better. Even though Taiwanese breakfast is nothing like a western breakfast, there have been plenty of times that I and other foreigners have wished a Taiwanese breakfast place was open for dinner.
So what went wrong? They changed their menu. They didn't really have any of their breakfast offerings, and instead added more lunch and dinner foods such as pastas and salads and set meals (meat, rice, veggies). Essentially changing what made them unique. Yes their sandwiches aren't the best, but they are unique enough that I'd love to be able to get one for dinner every now and then. But as poor a copy their burgers and sandwiches are of western food, their attempts at dinner foods were even worse. It didn't take long for people to stop going to their lunch/dinner restaurants.
