Designing a restaurant menu is completely different from designing a restaurant experience.
With the menu, you could choose ingredients, and portions and preparations. But when you start thinking about the whole experience, you have to consider how people reserve tables, parking, how they are greeted, the servers, how food is served, what the tables look like, what the environment is like.
You have to consider dozens more variables. It can be overwhelming, but also deeply empowering. To rethink everything about what a restaurant means gives you a chance to go places no one else has dared to go.
When you start with many degrees of freedom, you can always focus in on what matters. But when you start with a limited selection, it’s much harder to expand your influence.
Seek degrees of freedom and wield them wisely.