SLOP4122: Closure Studies: Post-Mortems for Restaurants That Died
Every closed restaurant leaves a trail: reviews, a delivery menu still online, a map pin marked permanently closed. This course reads that trail as an autopsy — one dead restaurant, one semester, through location, menu economics and the excuse everyone believed at first.
What you will do
On day one you pick one restaurant that has actually closed — not a chain closure, not a rumour, a specific address with a specific "sorry we're closed" sign — and you spend the rest of the semester on nothing else. Every week hands you a different instrument to point at it: location economics one week, the menu read like a balance sheet the next, the star-rating history plotted against time the week after that. You leave with a single finished autopsy report and a verdict you can defend under cross-examination, not a folder of unrelated exercises.
Who it is for
Anyone who has ever watched a beloved restaurant disappear and wanted a better answer than "the rent went up." No hospitality or business background is assumed — the methods are taught from the specimen outward. What is assumed is that you can read a spreadsheet, sit through an uncomfortable disagreement about your own conclusions, and resist the first tidy story that explains the death.