"Want to make a million in the restaurant business?" my late friend 3WC said, "Invest three million." Mark Kurlyandchik in today's Free Press presents an excellent portrait of the cresting restaurant scene in Metro Detroit. Beset by rising real estate costs, a tight labor market and market saturation, the herd is thinning.

It is still a robust scene compare to the food desert of ten years ago but the cracks are evident. Two businesses I never understood why people got into them are dairy farming and restaurants. This part of the article highlights why.

That's what's happening to Nikita Sanches, the chef and owner of Rock City Eatery in Midtown. In the fall of 2016, Sanches reopened his cult Hamtramck hit in a larger space with expanded hours on Woodward right next to a QLINE stop. Six years after becoming a restaurateur, Sanches said he's burned out and ready for a break from the industry despite being busy.

“Since we opened up, even back in Hamtramck which was over six years ago now, it's just been 70-plus-hour weeks,” he said. “In the past six years I've maybe seen my grandmother a dozen times, an hour at a time. It just literally feels like I am wasting precious moments that I could be spending with people that actually love me and care for me. I think my priorities have changed.”