Yesterday, I teed up two ideas that I believe determine whether a restaurant will soar or bust. One of those ideas, perhaps the more important of the two, is clarity.

I truly believe this: Unless you are opening a Chili's, restaurants should be polarizing.

By that, I don't mean "love it or hate it." What I mean is that restaurants should have a niche, a raison d'être, a reason to be remembered. See, when diners decide which restaurant they want to visit, they do not think in broad terms or "positioning statements," which restaurateurs agonize over for hours, even months.

Customers think about restaurants in terms of problems: "I have to take my boss somewhere where she'll be impressed." Or, "I need someplace special to take Mom for a great Mother's Day brunch." Or, "Where's the most memorable place I can take my girlfriend to ask her to marry me?"

Or, they think in tiny, specific categories: "Let's go someplace new and trendy." "Let's go get some pasta, but not to a red-checkered tablecloth restaurant." "I want banh mi, but somewhere with some ambiance."

Here's the problem, the real reason behind the incessant churn in the restaurant biz: Most sort of upscale or casual fine-dining, chef-driven restaurants that have opened in the last few years don't solve any of these problems. They don't have a crystal clear focus that makes them stick out in diners' minds.

And unless you are Grant Achatz or someone with his kind of star power, your restaurant absolutely cannot rely on the concept of "great food" to continue to draw people in. There's great food everywhere, even — in the increasingly foodist society that is America — in peoples' own kitchens. Your job isn't just to deliver great food; it's to deliver a memorable experience. Doing your job right means honing your concept to such an extent that you become the obvious choice for someone solving a problem.

Here's what I mean: Right before my Mom turned 70, she went through a mind-boggling amount of personal crap, including the summer when my Dad had four brain surgeries in three months, two of which involved a medical helicopter transferring him from one hospital to another. My sister and I wanted to do her birthday up right. Truly the only restaurant that would tell her how much we loved and appreciated her was Daniel — in New York City, not Chicago, where we all live. So, we all got on a plane and flew to New York. Daniel being Daniel meant that it, and nowhere else, was the only place that would do for Mom's 70th birthday. Didn't matter that Daniel was a plane ride away. Daniel owned the category of "where to take Mom for a big birthday after Dad has had several brushes with death."

Unfortunately, a lot of new places don't realize the importance of clarity. They think they won't get enough customers if they think tiny, so instead they decided to be as many things to as many people as possible. I hear it all the time, restaurateurs telling me their place is "For everyone! Yes, Ellen, we want your grandma and your niece to both come here and love it!"

The result is that no one knows how to use these restaurants. They don't solve anyone's problem. And once that "new-restaurant sheen" has worn off, they become an afterthought. They become the place diners visit when they can't think of anything better to do, or they're in the neighborhood, or it's half-price wine night.

And these are the kinds of places that either close after a few years (usually 24-36 months), or worse, in my mind, spend years floundering in the backwaters of diners' minds.

How 'bout you; ever dial up your honey and say, "Hey, let's go out tonight, let's go to a 'kind of a steakhouse but not really a steakhouse?'" Or do you say, let's go out for steak?