WHERE does less than $6 worth of food cost $32? In too many Manhattan restaurants these days, especially when you order pasta, salads and dishes with precious imported ingredients – part of a stealthy sticker-shock pattern that can leave you wondering where your annual bonus went.
Take fettuccine with porcini mushrooms at Valbella in the Meatpacking District – a $32 bank-buster that’s sinfully delicious, thanks to prized fresh porcinis flown in from Parma.
In fact, the dish’s components could be bought separately for a piddling $5.74, according to John Haywood, the new CEO of the restaurant chain Blockheads, who’s been a menu development expert and senior restaurant-chain manager for two decades.
Eager to get to the bottom of the recent run-up in prices, we had Haywood estimate the total food costs of four different dishes, based on ingredient lists we wheedled out of the restaurants. Haywood was not told which places they were from.
He found markups over the estimated cost of raw materials from 282 percent (for Lever House’s veal chop) to 557 percent (for Valbella’s fettucine and porcini mushrooms) – a range reflecting the ooga-booga that goes into restaurant pricing.
Of course, nobody goes out to eat expecting to pay as little as if you cooked at home. But how much is too much? Even though restaurants busier than ever and money seems limitless, customers say they’re taking a beating.
The damage goes beyond the handful of celeb-coddling joints where money is no object – think of Nello’s notorious $27 asparagus – and extends to eateries at every price point. Michael Puskar, 37, an info-tech specialist at NYU who lives in the West Village, enjoys casual, inexpensive eateries nearby.
But, he says, “$50 is the new $30. I’m sort of being priced out of my own neighborhood” thanks to the arrival, for example, of tacos costing $15 for two at Diablo Royale on West 10th Street.
A friend of mine inured to paying $30 and up for “organic” chicken – which restaurants buy for $4-$5 per bird – recoiled from the $20 tab for salad at Café Gray at Time Warner Center: “It was basically a bunch of micro-greens,” she gulped.
Although the 2006 Zagat Survey, out last November, stated that, “the cost of dining out held remarkably steady” over the previous year, publisher Tim Zagat now says, “I don’t know if it’s orchestrated, but I have the feeling prices are going up in all kinds of ways.”
Restaurants need the dough to cover skyrocketing costs mostly unrelated to food. The great Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who owns nine places here, says food costs – especially meat and fish from local suppliers – have not escalated as much as rising restaurant prices might suggest.
“I remember paying $7 for a whole squab [years ago], and now it’s $8.50,” Vongerichten said.
But leases and construction are another story. Vongerichten opened his first small New York restaurant, JoJo on East 64th Street, in 1991 for $200,000 – about $297,000 in 2006 dollars. He says it would cost $2 million to launch today. “You have to do the volume and charge what you must to cover the exorbitant cost of rent and construction,” Vongerichten says.
At certain restaurants round town, “what you must” goes beyond $12 bottled water and specials whose prices your waiter neglects to mention. The sneaky hikes are not always reflected in entrée prices. Le Cirque and Bouley can charge $40-plus for them, but most places strain to avoid the conspicuous-consumption stigma of the Big 4-0 – so they’ve come up with other ways to tap the cash gusher.
You’ll pay through the nose for any ingredient touted as a higher “grade,” imported or “artisanal.” Other ways restaurants rake in more cash include:
JACK UP THE APPETIZERS AND DESSERTS.
When Café Gray opened at Time Warner Center less than two years ago, dinner appetizers were $11-$19. Now, incredibly, they start at $20 and run to $30.
Last week, two of us split a single order of $24 risotto with mushrooms as an appetizer – and we were charged $27. Neither the menu nor the waiter informed us of the sharing charge.
Dessert-creep is all over the map, too. At Buddakan, they’ve jumped from $10 to $12 in a mere three months.
PRIX-FIXE ONLY.
Long the norm at high-end French joints, places with a fixed price-only dinner menu – which obscure the cost of each course – are popping up all over the place.
The recent roster includes Alto (north Italian), Country (eclectic modern-American) and The Modern (French/Alsatian). Most prix-fixe joints are expensive to start and get more expensive almost overnight.
A few weeks ago, a bunch of Country customers howled when they found the original $85-minimum prix-fixe, touted in the Times as offering four choices in each category, had been jacked up to $110 within two months of the review.
Meanwhile, older restaurants that were previously a la carte have converted to prix-fixe-only dinner formats – most notably Eleven Madison Park, which recently switched to a $68, three-course menu.
ULTRA-EXPENSIVE ITEMS.
These are dishes that are much more expensive than anything else on the menu, even if the markup isn’t greater.
You don’t have to order $70 Kobe-style steak options and $50 tuna belly at the Japanese Megu outposts in Tribeca and Midtown, or $100-and-up tasting menus at Del Posto.
But just having them on the list makes everything else seem cheap, and also imposes pressure to spend more. “You see those super numbers and suddenly the dishes for $30 don’t seem so bad,” Tim Zagat says.
THE SMALL-PLATE SCAM.
Once, menus were a snap to navigate. Today, they offer a zoo of categories the waitstaff does little to explain.
Go to party-time places as diverse as Ono (Japanese in the Meatpacking District) and Bond 45 (Italian near Times Square) and you’ll likely be bamboozled into ordering much more than you want or need, thanks to a confusing muddle of small plates, giant plates, and unintelligble choices in between.
EVERYTHING COSTS EXTRA.
That means $6-$12 for every little side of potatoes, mushrooms, greens and beans.
In the old days, an entree (except at steakhouses) was a complete dish combining meat or fish with sauces and vegetables.
No longer. The phenomenon of charging for each extra item probably started with the Greek seafood restaurants selling whole fish by the pound – Milos, Avra, Trata, etc. It has since spread to Craft, new Craftsteak and to all of Laurentt Tourondel’s BLT locations.
GUEST CHECK
Fettuccine with porcini mushrooms
At Valbella, customers pay $32
But the ingredients cost:
Imported porcini $3.75
Garlic, sugar 8 cents
Olive oil 30 cents
Salt, pepper, min leaves 13 cents
White wine 18 cents
Parmigiano Reggiano 15 cents
Beef stock 18 cents
Butter 13 cents
Fettuccine 24 cents
Table condiments 60 cents
Restaurant paid: $5.74
GUEST CHECK
American Black bass
Trata
Breakdown:
Black bass $7.53
Lemon 20 cents
Capers 15 cents
Parsley 10 cents
Salt 1 cent
Table condiments 60 cents
Restaurant paid: $8.59
GUEST CHECK
VEAL CHOP
Lever House
Breakdown:
Veal chop $9.97
Asparagus 45 cents
Morels $3.50
Sauce 36 cents
Salt, pepper 3 cents
Table condiments 60 cents
Restaurant paid: $14.91
GUEST CHECK
Salad Nicoise
Michael’s
Breakdown:
Tuna, grade A $4.50
Baby mixed greens 20 cents
Potatoes, fingerling 27 cents
Egg 11 cents
Olives, Kalamata 15 cents
Haricot vert 45 cents
Cherry tomato 36 cents
Parmigiano Reggiano 23 cents
Dressing 24 cents
Table condiments 60 cents
Restaurant paid: $7.11