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Fancy restaurants
at Sun, 05 Oct 2003 18:59:49 GMT in
>,
(Siobhan Perricone) wrote :
>As a sort of a break from things, we've been eating out a fair amount
>this last week. ...well, one place had mashed potatoes that really
>needed help. How can they justify charging me $25 for an entree that has
>completely uninteresting mashed potatoes? ...
Although one can always hope that everything on the plate will be a
transporting experience, you can't expect that when you go into a
restaurant. The chances that the kitchen will prepare all foods so that
they happen to align with your exact tastes are very remote. As for the
price, much of that depends on the cost structure of the dish. See below
for more explanation in your particular case.
That being said, you *should* expect that at a fine restaurant there will
be no major miscues. If the potatoes were downright bad, this would be
justifiable reason for a complaint.
>Maybe that's what it was. These were British mashed potatoes. But they
>*really* needed some butter, maybe a bit of cream. They were sooooo
>bland. ...
You could always have added butter to taste. And perhaps that's what they
were thinking. How much butter goes on mashed potatoes is a very
individualized thing. I would prefer very little, perhaps none; my sister
wants the potatoes virtually swimming in butter. For the restaurant to make
an arbitrary choice for the diner makes it nearly impossible for them to
get it right for everyone. So, allowing individual diners to choose how
much butter to add would be, IMHO, a "finer" serving method: then
*everyone* can get it how they might want it, at least on the butter front.
>...individual beef wellington I had was wonderful, maybe that's what I was
>paying $25 for, ...
That's *exactly* what you were paying for. The raw ingredients for beef
Wellington are terrifyingly expensive (beef tenderloin, foie gras), and the
labour involved is Herculean (you have to make puff pastry, then partially
roast the meat, then wrap everything, then bake some more). Meanwhile the
raw ingredients for plain mashed potatoes are spectacularly cheap
(potatoes, perhaps milk), and the labour is minimal (peel, boil, mash). I'd
guess that the mashed potatoes might have represented at most 5% of the
total cost of the plate.
> ... but I was just disappointed that everything wasn't
>spectacular. ...
Finally, I think you may need to get a more realistic idea of the price
point where you really *can* expect everything to be spectacular. A lot
depends on where you are, of course, but $25 for a main course isn't yet in
the super-high-end range in very many places in the USA. Here in Seattle,
$25 would be a standard price for a "quality" restaurant - not exceptional,
certainly not world-class, merely a decent place to have a good meal that's
above the level of, say, an Olive Garden. The price where you really do
start breaking into the great restaurants is about $40 for a main course.
Other places in the USA may well have lower dividing lines, but I've seen
they're not much lower - my experience is that the high end starts
somewhere about $35-$55.
That's not to say there won't be restaurants that are absolutely world
class for much less, and it's always delightful when you find one of those,
but below about $35/main course the statistical probability that a
restaurant will actually be out-of-this-world falls to the level where that
restaurant will rank as a "discovery".
Summarizing, I think you were disappointed because you went in with
preconceived expectations of what the experience was going to be like. I
prefer not to anticipate too much in advance how good a restaurant will be.
That way, if it's great, it's a wonderful surprise, and if it's simply
good, it's a low-stress enjoyable evening.
--
Alex Rast
(remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)
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