A Mexican restaurant I like has freshly prepared tableside guacamole, is that excessive in your opinion? This is my go to date restaurant, the entrees are quite reasonably priced by Chicago standards. Their drink prices are a bit on the pricey side especially for the better margaritas, but I know restaurants make their money on alcohol and who doesn’t want a margarita with Mexican food.
The $10 certainly isn’t a deal breaker, but I just noticed it was $7 in a restaurant in Washington DC, which generally has higher prices.
At my local Mexican restaurant outside Boston it’s $14, with chips and salsa. But it’s REALLY good and worth it. So I think $10 is perfectly reasonable.
Considering just the price of just the avocado, the time dedicated to getting the staff to your table to smash it up and later wash the dishes, and a little extra to ‘keep the lights on’ it’s probably reasonable.
I think you would have to take into account how large the serving is. That would not be excessive to me if it was a generous appetizer serving for 2-3 people.
Our local place (which has a menu designed by a Next Food Network Star contestant for her family) charges $9.99. That’s in Southern California, where there is no lack of competition for good Mexican food.
I suppose it depends on how much you get, but I live in an inexpensive neighborhood in Chicago that is mostly Hispanic, and guacamole at one of the restaurants by my house is $8, and it’s not prepared tableside or anything like that. To give you comparison prices, tacos are $2.25 each (a buck on Tuesday, though). Ten bucks does not seem too spendy for me in a nicer restaurant, especially with tableside prep. Heck, even at Pepe’s (local chain), it’s about eight bucks, and there’s no tableside prep there, either.
In UK money that’s about £7. When I make Guacamole at home I use a medium Avocado with tomato, chilli, spring onions, limes, coriander leaf, that probably comes to about £2 of ingredients just for a one person portion. If they make it fresh, make it well and make enough for several people then I think it would a reasonable price.
Certainly if I could find a restaurant that made it for £7 as well as I do at home I’d be a happy man.
(I’m not going to be falsely humble about it, I make very good guacamole but it is very little to do with culinary skill and all to do with being able to spot fresh and ripe ingredients and to spoil them as little as possible)
For table-side service, and assuming this is plenty for 2+ people, $10 sounds very reasonable.
Totally reasonable. You’re paying for the extra equipment and effort to do it table side and usually get the chance to customize it to you liking. It’s almost always a serving for at least 2 people. This makes WAY more sense than a $8-10 microbrew or the $7 basket of chips and queso at most places.