I’m not speaking for @Martin_Hyde or anyone else here, but it’s more the notion that the kitchen is overseen, the menus developed, and everything else kitchen-related is done by a genuine chef. I’m not looking for a virtuoso or a celebrity, but I do expect that it’s a chef, not a kitchen manager and a bunch of semi-trained cooks strictly following the same recipe that the others in the chain have.
There’s definite artistry in that sort of cuisine, and it really comes in as much in the ingredient sourcing, the dish and menu development, as it does in the literal preparation of the food.
For example, the only thing that really sets a Texas Roadhouse apart from say… that Cooper’s Hawk place is that one is considerably more expensive than the other. Both are more than likely sourcing their stuff at a corporate level, developing their menus at a corporate level, and so on. It’s not artistry, it’s logistics. Meanwhile, somewhere like the other places mentioned in the thread, that artistry is in effect, and that’s what having a chef mentioned promises, more or less.
That’s why I was curious in the thread; “nice” to me equates more into a high end place exhibiting that culinary artistry, not merely some condition of having clean carpets, good waiters, and tasty food. Those places are fine, but lacking something. They lack something indefinable about the way the food is prepared, presented, and even described by the wait staff.
Well, yeah. There are chain restaurants and holes-in-the-wall slinging plain old spaghetti to the can’t-be-bothered-to-cook-a-simple-meal-at-home (or living in student apartments and don’t have a kitchen, etc.) crowd, but I agree with @Martin_Hyde these are highly unlikely to end up being “nice restaurants”.
These prices are astonishing. I’ve been to a place I thought was really nice, right outside of the Biltmore Estate, and looking at the menu, the filet mignon is currently $39. I guess with a couple glasses of wine and an appetizer, I could put myself in the $70 range; but that’s like the place I went once in my life to celebrate a 13% raise. And even then I don’t think I spent that much.
For me, “nice” means I might spend, with a drink or two, as much as $50 on one person.
Are you really that far off then? If your idea of a nice restaurant is one in which the per-person cost with a drink or two is fifty bucks, it’s not so hard to understand that someone else might spend seventy.
Our standard date night is a nice local steakhouse. It’s not fancy and we didn’t feel bad taking three kids under 6 there recently on a Friday night but the ambience is nice and the food is great. A Texan we just took then said it was as good as any steak he’s paid twice the price for in Houston.
A 12 oz NY strip is $47 and comes with one side. Typically, on a date night, we’ll have an apatizer, a bottle of wine two steaks and split a dessert and it’s rare we get out of there for less than $200. Everything in our little tourist town is expensive though and burgers at the brewery will end up at $50/person.
For me nice is about the quality of the wait staff and the quality of the food I’ve only been to one place that I knew the head chef’s name and that was because he named the restaurant after himself. Their current menu has the three course menu at $50/person before you have drinks. I just checked our old date night place in Denver and their entrees are $20-30, ~$15 for an apatizer or dessert plus a $10 drink and it’s easy to break $50 per person and with tip we’d run $150 for two.
These are just places around Denver that I’ve frequented over the years but I think you’d be hard pressed to find nice for less than $50/person and $70 wouldn’t involve going crazy.
Looking at Morton’s and choosing the cheapest salad/appetizer, steak, and side is $71. No drink, no dessert. Ruth’s Chris or Capital Grille would be similar.
Now you can definitely get cheaper steaks, but that’s probably a good country wide reference.
I mean if you’re at $39 for a steak you’re easily in that ballpark for the $70 ranch if you get an appetizer and a dessert. A lot of “nice” restaurants, people go to kind of experience a multi-course thing like that too, for many people it’s either a special occasion, or they’re people like me who like to enjoy a nice restaurant as one of my recreational activities, so I tend to order more liberally than I would if I’m just dropping into a place to satiate myself or just have a quick bite. Like in a “normal” dinner where me and a friend go to grab a couple drinks and some food after work or something, I never get dessert and it’s rare I get more than just an entree. But a nice restaurant I’m making a very deliberate / special effort to go to, I like to kind of experience the full thing start to finish so to speak. Makes it fairly easy to hit that $70 mark before drinks.
I understand what you’re saying, that a nice restaurant will have an actual head chef who directs the cooking and menu, rather than a line cook in charge, who’s been given some kind of title and follows instructions from the owner. I agree with you.
I’m questioning whether your definition of “nice” is closer to fine-dining than most other people’s definition. If I’m going to a fine dining restaurant, I almost always know who the head chef is, although the “name” chef may be an executive chef or a chef patron. For nice places, I’ll again often know who the head chef is, especially if it’s featured on their website, or if I found out about the restaurant from reading a review. From looking around a bit, I can see that that feature is more widespread than I thought. However, I can think of plenty of nice restaurants that don’t have much of a reputation and where I have no idea who the head chef is. Generally these are smaller restaurants that attract people who live locally, or who are in the neighbourhood for some other reason, rather than travelling to the restaurant. I don’t view knowing who its head chef is as a criteria for deciding whether I think it’s a “nice” place or not.
When you’ve been driving all night, and a Denny’s looms on the horizon in the early morning, then that Denny’s looks like a pretty nice place. And it is: hot and fresh coffee, cold orange juice, and the ability to make a BLT (even though it may not be on the menu, the waitress tells you that they can make one anyway) with home fries on the side. Denny’s is the nicest restaurant in the world to be in, at 6:00 AM on a Tuesday morning, and I speak from experience.
Denny’s is a far cry from Hy’s, or The Keg, or Smith and Wollensky’s, or Ruth’s Chris. All are nice, but in different ways.
I still think you read something in my comments that wasn’t there–namely that I was saying the restaurant has to have a “celebrity” head chef or a “famous” head chef. I never said that. I started off by saying “it will put the head chef’s name on their website or menu”, I later amended that to say more generally the restaurant would make its head chef’s name known, through marketing materials, maybe somewhere in the restaurant itself, in a restaurant review etc. It has nothing to do with renown. A brand new head chef just breaking into the field, I would expect to still have their name listed in some form by the restaurant. It’s not about the notoriety of the chef, it’s about the fact nice restaurants have head chefs because they aren’t running a corporate menu, they have a professional working on developing their menu and running their kitchen.
And fine dining IMO is much easier to define than “nice restaurant”, fine dining has formal elements that are not required to make a restaurant “nice.” Fine dining has formal rules for how a service is conducted, has waitstaff that are required to dress in very formal fashion and etc.
One nice thing about living in ski resort area, is that we never get sticker shock about prices when we visit/vacation somewhere expensive. $70 for a decent dinner and a couple of drinks is cheap.
The second most expensive meal I’ve had - besides the California Grill at Disney with drinks - was at the Doubletree at Breckenridge which was $80 without drinks - just water. Then again I did have an entree and an appetizer and a salad cause I hadn’t eaten very much the previous days.