I’m the un-adventurous eater who would be a fan of people kibble washed down with tap water, but even I have paid more than $30 for a meal on occasion. (For purposes of this discussion, I’ll include meals that others bought for you, and include main course, appetizers, dessert, drinks, and tip.)
On fewer than 10 occasions, I’ve eaten at restaurants where others footed the bill for meals costing well over $100 per plate. I’m sure I’ve picked up the tab myself for at least a couple of $100 meals - where the tab for me and my wife exceeded $200. Hell, on very rare occasions I’ve cooked steak or a tenderloin which may have approached $30 per person. It just strikes me as odd that someone would have gotten very far into adulthood and would never have eaten at a restaurant where meal and drinks did not exceed $30.
Please offer any characteristics that might explain your experiences. For example, are you a rich heiress living in midtown Manhattan. Or a welfare baby living on a farm…
I’m 62, upper middle class, lifelong from the Chicago area. I would be happy to go the rest of my life never eating in a restaurant. But on occasion, I have found myself in a restaurant where the cheapest entree is around $20. I generally gravitate towards the chicken or veggie - which tends to be on the lower end of the price range. I’ve had others pay several hundred for my plate - which I did not enjoy at all, either for the taste of the food, or my perception of the value. But if the person has the money to spend and that is how they wish to spend it, more power to them.
Right. I wasn’t asking folk to identify the highest priced meal they ever had. Sorry if my OP misled.
Instead, I was asking for other people who have NEVER paid as much as $30 for a meal in their life.
In my sheltered existence, I could imagine someone who was born into and never escaped poverty being in that position. But $30 as a lifetime max did not impress me as terribly high for most adults over the course of their life.
It’s not but I know someone who has never spent more than $30 on a meal voluntarily. I don’t mean that anyone exactly forced him - but when you are on a weekend/weeklong trip and you don’t have your own transportation, you are probably not going to be able to eat at 7-11 or McDonald’s for every meal. When he goes on a trip where transportation is not necessary, he finds cheap places to eat on his own - but that’s very few trips, maybe one out of ten.
My personal experience is likely skewed by the fact that I eat out extremely rarely. If not on vacation, WELL under once a month. And my wife and I eat pretty simply. We often will eat a meal we both find extremely tasty and satisfying, and estimate whether the ingredients cost even $5 per person.
So on the rare occasions that I DO eat out, it is generally a special occasion, and I’m not clipping coupons or caring whether the tab for the 2 of us is $60 or $100 - or even $200. (I’d probably think twice if the tab for 2 exceeded $200.) I’m regularly surprised at how pricey relatively unspectacular meals are, even in what strike me as relatively modest restaurants. To have NEVER paid $30 for a meal suggests to me that one has either been very consistent in their choices, or that their circumstances have forced such frugality.
I’m certainly not the type of person the OP is looking for. Even going out for a nice lunch by myself, I usually end up paying more than $20.
However, I do know the type. About 25 years ago, I was part of a group of half a dozen scientists touring labs in Japan. We had a free day in Tokyo, so everyone split off, but coming back to the hotel in the evening, I ran into a couple of my colleagues and we decided to have dinner together. One of us recalled having a very good shabu shabu dinner somewhere nearby, so we set off to find some shabu shabu (in the Ginza!). We ended up in a restaurant that reeked of money and when we walked in, I muttered that we weren’t getting out of there for less than $75. My friend said, no, think higher, it would be more than $100. We ended up having a very good dinner with plenty of beer and sake, plenty of fine food, and lots of stories, some of which might have been true.
The next day, two of us are in a cab to the train station, along with a professor who was part of our group. We started talking about what we had done with our free day, and my friend and I started good natured wrangling over what dinner had cost, $100 or was it more? The professor remarked that he would have liked to come along with us and he’d have no problem paying his share of the bill. I leaned over to him and said, “No Ted, it wasn’t $100 total, it was $100 each”. He went pale and was quiet for the rest of the cab ride.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it, it was that he couldn’t conceive of spending that much on dinner.
I’ve never had a $30 meal but my with has a couple of seafood medleys that went over $30. There are numerous places around here to get a perfectly good steak dinner for less then $20. Delicious oysters on the half shell, 3 for $5 during happy hour. I’m happy. Grilling at home I usually get Walmart’s choice Black Angus filet minion that is currently $20/lb. Two 8 ounce filets for $20. Heck, I have only drifted up into the twentys in the past year or so.
In 1996 I was in New York on business and met up with a friend who grew up in straitened circumstances for a coffee after work. She was a college student at the time.
We had this coffee in the restaurant of the hotel I was staying at. I remember two coffees and two very nice pieces of cake came to $34. She was freaked out. She said she’d never paid more than $10 for a meal in her life.
I then took her back to her home in Queens in a taxi and she thought it was most extravagant.
Thanks for the responses. If not too much to ask, would you specify whether your frugality reflects choice, lack of means, lack of opportunity, or some other factors?
I don’t know. I don’t keep track. Pretty routinely we will eat out and get a meal that’s $150-$200 for two of us. Expensive wine means nothing to either of us so we will go for the lower end of the wine list. I’ve definitely paid for than $75 just for a steak. I’m going to a restaurant because I can afford it. If I couldn’t afford it I wouldn’t go.
On a business trip, a couple of us went to Cheesecake Factory for dinner (because we would have had to wait more than an hour for the local restaurant we wanted to eat at); my bill was close to fifty bucks, though the ten-dollar slice of cheesecake contributed to that. I don’t think of Cheesecake Factory as upscale food, but it’s quite easy to spend more than thirty bucks there.
Pre-COVID a chef friend of ours donated a dinner for two, prepared by him, in your home. The menu would be chef’s choice and the dinner would have seven courses.
Chef donated this offering for a charity auction. I really wanted to buy this, so I bid from the start (all items began at $1). There were 3 other people bidding against me, so we went from $1 to $50 pretty quick, at which time I raised my hand and yelled, $200.
I was hoping to scare away the competition, but nope. No sooner did the auctioneer recognize my $200 than one of the other serious bidders yelled, $400. Then someone went $500. I bowed out. (It went for $800)
That reminds me of the time, almost fifty years ago, when a New York Times columnist won a charity auction for dinner at any restaurant of his choice. He and another NYT writer went to a well-known Parisian restaurant and had a 31-course meal that cost $4,000.
