There are dishes like I dunno for a random example beef consumme where if I want to see how a restaurant makes it rather than at home my choices are limited to places fancier than I care for and more expensive than I care for(maybe for a special occasion I’ll keep it in mind).
Why?
I fully understand why something like kobe beef or fugu is expensive, the food itself and the preparation are $$$. But a lot of dishes you’ll pay out the nose for have very pedestrian ingredients that should not cost a bundle.
The same rule goes for ethnic places, if you find a hole in the wall and hear people speaking their native language you’re in for a modestly priced authentic treat. But if you are in an area without sufficient expats to support such a place you’ll find the only other choices are pricey and of varying quality. Why?
There is no market for modestly priced fine dining(where cost of supply allows)? I don’t even want the fine dining experience, just the food.
grude, such a thing does exist to an extent in the UK - the ‘gastropub’. They save money on the premises by combining forces with a building that is already functioning as a pub. They’re not cheap, but they’re not outlandishly priced either.
Furthermore the ‘pedestrian’ ingredients of which you speak are sometimes quite expensive in fine dining restaurants, as the chef will be aiming for the absolute best.
Friends of mine ran a gastropub in England (and went bankrupt), and their chef cost them £30K p/a.
At a restaurant you are paying for three things: the food, the labor, and the location. Any of those could be expensive and drive up the price.
I suspect the reason why the hole-in-the-wall ethnic places have such low prices is because they are usually owned by a family. This allows them to pool costs and have cheaper labor (possibly even “child labor”).
This is a random example of what I am talking about:
I could walk into one of several groceries in Houston and if by chance the sushi chef was there they would gladly make my special request tuna rolls with just the nori rice and tuna and a whole tray would be $5 USD. This was a Japanese chef trained in Japan, not some minimum wage teen and the sushi was pretty damn good for a grocery store the rice was perfect and vinagery and the tuna fresh.
If I wanted sushi from a restaurant my options were a all you can eat Chinese buffet with absolutely atrocious faux sushi containing stuff like broccoli and cooked shrimp and bits of fried white fish for $10 USD a head.
Or the real sushi joints with waterfalls and bamboo surrounded sunken seating I could expect to pay at least $30 bucks and being more realistic and including a drink and sides around $50.
If the grocery store can do it, how come no one has made a self serve McSushi place? The seating and toilets can’t cost that much.
An uninformed guess here - some people think the more expensive something is, the better it is. Surely that explains why people buy bottled water around here when we have perfectly good tap water…
My WAG is that it comes down to cost; most low-to-mid-level restaurants are businesses first (if they want to be successful) and Temples to Good Food second (to a point - you can’t sell total crap and stay in business.)
Take your example - consomme. Heck, let’s just take homemade stock. Not difficult to make, but it takes a long time. The ingredients aren’t particularly expensive, either. But few restaurants make their own stock, because paying an employee to babysit a vat of stock for 3-8 hours a day, even if it takes minimal employee time, can’t compete with the low price of commercially produced stock or soup base. Is it better? Yeah! Can most people tell the difference once it’s made into soup? Depressingly, no. And in fact, many people are so used to the watery, salty stuff that is commercially produced stock that a real stock tastes too rich/just wrong to them.
Given that, is a restaurant going to spend the time and money to make something that really has very little return on the dollar? Nope. But a high-end restaurant is expected to have homemade everything, and has a clientele who will be able to tell the difference between Swanson’s Chicken Stock and the real stuff. They also charge a heck of a lot more than the place on the corner.
I had to look up Consommé (which would have been easier if you’d spelled it correctly :p), and I found several good reasons why it might only be available in expensive restaurants:
It takes a long time to make. (“Once the ‘raft’ begins to form, the heat is reduced, and the consommé is simmered at a lower heat until it reaches the desired flavor, which usually takes anywhere from 45 minutes to over an hour.”) And a restaurant isn’t going to make up a batch ahead of time to have on hand unless it can be reasonably sure that people will order it. At a less-expensive restaurant, people probably won’t even know what it is.
It’s trickier to serve. (“Consommés are usually served piping hot because they tend to cool down more quickly than other soups and form a gel. They are most often served with garnishes, which vary in complexity from a simple splash of sherry or egg yolk, to cut vegetables, to shaped savory custards called ‘royales’.”)
It takes a lot of meat. (“A large amount of meat only yields a small amount of consommé; in some recipes, as much as 500 g (a little over a pound) of meat can go into a single 250 mL (8.2 fl oz) serving.”)
All good reasons why I wouldn’t expect to find it at Denny’s.
On preview, I see that Athena has said much the same thing.
I seem to remember a few sushi places which were about like that when I lived in Torrance, CA. Torrance is home to the largest Japanese-American population in the country, so the market could support them.
And, to be honest, that’s a lot of it. If a restaurant doesn’t get enough traffic to survive on low profit margins, it’s going to have to raise the margins.
I agree.
I got a Sauces cookbook because the nice fancy restaurants make delicious sauces to go with their meats that really make the dish taste so good.
Then I read what goes into making glace. Holy crap. It’s essentially essence of cow. The amount of meat and bones and heating that go into making stock is unreal. For a triple stock they do it three times! Then they boil it down to concentrate the flavor even more.
While I see what you’re saying, it’s not usually the case that you’re taking great meat and turning it into stock. I don’t usually make beef or veal stocks, but when I make chicken stock, I start with the carcass, picked clean of most of the meat. The meat goes back into the soup later. Similarly, when I make shrimp stock, I’m using the shells and heads with very little other meat. All of those bones and bits would have just gone into the trash, but this way, I get a little extra nutritional use from them, and a whole lot of extra flavor.
Stock making’s a PITA, but it’s not that hard, at least for the simple seafood and chicken stocks I make. Demiglace, OTOH, probably is difficult.
For the OP, as already mentioned, food costs can be a reason why certain dishes aren’t served. When I worked in a local hotel, we had a somewhat famous French chef who was running the semi-attached restaurant. One night, the chef showed/bragged to the night manager about his restaurant, and I got to tag along with them to see his walk-in freezer. You wouldn’t believe the sheer breadth and diversity of ingredients: shellfish from Brittany, Normandy butter, fois gras, etc… Most of the labels were in French. I shuddered at what his food costs must have been.
I am curious, grude, which grocery stores in Houston have Japanese-trained chefs doing the sushi work. Hong Kong Market? Ranch 99? I had thought they were mainly Chinese/Vietnamese, but I’m probably wrong. Maybe Central Mark-up, ahem Market? It’s certainly not the guys at Kroger, et al. To continue with sushi/sashimi, one of the significant differences between supermarket sushi and a place like, e.g., Teppay, is going to be the quality/freshness of the ingredients and the skill with which they’re prepared. I like supermarket sushi, and I love Teppay, but there are significant differences in quality between the two.
At times, looking at a lot of restaurant’s menus online, I think Gyrate’s #3 point is most applicable. Though for many of those, I think the guests are gouging a third party: their expense account.
In the store they sell a one-ounce packet of demi-glace, made from beef and veal. you add a cup of water and simmer for a few minutes. It costs about $4 for the packet.
Demiglace isn’t necessarily very hard, I keep some in the freezer all the time.
If you’re making the classic Escoffier demi, yeah, it’s involved. You make the veal stock, then you make an espagnole (which is time-consuming and laborious in itself), then you reduce them both and combine. It’s a several day project.
That said, few chefs - even high-end chefs at world-class restaurants - make true Escoffier demi anymore. You can make a simplified version which is basically reduced veal stock that is very, very good. That’s what I make, and it’s no different than any other brown stock, only you reduce it down to jello-like consistency. I then freeze it in blocks. I do it maybe once a year, and it’s great to pull out blocks for amazing sauces.
Someone has, just not in your neck of the woods. You go in and sit down at the counter, and a little conveyor belt full of plates goes by. You take what you want - plates are colour-coded to indicate the cost - and when you’re ready to leave they tally up your bill from the pile of dishes. It’s still not McDonalds-cheap but then fish isn’t as cheap as beef.
Yo!Sushi is not the only place like that - places like Wasabe and Itsu do a booming cheapish takeaway business - but then there’s a big demand for that sort of food around here. If there’s not much demand in your area, there’s no point in opening a restaurant like that.
The supermarket can probably get a better deal from the fishmonger because it buys so much fish. Also, it’s typically going to offer a much narrower product line than an actual sushi restaurant.
There’s another aspect to a very high end restraint – investment.
For one thing it can take up to (and possibly beyond) a year to simply build out a space. In that time you are paying rent, construction costs utilities etc., and you have no revenue coming in. You start deep in the hole.
Then you have to develop a menu. For your mid level place this isn’t a real problem as you are likely serving dishes you’re already familiar with, but with the high end you are creating a new, unseen before menu – your customers expect it . This involves developing many dishes and preparing them over and over and over until you have them just right. While you’re doing this you’re spending large amounts of money on top quality ingredients and as before you have no revenue to show for it.
Now you have to hire and train a staff. This can take months for professional quality service and guess what? These folks need to be paid so they can eat while they’re undergoing 6 weeks of training.
Then there’s drink service. That 2000 bottle cellar isn’t going to pay for itself. Do you plan on having decent cocktail service? All that liquor needs to be bought up front too. Add to this the fact that at the high end diners are becoming more and more demanding in their desire to have a unique and professionally made cocktail list and to do that you need to hire a really, really good bartender or mixologist – not the guy from Duffy’s saloon on the corner. Believe it or not these guys have reputations, not as highly visible as a top chef but they are known, and they can demand good coin and once again they’re going to be pouring out a lot of the booze you paid for to develop a cocktail list that fits you new venture just right and sets it apart. It bears repeating – you’re still not getting paid for any of this.
So now you’re opening your new place and you’re DEEPLY in the hole. The thing is that to pay the level of attention your customers expect you can only do a couple hundred covers a night tops. That’s not a lot of customers so they’re gonna have to pay accordingly.
Now that your restaurant is up and well received and humming along…
you need to change the menu to stay seasonal because no one wants to be eating your deconstructed turkey dinner in June, so start over with the new menu with all the costs outlined above and get your mixologist to adjust the drinks special with lighter ingredients for the spring…
Repeat this whole process endlessly until you finally go under after maybe a decade if you have an exceptionally good run.
