When Danish uber restaurant Noma opened its 10-week pop-up in Sydney at the start of this year, the set price for dinner was A$485 (£300) a head, plus drinks. The hefty price tag did little to deter punters, and all 5,500 available seats sold out within 90 seconds.
At Tokyo’s three-Michelin-starred Sukiyabashi Jiro – located in a subway station – around A$300 will buy you around 20 mouthfuls of fish and rice in an experience that’s all over and done in around an hour.
How about Tetsuya Wakuda’s Waku Ghin in Singapore? A evening there will roughly set you back an eye-watering A$600 with matching drinks, but for that you’ll get what many consider one of the best dining experiences in the world, collecting together ingredients like specially commissioned old-growth wasabi from Nagano, truffles from France and Russian caviar.
The a la carte menu at Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée in Paris will set you back around A$150 for each course, and dinner at New York’s Per Se starts at US$325 a head (food only), but once you add wines (the same price as the meal) and bolt on “supplements”, optional extras like wagyu and foie gras, Per Se can top out over a US$1,000 just for one.
Dropping what many would consider a week’s wages for a few hours of dinner might seem obscene, but the global high-end restaurant scene today is bigger, better and more accessible than ever before.
Have we all gone mad? A perfectly delicious meal can be bought for just a few dollars anywhere in the world, but as a dining public we’re still willing to pay hundreds of times more than that at some of the restaurant world’s most coveted tables.
The question of how much is too much to pay for dinner can really only be answered by what the market demands, and demand is seemingly insatiable. Destination restaurants are popping up everywhere, the lists and guides that direct us to them are more numerous than ever, and reservations are snapped up in seconds, months in advance.
It’s not madness, of course. Ironically, fine-dining is one of the most egalitarian luxury experiences money can buy. A few hundred dollars for the best dinners in the world is pennies compared to other parts of the luxury market.
People pay thousands of dollars to sit in a slightly-more-comfortable plane seat for a couple of hours, tens of thousands more for handbags, and hundreds of thousands for fancy watches. The most desirable cars in the world sell for millions, and in the art world can see paintings sell into the hundreds of millions without anyone batting too much of an eyelid.
Imagine how much it would cost to have one of the world’s great artists paint you a portrait, or a chart-topping musician to perform at your wedding. Six figures? Seven? You can get fed for hours by the best chefs in the world for just three.
The problem with food is we forget what we’re paying for. We all know the cost of a chicken or a tomato in the supermarket, and when we sit down to a restaurant we expect the price of our meal to be relative to that. But the real value-proposition of a high-end restaurant isn’t ingredients. It isn’t even tasty food really, as perverse as that may seem.
At a high-end restaurant you’re paying for art, skill, concept, theatre and service. The meal itself is little more than a vehicle for those things.
It might sound terribly wanky but if all you’re after is good food and you’re paying $500 for it, then you might not be doing it right. You could just as easily be satisfied in that regard with a $5 cheeseburger or an apple off a tree.
In the grand scheme of what we will pay for experiences, a few hundred dollars for the services of some of the best chefs in the world, a good meal and an unforgettable experience? It’s a bargain if you ask me.
