How does this dish sound?
Market-Fresh Salad: Farm-to-table butter lettuce with sculpted chilled cucumbers, chopped seasonal red onions, sheep’s cheese, crushed walnuts, wild-caught tuna, with a white wine Italian vinaigrette with fresh herbs and cold-pressed olive oil, generously piled high on a porcelain dinner plate.
I’m finding something similar on the website of Cheesecake Factory for $30.
This lunch for two would be $60 plus tip plus beer, plus who knows what fees, which get us close to $85, and we might as well up that to $100 to include parking.
Guess what. That description above is just random stuff from my refrigerator and cupboard. It was easily thrown together, with wonderful results. These are things many people let rot because they buy them and can’t figure out what to do with them. Yes, the tuna is from a can, but it is indeed wild caught, and wonderfully delicious.
But you have to consider. Is this worth $100 instead of, say, $10 at most from stuff sitting around? Maybe it is. Maybe you have money to burn. But many people these days do not. And yet they haven’t cultivated the habit of making do with the groceries they have.
So please do not try to recreate this dish above! The point is not to look up a recipe, slog from store to store spending money, and then follow it as if it is marching orders. The point is to make wonderful things from what you can find and what you have, improvising along the way, as one should and must.
Yes, I cheated by describing the ingredients in eloquent ways. But that is exactly what restaurants do. They also offer a dozen other items. We love to pick among many choices. That’s why we adore menus.
Remember how dreadful it was when menus were on our phones via QR codes? Fortunately, those mostly seem gone, along with the entire touchless economy dystopia.
With paper menus, we let our server know what we want and then it appears. No clean-up. It’s like being a king in the Middle Ages, available to all. It’s also a thrilling new environment.
You aren’t really buying the food. That’s just the headline product. You are buying the whole experience, but that’s hugely expensive. It includes rent, maintenance, a big staff, and vast overhead in regulatory compliance.
But you are going to pay and pay heavily, especially these days.
Once the lockdowns ended and hospitality, restaurants, and bars reopened, they became the saving grace of the jobs market. They were booming and many people found excellent work, after having seen so many other jobs eliminated.
That lasted for a while, but then came the inflation. It ravaged cost structures and the narrow margins of many eating establishments. You see, despite the seemingly huge prices of the restaurant experience, the costs are exorbitant too.
In a hyper-competitive market, restaurants are loath to pass on costs to customers in a way that would deter them. They look instead for high-margin items that customers are more willing to purchase without bothering with price. They found beer, wine, and liquor. These items among all classes of goods have gone up the least in this inflation. That means they can be bought low and sold high.
As a result, beer, wine, and liquor at restaurants have skyrocketed in price. I’m not going to put a number on it because it varies so much. But you know this already if you have ordered any at an eating establishment. The point of the increase has been to subsidize losses in other areas. It has worked for two years.
But the margin squeeze has been very intense for restaurants. The inflation came at the worst possible time, after two money-losing years of lockdowns and capacity restrictions. They were barely getting going again, and they got hit with exorbitant cost increases in every area. But in any case, the scheme worked for a time.
The evidence is growing, however, of a consumer revolt against restaurants and bars, and that is hurting the bottom line. Hiring is frozen and falling, and there are growing reports of bankruptcies.
The speed of the boom and bust in restaurants has been alarming to behold. They went from being the biggest growth industry, along with hotels and so on, to being in real trouble from a financial point of view. One shudders to think what the industry will look like in a year if this inflation continues, particularly with wholesale prices. As it is, wholesale prices are up now for four months straight.
We all want to support our local eating establishments. But with all economic issues, the question is: at what cost? At some point, you will likely replace your routine of going out to eat with meals made at home. This is sad from a business point of view but probably ever more necessary for household finances.
The point is simple, however. Eating at home instead of out can be a real delight. But it will likely require a change in your habits. Learning to cook can be fun, especially when you free yourself from the bondage of recipe books and instead make do with what you have. You might be surprised at how many great meals you can make with just what you have in your cupboard and refrigerator.
If it really comes down to it, we all need to eat more healthily and with a consciousness on weight and fitness. The American diet is truly awful. The means to fix it is not with more pizzas and frozen meals but with the fresh stuff that you find around the edges of the grocery store. You might also consider other shopping sources, not always the store that plays fancy music but maybe the store with cardboard boxes sitting around that smells like a warehouse. It’s all the same once you get it home.
There are ways to preserve a good lifestyle even in hard times. It starts with a focus on food. Giving up the restaurants can be hard, but you might find that doing so will create better habits in the long run.
My strong recommendation: Learn to cook not by following recipes but by discovering how to make the basics. Once mastered, you can make glorious dishes out of whatever you have around. You can even hold dinner parties, complete with elaborate descriptions of ingredients like that which opened this article. Your home can be as good as or better than any restaurant.
In any case, the economics of our times might require change. My heart breaks for the sufferings of the industry of food away from home. But a bit of correction here can do us all some good.
