How much? The hidden costs of restaurant dishes

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/jun/26/how-much-the-hidden-costs-of-restaurant-dishes

30 45 27 days ago

simgt3• 27 days ago

I'm in-between two minds. On one end £9 of labour cost for a plate of asparagus seems deeply inefficient and unrealistic, particularly when the cost of ingredients that also include (hard) labour is £2. On the other, just a century ago being served quality food in a nicely decorated place was exclusively the privilege of aristocrats.

meheleventyone3• 27 days ago

On one end £9 of labour cost for a plate of asparagus seems deeply inefficient and unrealistic, particularly when the cost of ingredients that also include (hard) labour is £2.

Presumably the staffing cost is the front of house staff as well as the actual cooking and then the cost of employing someone to wash dishes, clean the restraunt and so on. Then compared to growing asparagus which seems to largely come from countries with substantially lower wages. Restraunts have always been infamously low margin businesses though.

cma2• 26 days ago

A century ago was 1926.

simgt3• 26 days ago

Yes

65106• 26 days ago

I see some interviews where asparagus farmers explained that the market forces them to sell at a loss. It is apparently an uniquely complicated crop.

They talk about price per kg but I see 4 on the plate? 12 to 20 gram each. 48 to 80 grams total. 21 to 12.5 portions in a kg. £15 to £20 per 1000g

   15/21   = 0.714
   15/12.5 = 1.20
   20/21   = 0.95
   20/12.5 = 1.60

> chop off their woody ends to lacto-ferment, so we can use them elsewhere

Then you cant even say it costs 1.60 in ingredients per plate. It might even be that it costs 72 cents and that the customer gets only 60 cents worth of vegetables.

asparagus can actually be more expensive than some proteins

It's not actually the asparagus but the preparation that costs money.

Overall, the ingredients for this dish are around £3, but the labour, energy and everything else comes to £56

Say 60 which is 100 times 60 cents or 3-4 kg.

The hidden cost is real estate for both the restaurant and the employees. They have few seats and the usual menu has a lot of different things.

If say the city would buy the surrounding buildings (which is a good investment) and provided say 2000 to 7000 seats for free (we've already paid taxes) then reduce the menu to 3-4 meals that you pick up yourself at the counter people could eat there for next to nothing (which would be good for the economy)

It wouldn't be the same experience of course.

pseudohadamard• 26 days ago

I just see it as conspicuous consumption. If you want to pay 200 Zorkmids for someone to wash some oograh in duck's tears and then marinate it in bird's milk before cooking it over a wood fire made with Mongolian teak flown in fresh that morning then good for you, but are you really getting a better meal than the 10 Zorkmid plate from my local favourite restaurant or just setting fire to a pile of money to prove you can afford fancier wank than your neighbour?

Jimmc414• 23 days ago

“On one end £9 of labour cost for a plate of asparagus seems deeply inefficient and unrealistic”

Every time I’ve had this thought that I could recreate a dish and spend a lot less, I end up paying more for the same dish, with lower quality and I still have to do the dishes. It might not be as unrealistic as it seems if you aggregate the wages of all staff involved and divide it by the number of plates they serve over a night. I’m not a cook, but if someone offered me $9 to prepare them a comparable asparagus dish, it doesn’t sound that lucrative.

haritha-j• 27 days ago

As a broke PhD student, my conclusion was that I just need to cook more. As pointed out in the article, the ingredients cost a small fraction of the price of the dish. Yes, its a bit time consuming but its also interesting to make different dishes, and many things like lasagna or biriyani can be batch cooked. There's a lot of really interesting dishes that don't take a whole lot of time per portion.

65106• 26 days ago

I would argue that if building one thing is cheaper per unit than building 100 there is something fishy going on. You aren't even good at cooking!

broken-kebab2• 26 days ago

Manual labor may as easy be more expensive at scale, not cheaper. Then if you really read the article there are tax/regulatory expenses which you are spared of as an individual.

collingreen• 26 days ago

If the restaurant made only one dish and employed a skeleton crew reheating it from frozen because it was made in enormous batches then yeah they might be able to reduce the cost so far below you doing it at home that they can pay the other restaurant overhead and still come out on top. That's a lot different than running a full service restaurant though.

DangitBobby2• 26 days ago

If you like Indian food, you can make absolutely gigantic batches of curry in the instant pot for low effort (stove top also viable requires a bit more attention), then freeze or refrigerate the curry and serve it with rice or protein of choice at your leisure. Awesome for college students because you can make not-quite restaurant quality food with very limited kitchen supplies.

armchairhacker3• 27 days ago

Lately I’ve been finding most restaurant dishes “low quality”: in particular, less meat and tastes overcooked compared to what I make at home, though grains and vegetables are also blander.

I suspect this is more me being a harsher critic than restaurants enshittifying. I’ve been improving my cooking. I do get premium ingredients, that sometimes cost much more than the cheapest alternative, but still always much less than even low-end restaurants.

So my conclusion is, if you like good food you should cook yourself. Maybe if you’re rich enough to always eat at especially expensive restaurants, but even then I think you’d prefer a private chef.

meheleventyone3• 27 days ago

If you like food you should do both! There are plenty of things it's hard to cook at home or impractical to keep all the different things you need. A good example is ironically a really simple food. Pizza needs temperatures most domestic ovens aren't nearly hot enough to provide in order to make a quality result.

Restaurants also provide an opportunity to eat foods you've never experienced before which really helps cooking similar things at home as you have some idea of what the end result should be like. And the beauty is that this often doesn't have to be expensive to be good.

It's like any creative hobby you need to develop both craft and taste.

armchairhacker3• 26 days ago

You’re right on both points.

I’d say restaurants are great occasionally. It’s generally bad to go more than occasionally.

I don’t get why there are so many though, especially generic ones.

manarth2• 26 days ago

    > "Pizza needs temperatures most domestic ovens aren't nearly hot enough to provide"

This is where the hobby-cook market has started to be addressed; e.g. Ooni Pizza Ovens aren't cheap, but they also aren't a suitable commercial oven, so very much aimed at the home hobbyist/enthusiast.

pards• 26 days ago

I’ve been finding most restaurant dishes “low quality”

Many restaurants use pre-made components like sauces bought from restaurant wholesalers which explains a lot of the sameness across establishments.

Hollandaise from a bag? No thanks.

jareklupinski4• 26 days ago

my theory is that restaurants used to just close when the owner / chef / patrons ran out of steam to keep an excellent place afloat

it seems to be more popular now to buy a struggling business that seemed highend, give it a new coat of paint, swap the menu for something from a university cafeteria, and keep it making money for a couple decades

because that was the point... i guess...

65106• 26 days ago

The point is to get nutrients into the labor force.

Eddy_Viscosity22• 26 days ago

Restaurants are enshittifying, in the US this is largely the Sysco effect where more dishes come pre-prepared to the restaurant from mass production lines. They range from bad to peak mediocrity.

armchairhacker3• 26 days ago

In Europe?

yoshyosh• 27 days ago

dishes and costs in asia and different venues would be solid here

comrade1234• 26 days ago

I thought this was going to be about the actual dish-ware, not food.

I remember one of the few newer fancy/expensive restaurants in San Francisco that survived the 2000 dot-com crash did so in part by dropping their custom-made (along with their restaurant logo) dishes/glasses for normal plain dish-ware.

(They also simplified their menu - still very good, just a bit less exotic)

rjh292• 26 days ago

Very much a UK problem. Almost 10 quid of labour to cook a simple asparagus dish? VAT exceeds price of ingredients. This is why going out to eat is a huge luxury here.

Meanwhile in Asia you can get cooked meals for less than a dollar from a hawker stand or eat a beef bowl or ramen for like 5 dollars in Japan. Why is that?

krustyvonklown• 26 days ago

Does the stand rent a cherry picker to clean their chimney? It may seem absurd, but it is probably fair that a restaurant has to take steps with it's externalities, and only absurd in the context of all the interest groups that don't have to take similar steps. Personally, I would suspect my health was damaged by living directly above restaurants in either of two places with terrible attention to air quality risk.

manarth2• 26 days ago

The comparison isn't like-for-like: the article is describing sit-down restaurants where diners are likely to spend an hour or more in the restaurant.

A $5 ramen from a chain restaurant in Japan might be viewed as the equivalent of a UK McDonalds meal deal at £5.50 (UK prices generally translate 1 USD into 1 GBP, so it is more expensive in the UK, primarily accounted for by taxes).

rjh292• 26 days ago

You can go to plenty of chains in Japan where you can spend an hour, you'll still spend half of what you pay in the UK.

McDonalds too, a Big Mac meal is £7.99, it is £3.60 in Japan.

simianwords• 26 days ago

In the other thread about doorman fallacy, lots of folks were signalling that they do actually like waiters and other labour.

This post puts the price to pay for the luxury in perspective

bomewish2• 26 days ago

Seriously ? These are not sympathetic! The first seems like a whole lot of pointless faff for nothing much at all — who needs an emulsion made out of salvaged organic chickpea bubbles — and the second complains about not being allowed to raise prices… yet she can! It’s just that you’d get fewer customers.

Also - this is presumably profit after all the wages are taken out including for owners of the place? If so it kinda depends on what their wages are to know if this whole situation seems super unfair.

DangitBobby2• 26 days ago

Who needs aquafaba? Vegans and vegetarians do. It's an emulsifier and often takes the place of eggs and other animal derived products in a dish. It's not expensive, you get it for free when you cook with chickpeas.

bomewish2• 25 days ago

Forgive my ignorance. It sounded super yuppie.

ksec• 25 days ago

This is a typical guardian writing which does not actually reflect the business of restaurants.

Rent and Staffing cost are fixed / operational, and half of the energy cost as well since you will need to turn light and fan on regardless whether you have customers or not.

How much? The hidden costs of restaurant dishes

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