S.F. restaurant's $72 fried rice was a runaway hit and also the chef's nightmare
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Even at 120$ it would probably still have worked.
Calling it over-the-top bait is so strange to me. He seems to have put so much effort into actually making the dish good and then was surprised that people liked it. Like he actually tried! Was the joke that people who buy $72 meals are idiots? It's like a student who tries really hard in a class as a "prank" on the teacher.
Maybe I don't get the joke, but if I went to relatively cheap restaurant and saw a $72 dish I'd expect the dish to taste good. If it did, I'd be pleasantly surprised and tell others about it, if it didn't I'd feel ripped off and probably never order there again. If me being happy and well-fed is the purpose of this prank, then I wish more pranks were like this.
Dishes like this are almost always agglomerations of expensive ingredients -- truffles, caviar, wagyu. I'm just surprised it doesn't have foie gras -- and perhaps that's only because foie gras was illegal in California until recently.
It's over the top by design. It may be only in San Francisco that it could possibly catch on, where just living there is so expensive that food is a tiny percentage of your budget.
As you say, it sounds like he was at least shooting for a bit more than "a bunch of expensive ingredients". A chef will usually want to be known for technique and judgment, though most people don't really care about either one. It's the same way in every field: movie buffs want films that are different from the same-old action movie; coders want to write clever algorithms more than merely being useful.
But to really pull the joke off with another dish costing $48, it would need to cost at least $200 imo.
Yet, it's also hard to price it too high, because at the end of the day, it will taste like very tasty fried rice, with expensive ingredients laid on top.
If you go too high, you're setting very lofty expectations.
So they were stuck in a rock and a hard place.
Could they have offered it for longer? Sure, but I think they made the right call. Call it quit on high note.
But what I want to know is: what kind of bleeding idiot is going to spend $72 or $105, or $129 on f-cking dinner?
Like lottery people who win $25 million and are flat broke 4 years later.
Financial diots. They're everywhere.
There’s a paywall but the full text can be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20210806030142/https://www.sfchr... . Wasn’t sure whether I should submit the original URL or the one without a paywall.