The pizza that’s taking over the US | Hacker News Reader

The pizza that’s taking over the US

seattletimes.com

4 pointssowbug4 comments

I'm always excited to try new pizza styles. But see below:

  the Starkness ($25), made with red sauce, mozzarella, roasted garlic, pepperoni and mushrooms, and the Dolinsky ($23), an ode to the renowned pizza expert, with the same red sauce and mozzarella plus housemade Italian sausage and hot giardiniera.

It's super frustrating when a bar snack gets marked up to a ridiculously inaccessible price and only sold at pretentious places where clientele can actually pay that. For once I'd just like to go to a normal restaurant and get something good to eat, not choose between Popeyes and a place serving $25 bar snacks.

$25 is hardly markup in Seattle.

It is stupid expensive here in general. ;P

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not defending a high price, moreso commenting that the number in Seattle is not surprising to me (a resident) at this point.

I think the usual answer why that can't happen is that you're not paying just for the food, but for the ongoing expenses of the business: rent, labor, etc. Which means that you could order just a glass of tap water as your entire meal, but they'd have to charge you probably $50 for it, or else they'd go out of business.

This leads to a weird business idea: what if there were a restaurant that priced food and fixed costs separately? You rent the table by the hour, and the food is priced close to its materials cost plus the time to prepare it (basically rental of kitchen + staff). So if you sit for an hour enjoying your pizza, the bill still comes to about $30, but it's $25/hour for the table and $5 for the pizza.

There are many reasons this wouldn't work, besides the weirdness I already mentioned. People would sit for an hour, order 100 pizzas, and contract out DoorDash drivers to sell 98 of them at normal pizza prices. It's unclear how take-out would work if there isn't any space rental. And while I don't think many restaurants make a lot of money, I do think they like making more money when people eat more food.

Kenji Lopez-Alt has published a good recipe for tavern-style pizza: https://www.seriouseats.com/crispy-bar-style-pizza-star-tave.... It takes a couple days from start to finish, but otherwise it's very easy to make.

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