Felix Salmon

The world’s best art is not the world’s most expensive art. But artists like being rich just as much as the rest of us, and so there are a lot of ambitious artists out there, working the art world hard, making precisely the kind of art which appeals to the tiny group of global plutocrats willing and able to drop millions of dollars on a single contemporary artwork.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. But the problems start arising when art-for-global-plutocrats starts becoming broadly accepted as the best and highest form of art being produced today. It’s not: it’s just the most expensive, and the most celebrated. But drawing that distinction is very difficult, and probably pointless — at least in the art world.

In the food world, however, the good news is that things are different. The foodie equivalent of the trendy million-dollar artist is the chef with a $200 prix-fixe tasting menu featuring dozens of tiny courses. There’s even a globally-recognized league table: the higher you appear on the San Pellegrino list, the better (and more bankable) you are. Haute cuisine generally works on the same basis as haute couture: the latter is a loss-leader for perfume sales, while the former is a loss-leader for lucrative books, consulting contracts, and the like. Eventually, you can kick away the ladder entirely — the restaurant which always used to sit at the top of the list, El Bulli, has now closed, freeing up time for its global-superstar chef, Ferran Adrià, to make much more money elsewhere. While it’s always nice for a restaurant to make a profit by selling food, the big money comes from brand extensions, after you’ve become globally famous.

The economics of restaurants on the San Pellegrino list are very different from classical restaurant economics in other ways, too. Not only is narrow profit-maximization kicked down the list of priorities, but so is the cultivation of regulars. New York has more than its fair share of these places — Atera, Per Se, Brooklyn Fare, Blanca, Momofuku Ko, etc. But very few of them have regulars. Instead, they fill up with gastrotourists ticking the place off their list. This is most obvious at Eleven Madison Park, which has reinvented itself quite explicitly as a high-end New York tourist destination, complete with New York tour guides. And if you read John Colapinto’s profile of its chef, Daniel Humm, it’s clear that Humm is deeply invested in the San Pellegrino game, and is playing to win.

Corby Kummer, in his delicious Vanity Fair takedown of the whole tasting-menu phenomenon, describes his meal at Eleven Madison Park as “worse than bad”, and says that Humm “seems to be re-inventing himself to chase trends”. Kummer is far from being alone: the NYT’s Pete Wells came down hard on tasting menus back in October, and found that his piece struck a real chord with his readers. And then there’s Dana Goodyear’s examination of the lowest levels on the tasting-menu ladder. These are the small underground restaurants whose reach might exceed their grasp, but who can still persuade a certain class of diner to shell out large amounts of money to eat lots and lots of clever morsels:

Frizzell went out to the patio, where the guests were assembled at a long table. “This is nose-to-tail eating, in a vegetable fashion,” he said, presenting the peas. Several courses followed, meagre and mainly protein-free. At a certain point, even the hostess’s enthusiasm seemed to be growing forced. “It is totally amazing what you can do with my tiny kitchen!” she chirped, over a plate of red-cabbage juice that had been turned into what Frizzell described as a “fluid gel” thickened with ultratex, a tapioca starch. When a tray of bacon-infused whiskey cotton-candy pops, made by the bartender, came around, the diners snatched at them desperately. Then it was time for “nitrogen play.” Frizzell decanted the liquid nitrogen into a small bottle with red-bell-pepper coulis and whippets inside, and shook it wildly before shooting the contents into a bowl. Cold smoke tumbled out and rolled down the long table. “Red-bell-pepper Dippin’ Dots!” Frizzell announced triumphantly, spooning a pile onto every plate. They melted on my tongue—the ghost of nourishment. I thought of something the founder of the Web site Gusta had said about underground dining: “We liken it to going to a doctor. You don’t say, ‘This is the medicine I need.’ They tell you what you need. The chef tells you what you should be eating.” In this case, I was able to self-diagnose: what I needed was some food. I saw a gourmet truck on the way home, and stopped for a hot dog.

The point here is that the critics, wonderfully, are increasingly not buying what the chefs are selling. I personally swore off tasting menus after six hours and 20 courses at Moto in Chicago, which culminated in one of my dinner companions going so loopy that when she was presented with a syringe of something chocolatey at the end of the meal, the contents ended up in my ear rather than in her mouth. Naturally, that brief journey off-script was by far the most memorable part of the evening.

I’m not saying that there’s no place for these restaurants. There are enough international gastro-tourists in the world that the most successful of them will always be booked solid, long in advance. And there are enough ambitious chefs that there will always be a lot of competition to get into the top tier, to be mentioned in the same breath as superstars like Rene Redzepi, Grant Achatz, and Thomas Keller.

But as the number of courses escalates along with the prices at these places, the world of tasting-menu restaurants is increasingly becoming as inaccessible and irrelevant as the world of first-growth Bordeaux. It’s fine for the self-selecting few within its hermetically-sealed borders, but the rest of us are perfectly happy making do with the occasional cheaper morsel trickling down from Mount Olympus. We don’t have FOMO — fear of missing out — because we know the air up there is too thin in any case for the likes of us. We are the people who don’t think that every dish should tell a story, the people who don’t get bored with dishes after three bites, the people who do get bored with any meal after the first dozen courses or three hours, whichever comes first. And increasingly the food press is taking our side, rather than that of the self-selecting elite.

Would that the art press did likewise.

Who doesn’t like hanging out in a chocolate factory? My visit to Cacao Prieto, in Red Hook, was fascinating: what I wanted to do was understand the reason why artisanal chocolate (or artisanal coffee, or even artisanal mayonnaise, for that matter) seems to be such a fast-growing market these days.

Both Dan Preston, of Cacao Prieto, and Tim McCollum, of Madécasse, agreed that at the supply end of the chain, nothing much has changed. They’re using Victorian technology, largely (although Preston has built some clever new machines of his own), and relying much more on a simple back-to-basics approach than on anywhere that buzzwords like “scalable” might apply. That said, the marketing at least has got to be much easier these days; the Cacao Prieto website, in particular, is gorgeous, at a cost which would be a rounding error in the context of a big chocolate company’s ad budget.

And the demand end of the chain has changed a lot: as Dan says, there’s a whole new market now for what he calls “fine chocolate”, as opposed to “confections”. And truth be told, that split makes a hell of a lot more sense than, say, the creation of “super-premium vodka”, which is to all intents and purposes identical, in everything but price, to any other vodka. Chocolate, even more than coffee, has a depth and richness of flavor, when it’s carefully and lovingly made, which is easily worth six bucks. (Compare, for instance, the amount you’d pay for a very good coffee, or a very good glass of wine.) If you cultivate an audience of people who consider themselves connoisseurs, they will happily follow you to a world of unprecedented pricing.

On top of that, artisanal chocolatiers, much like Fair Trade coffee merchants, can tell a true story of how they’re doing a very good job of treating developing-world farmers with respect and high prices. That message resonates to differing degrees with different people, but at the margin it certainly helps.

Why are these kind of businesses cropping up now, in particular? I think there are a few reasons. Firstly, money has appeared to fund them for pretty much the first time. In a zero interest rate environment, risky businesses with little correlation to anything else look increasingly attractive — and on top of that, the number of socially responsible or impact investors is rising impressively, and chasing a relatively small number of opportunities.

Secondly, food prices in general have been making up a smaller and smaller proportion of household expenditures for generations now. Here’s food-price inflation, in blue, charted against personal consumption expenditures, in red: the gap just keeps on growing. And in that gap, there’s room for people to spend a little bit more on edible luxuries, without significantly increasing the proportion of their budget that goes to food.

Finally, consumers of pretty much any product, from duvets to dishwashers, tend to become increasingly sophisticated over time. The low end of the market becomes commoditized, and the margins migrate to the high end. This kind of chocolate doesn’t scale to Nestlé or Hershey size: as Dan explains in the video, Hershey was not able to maintain Scharffen Berger’s quality after they bought it. But both Cacao Prieto and Madécasse have room to grow a very great deal from where they are right now. Which is good news for their investors, and good news too for the many parts of America which have yet to discover the wonders of artisanal chocolate.

I have a column at Grub Street today looking at some check-by-check level data for five New York restaurants. I got the data from the good people at Bundle, and NY Mag turned it into pretty charts, complete with a red line marking the median amount spent at each place.

But of course there’s much more to these charts than could be fit into a Grub Street column. So here they are again; this time I’ve added two more datapoints to each one. The blue line — which is always to the right of the red line — marks the mean cost of a restaurant meal. That’s the number you’ll see if you visit the Bundle website. And the blue Z marks the amount that Zagat thinks a diner is likely to spend, with tax, tip, and one drink. At Per Se, for instance, the mean cost is $878, while the Zagat cost is $303. (This is a slight apples-to-oranges comparison, since the Zagat price is for one person, while the Bundle data is not per person but rather per credit card or debit card. But both are intended to give an idea of how much the restaurant is going to cost, and the Bundle data is surely  much more accurate on that front.)

Zagat reckons that the “cost” of a meal at Megu is $87 — which is surely meant to mean something. But few people pay much attention to Zagat cost estimates, for good reason — in many cases, it’s actually impossible to get out of a restaurant for the amount of money listed in the Zagat guide. At Per Se, for instance, even with no drink at all, the $295 prix-fixe menu, plus tax, will run you $320.

So how much does Megu cost, in reality? It turns out that question is pretty much impossible to answer. On the Bundle page for Megu, we can see that the average amount of money charged per credit card is “about $200 to $210”; that’s based on a mean expenditure per card of $198.82. But if you look at other kinds of average expenditure at Megu, they look very different.

The mean expenditure, $198.82, is basically the total amount spent there divided by the number of cards used to pay for it all. So if someone pays for a massive blow-out party there, that’ll raise the mean expenditure for everybody else. The median expenditure at Megu is substantially lower than the mean — it’s $126.87. Finally, there’s the mode. If you put all the charges at Megu into $10 buckets, instead of the $25 buckets in these charts, then the mode charge at Megu is between $70 and $80. More than 7% of charges at Megu fall in that range, which means that if you charge your card at Megu, there’s a 1-in-14 chance that you’ll spend seventy-something dollars on that card. That doesn’t make it exactly probable, but it’s more likely than any other amount.

But why try to reduce everything to a single number? This is one of those cases where a picture — or a histogram, rather — is worth a thousand words.

The Megu chart is actually about as simple as Bundle’s restaurant histograms get. Megu was not picked at random. It was picked because it gets lots of customers, and therefore generates a lot of datapoints in the Bundle database; because it is open only for dinner, which means that the numbers aren’t complicated by mixing up a relatively low-spending lunch crowd with a higher-spending dinner crowd; and because it doesn’t have much of a bar scene — if you drink there, you’re likely to eat there too.

But even so, the range of expenditures at Megu is enormous. More than 4% — one in 25 — of the card charges at Megu are for less than $20. And at the other end of the spectrum, more than 1.5% of the card charges are for more than $800; in fact, according to the Bundle data, you’re just as likely to spend over $800 at Megu than you are to spend between $600 and $800. What’s more, if you look just at the people spending more than $800 at Megu, their average expenditure is a whopping $1,894. The tails, in other words, are long.

I’ll admit that I was hoping to see some humps in Bundle’s histograms — what statisticians call a bimodal distribution. If Babbo’s histogram, say, has one spike at $100 and another spike at $200, then that would be a pretty good indication that eating at Babbo is likely to cost you about $100 per head. The $100 spike would be people paying for themselves; the $200 spike would be people paying for someone else as well. And then maybe we’d see another spike at $400, too, where people picked up the check for a party of 4.

But I had no luck on that front. If you squint and hope and delude yourself a little, maybe you can find those spikes at $100 and $200 and maybe even $400. But what about that spike at $250?

The main message I get from the Babbo chart is just that there’s an extraordinarily large range of checks at Babbo — you have a pretty good chance of coming up just about anywhere between $60 and $270. Which is not particularly helpful if you’re someone trying to anticipate how much the restaurant is likely to cost.

In many ways, though, the most interesting of all these histograms is the one for Per Se. Here, everything is set: the menu is a fixed price, the service is included, and while some people are sure to push the boat out when it comes to wine, you can pretty much expect that most checks there are going to be much of a muchness. Can’t you? Actually, no, you can’t.

One in every 35 visitors to Per Se spends less than $75 there — how is that even possible? The mean, median, and mode are relatively close together — $878, $768, and $800 respectively — which implies to me that if you take one other person there for dinner, it’s very easy to end up spending about $750 to $800 altogether. Except, that seems to be very much on the low side. Food alone can run you as much as $610 per person, and most people will spend hundreds more on wine.

At the far ends of the spectrum, fully 18% of the people spending money at Per Se are spending less than $325, which barely seems possible, even if you take into account the 3-days-a-week lunch menu at $185 per person. And that spike at the end representing people spending more than $3,000 is pretty substantial — those checks account for less than 2% of the payments run by the restaurant, but fully 10% of all its dining revenues.

In between, there’s all manner of activity going on. There are two spikes at $600 and $800 — people like to put round numbers on their cards. 44% of all spending takes place in the range between $575 and $1,100 — but that just means that 56% doesn’t.

All of which leads me to conclude that the very idea of a typical meal at a restaurant — or the idea of what a restaurant “costs” — just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. At Mr Chow of Tribeca, Zagat — which we can use as a guide to the minimum price — says a typical meal will run you $77. Bundle says the “real price range” is $200 to $210. The median amount charged to a card there is $145. And 2.1% of customers spend more than $800, while 17% spend less than $70. What will you spend if you go there? Pick a point on the chart and guess. One thing’s for sure, though: you’re wrong if you think that the diners at Mr Chow Tribeca are some kind of homogenous and interchangeable mass. They might look like that from the outside, but in fact there’s a lot of variety there.

It would be nice indeed, then, if there were some neat formula where you could take the price of the average entree, say, multiply it by three, and get a typical all-in price per person. Sadly, there isn’t. Some restaurants make most of their money on cocktails; others concentrate more on the food. Some allow diners to eat cheaply, others don’t. But the big picture is that the differences between restaurants pale in comparison to the differences between diners. Some people are just going to spend a lot, others are going to get away with spending much less.

The next best thing, at least for people like me, would be a look at these histograms. If we had that, along with the ability to easily drill into the data, it would be an invaluable addition to Bundle’s service. Bundle’s $200-$210 number for Mr Chow of Tribeca, for instance, is interesting, but fully two in three people picking up a check spend less than $200 there.

If Bundle doesn’t want to show histograms, then at least they should switch from mean to median. But in any case, their service is really exciting, since it’s the first opportunity we’ve ever had to be able to make like-for-like comparisons between restaurants when to comes to the question of how much you’re likely to spend. It’s early days yet. But this could be the most important step in years when it comes to helping people know just how much different restaurants cost.