> 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.

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.

A century ago was 1926.

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.

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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!

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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.

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).