6 ms·

High end restaurants don't get their ingredients from the same place you do or McDonald's does. The quality there is above and beyond.

lorenzhs 10y ago
The cost of ingredients for coffee are a small fraction of the cost, whether you charge $2 or $5 for it. There is a student-run café at my university, all staff are unpaid volunteers, they serve really good coffee for 50 euro-cents (~55¢ US). The beans are from a high-end local roasting house, and it's in a real cup. Milk (whole/soy) is included. Coffee is cheap.
- toomanythings2 10y ago
  Let's not cherry pick. I'm talking about menu items overall.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    The cost of the ingredients will still be pretty low compared to the overall price you pay. A bacon and egg sandwich is about as cheap as it gets to make. It's the time to prepare and serve the food (i.e., staff time) and the time you spend there (i.e., customers per hour → rent) that are the bigger factors.
    - toomanythings2 10y ago
      Quit guessing. Your estimate of food costs is wrong. The bacon and bread at high end restaurants is not the bacon and bread you get at the grocery store. For one thing, the bread at the restaurant just may have been made from scratch and baked in the kitchen a couple of hours earlier. The eggs may have been shipped in from a special farm picked out by the chef. The bacon might have the chef's name on it, too, cause he hand selected it himself when he visited the farm. And there's nothing frozen and you won't find any microwave ovens either. Food cost varies but can easily be 28 to 33% of your bill. Now add up how much a couple of slices of your Wonder bread, an egg from your $2/dozen eggs and $5 package of bacon is and then try and figure out why the restaurant food costs so much more. Let's not forget, too, that, in higher end restaurants, the people in the back room aren't high school kids playing on their phones and dancing to hip-hop while making your food. They are most likely professionally trained with an experienced background. None of them are making $10/hour until they find their "real job". This IS their real job. How can you tell? You can taste the difference. That's all the proof you need. You may think $15 for a bacon and egg sandwich is high until you taste that sandwich. Then you really know what a $15 sandwich tastes like.
      - lorenzhs 10y ago
        Hey, you're making an awful lot of assumptions here. For the record, you won't find a microwave oven or Wonder bread in my kitchen either. I've had a rye sourdough for the past ~2.5 years. Not exactly sandwich bread, but the point stands. Making the bread themselves is exactly my point - the ingredients are not the most expensive bit. Staff time is. Now I don't know the restaurant from the article and how high-end it really is, but for $18 I would expect them to make the bread themselves and not use cheap supermarket ingredients. Staff is still the most expensive part.
        toomanythings2 10y ago
        Again, you may not be correct. I would have to ask my bookkeeper what our labor cost is, I'm not that involved in mine anymore, but it's not that much higher than food cost.
- dagw 10y ago
  Coffee is cheap Rent isn't. I bet those students pay a lot less in rent every month (and quite possibly they don't pay anything at all) than what it costs a nice restaurant to rent a centrally located place.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    Yeah, but the post I replied to was about the cost of ingredients. And McDonald's has some really expensive locations as well.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
I've read that restaurants as a whole usually spend 30% of the price on ingredients, and the rest is staff and rent and other miscellaneous items. Buffets work because even if people eat more, the restaurant as a whole operates more efficiently(no individual servers). I don't know what the percentage is for high-end restaurants. Do you think it's higher or lower?

lorenzhs 10y ago

The cost of ingredients for coffee are a small fraction of the cost, whether you charge $2 or $5 for it. There is a student-run café at my university, all staff are unpaid volunteers, they serve really good coffee for 50 euro-cents (~55¢ US). The beans are from a high-end local roasting house, and it's in a real cup. Milk (whole/soy) is included. Coffee is cheap.

toomanythings2 10y ago
Let's not cherry pick. I'm talking about menu items overall.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  The cost of the ingredients will still be pretty low compared to the overall price you pay. A bacon and egg sandwich is about as cheap as it gets to make. It's the time to prepare and serve the food (i.e., staff time) and the time you spend there (i.e., customers per hour → rent) that are the bigger factors.
  - toomanythings2 10y ago
    Quit guessing. Your estimate of food costs is wrong. The bacon and bread at high end restaurants is not the bacon and bread you get at the grocery store. For one thing, the bread at the restaurant just may have been made from scratch and baked in the kitchen a couple of hours earlier. The eggs may have been shipped in from a special farm picked out by the chef. The bacon might have the chef's name on it, too, cause he hand selected it himself when he visited the farm. And there's nothing frozen and you won't find any microwave ovens either. Food cost varies but can easily be 28 to 33% of your bill. Now add up how much a couple of slices of your Wonder bread, an egg from your $2/dozen eggs and $5 package of bacon is and then try and figure out why the restaurant food costs so much more. Let's not forget, too, that, in higher end restaurants, the people in the back room aren't high school kids playing on their phones and dancing to hip-hop while making your food. They are most likely professionally trained with an experienced background. None of them are making $10/hour until they find their "real job". This IS their real job. How can you tell? You can taste the difference. That's all the proof you need. You may think $15 for a bacon and egg sandwich is high until you taste that sandwich. Then you really know what a $15 sandwich tastes like.
    - lorenzhs 10y ago
      Hey, you're making an awful lot of assumptions here. For the record, you won't find a microwave oven or Wonder bread in my kitchen either. I've had a rye sourdough for the past ~2.5 years. Not exactly sandwich bread, but the point stands. Making the bread themselves is exactly my point - the ingredients are not the most expensive bit. Staff time is. Now I don't know the restaurant from the article and how high-end it really is, but for $18 I would expect them to make the bread themselves and not use cheap supermarket ingredients. Staff is still the most expensive part.
      - toomanythings2 10y ago
        Again, you may not be correct. I would have to ask my bookkeeper what our labor cost is, I'm not that involved in mine anymore, but it's not that much higher than food cost.
dagw 10y ago
Coffee is cheap Rent isn't. I bet those students pay a lot less in rent every month (and quite possibly they don't pay anything at all) than what it costs a nice restaurant to rent a centrally located place.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Yeah, but the post I replied to was about the cost of ingredients. And McDonald's has some really expensive locations as well.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

I've read that restaurants as a whole usually spend 30% of the price on ingredients, and the rest is staff and rent and other miscellaneous items. Buffets work because even if people eat more, the restaurant as a whole operates more efficiently(no individual servers). I don't know what the percentage is for high-end restaurants. Do you think it's higher or lower?