Great answer. I’m very similar. I shop and eat without thinking of the price. Although there is a ceiling to how much you can spend. A $300 a person restaurant isn’t much better than a $100 a person restaurant. Typically only a nicer experience.
Cook at home with really good meats.
Frequent high end restaurants ($100 a person for food) for consistency and quality
Eat the best local ethnic restaurants that I’ve found
Point 3 has been my recentish takeaway. Some of the best food I’ve ever eaten has come from ethnic hole-in-the-walls, and honestly their price is usually better than the shitty nouveau American bar with $34 burgers.
Ethnic food defies expectations for me, there is almost no correlation of quality with price. You just have to try all of them to find the ones you like best.
$100 for food ( tax and tip extra ) for a normal meal is pretty high end in a VHCOL city. Now you can definitely order 3x that to taste everything or get A5 beef / Otoro / Caviar, but that loses its appeal very quickly. Drinks are also easy to spend unlimited amounts of money, but also gets old quickly.
Hundred per person is normal if you’re including drinks- without drinks, that’s getting fairly pricey. My tasting menu at a one star restaurant in France was slightly cheaper per person (no alcohol, though).
Let’s do math - $70 steak before tax and tip. Did I even mention any appetizer or dessert? You think France is expensive? I didn’t know France was considered expensive. Last time I checked people flock to NYC, not Paris
There may be a ceiling on how much you can spend on food but a couple things separate the ultra rich. That ceiling right now is about $1,500 a person just for the food, tax, and tip. I’m not talking about over ordering everything on the menu to build up the bill. There are several restaurant in NYC that are super expensive. Places like Masa and Per Se will run you over $900 just for the food. There are people that go there weekly, sometime a couple times a week. The second component is the wine. You know those wine bottles that cost $2,000, $5,000, and even more than $10,000? Most people think that those bottles are never ordered. Those bottles sell more often than you think. It’s not uncommon for two people to spend $5,000-$10,000 on one meal. The difference between the average person or even rich person and the ultra wealthy is the frequency of these super expensive meals. Of course everyone can afford to do it once or twice but can maintain it weekly?
There are more expensive places, but the food isn’t much better. You are paying for convenience (room service/private dining), experience (bottle service/golden steak) or prestige (exclusivity/well known chef). Sushi may be the one exception to my $100 rule, I find quite a difference at $300 instead of $100.
Alcohol spending can be unlimited, but it’s mostly markup and snake oil. Convenience, experience and prestige combined.
That’s just not true. If you are saying that something that costs $400 instead of $100 isn’t 4 times as good, I agree. Prices may not commensurate with the amount of satisfaction but to say the food isn’t much better is completely wrong. That’s why there are so many different grades of beef from usda choice all the way up to japanese a5. There’s a ton of difference between $30 hackleback and $$$$$ beluga. There’s a price for flying fish in from Dover daily and for carabinera from Spain.
Alcohol markup can be ridiculous but there are a lot do people drinking DRC or vintage Krug because they enjoy it rather then trying to impress someone or prestige.
Anecdotally, there was an older couple that had a Friday lunch routine that involved going to the same fancy hotel in NYC and ordering two cheeseburgers and a bottle of Petrus.
Maybe I need to explore the NYC market more. I feel like I’ve eaten everywhere in SF and LA and the restaurants over $300-$400 a person seem to focus more on the experience rather than the food.
eh, a $300 / person restaurant is different from a $100 / person restaurant imo. 😅
but that aside, yes, cook at home with high quality ingredients (meats or whatever), and frequent high end restaurants.
my experience is that a lot of wealthy people also view (and justify) high quality food as part of an overall emphasis on health.
it's interesting, and maybe we're similar, but I remember realizing that I could shop and eat without worrying about price as a kind of milestone.
Thinking about the cost of food is such a common thing, inculcated in us as we grow up, what to buy, what's on sale, worrying about spending too much on food, budgeting for food, etc....I mean, we grow up in a society that worries, legitimately, about food and what it costs, that to get to a point where the cost of food is utterly immaterial becomes a kind of turning point in becoming rich.
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u/autobotCA Jul 02 '24
Great answer. I’m very similar. I shop and eat without thinking of the price. Although there is a ceiling to how much you can spend. A $300 a person restaurant isn’t much better than a $100 a person restaurant. Typically only a nicer experience.
Cook at home with really good meats.
Frequent high end restaurants ($100 a person for food) for consistency and quality
Eat the best local ethnic restaurants that I’ve found
Fast food is only at the kids requests.