A Vent: Over Dining Out in Boston

Regional Dining Discussions Boston, New England
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Full disclosure, this is a vent - I’m just letting it out (over dramatization in full effect, it’s a vent - actually read it back, controlled myself and no over dramatization was included, :smiley: ) but I am curious how others feel and to get some new perspective on these feelings.

I am sick of eating out in Boston. Why?

It is all insanely overpriced.
I can’t think of the last time I went out to eat and thought . . that was a great deal. Instead I now leave almost everywhere and think - you have got to be kidding me that that food cost that much.

Not only is there the insane price points of the food dishes - but then the insane costs of cocktails and wine - plus the insane parking prices - and the “2% Kitchen Service” drives me insane.

The food is just okay
I cook a lot and have been for a very long time. If you’re going to be charging these prices for food, I’d like to think “I couldn’t make this at home” . . . and that hasn’t happened in a long long time.

Service is Lacking
I can’t remember the last time I’ve had waitstaff or an overall experience that I thought - wow they did a great job. It’s all “fine” but hardly anything worthwhile.

Getting reservations are near impossible
I’m not a huge “planner” when it comes to going out on a weekend. If the mood strikes, we go out. But almost every time we decide to head out for dinner, the first 3 or 4 places we’d like to try have nothing available. I mean, good for them, but not for me.

The last two places I went to eat were - Bar Mezzana (South End) and Mida

Bar Mezzana was fine. There were four of us. Without tip (or should I say tips) our bill was around $480 ($240 food, rest was alcohol). The food was fine, nothing wonderful but fine. We were looking for a little over a week out for reservations and finding this reservation took a tremendous amount of work since my first 10(?) places didn’t have availability. We took an early reservations since that is all there was (5:30) and we left when the manager came to tell us they needed the table back. (I get that, I knew what he was asking as soon as he came to the table - but their kitchen controlled the pace of our meal.)

Mida - went for lunch over the weekend. I think our bill was around $80, no alcohol, not including tip or the 2% kitchen fee. I ordered the sausage pizza but asked for it without “hots” - the waiter said "those are in the sauce, so … . " okay fine . . but they weren’t in the sauce. They were placed on the pizza and would have been easy to keep off the pizza. And the menu had a paragraph about the 2% and how it was “in lieu” of raising prices . . . if you add it to my bill and I pay it - you’ve raised your price. That logic just doesn’t track for me. And the food was fine - but was it an $80 lunch, no.

I’m just fed up with how hard it is to go somewhere, how much it will cost, how lacking the service is, and how after spending all the money and effort I wish I would have just stayed home, cooked, had better wine, and just had friends over so we could take our time with things.

The challenges finding a reservation clearly mean things must be good for the restaurants but I’m out. Maybe I’m just getting too old for this much hassle with my dinner . . . a fair possibility.

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Say no to the back of the house charge. If the restaurant has sales of a million, that saves them 30K in wages if the BOH upcharge is 3%. If they paid the BOH a reasonable wage, this would not be needed. Nobody can convince me that this is added on top of their salaries. It’s just a way to not pay them a decent wage.

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True - I just don’t want to end my meal with a discussion about taking a charge off the bill. One more thing to not look forward to . . .

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Exactly. And if the 2% or 3% is auto-added to the bill as a tip to the BOH, do you then deduct that from the tip to the waitstaff? A 2% BOH auto-tip ($10) on the $480 bill, and probably a minimum 20% tip (or $96 - I’d just round up to $100) to the FOH/waitstaff. So do you then tip the waitstaff $86 (18%)? Or do you just tip 22% overall (or 27% if you’re tipping 25% for the waitstaff)?

But this is Marketing 101 - just like half-gallons of ice cream are no longer a half gallon - they’re down to 1.5 quarts (going from 64 oz. to 56 oz. to 48 oz. and some down to 46 oz. - but the price creeps up.
Shrinkflation happens to toothpaste, canned cat food, potato chips, Fritos, cereal, condiments, toilet paper, tissues, almost everything. Older recipes that say “2 16 oz. cans of kidney beans”…but cans are now 14.5 oz. That’s almost a half cup of kidney beans no longer in the recipe. For something like chili with beans - I guess not a huge difference, but sometimes the older recipes needed those original sized cans of product to make it right.

And as this 2008 article said, the 1.5 qts. of ice cream at the original half gallon pricing results in a 25% increase. But marketers know that raising prices on a half gallon of ice cream by 25% in 2008 (or earlier) would have resulted in WAY less sales. So they disappear the product by putting a dimple in the bottom of a container to remove 2-5 oz. of product, and tell us “Brand new container, but still the same great product!” Yeah. Just less of it.

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Rising costs are everywhere. Not just in restaurants, and at a higher rate than the official inflation rate.

Consumers are paying more at the grocery store. Restaurants are also paying more for ingredients and food. There is a huge labor shortage, meaning restaurants have to pay staff more to get staff. Service suffers because there isn’t enough staff, and the people they can get aren’t well trained. (That the hots are in the sauce when they aren’t is a prime example of poor training). Landlords are raising rents on restaurants and apartments, so that anyone renting in Boston has to pay more.

All the restaurants need to end the extra % charges and pay all their staff, front and back of the house, living wages, at the same time. That’s the only way to level the field. I agree, change is sorely needed.

I don’t think it’s fair to blame only restaurants when prices are increasing for everything. Lots of restaurants are closing because they can’t make a profit anymore or find staff. Most restaurants were on a thin margin before covid (though I do sometimes wonder how much “top chefs” pay themselves). Those margins got stretched to the breaking point after covid when prices for everything went up.

We don’t go out as often because I can make better food at home and yes, the wine is cheaper at home. We do get take out (often pick up to avoid the absurd delivery/extra charges) so we don’t have to worry about parking or service or expensive alcohol. It avoids a lot of frustration.

There are those times I need to get out of the house and eat food I don’t cook myself, since my partner doesn’t cook unless I am there to supervise. That gets old, too.

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I don’t disagree with any of this (as well as agree to lower cost of wine at home - that markup is insane!). But I do agree with Thimes’ initial post re: rising costs and lower quality of service (at times). It also seems that so many don’t want to work in the service industry because customers are getting ruder as well, making unreasonable demands and treating waitstaff as servants. I’ve never waited tables - it takes a special type of person to do that - but I sure as hell wouldn’t want to do it now!

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“insane parking prices”: Two words–“The T”.

(I once freaked out a co-worker by suggesting that instead of renting a car for a conference in downtown Boston, we should just take the T. After a couple of rides, he agreed it was much better than driving and parking in Boston, and it saved the company a couple of hundred dollars.)

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A couple of decades ago, my program at Harvard applied for an NSF grant for teaching science and math to high school students. We had a group of NSF people come to us in Cambridge to review the proposal and ask questions. They all arrived late because they were taking several cabs from Logan. One of them told me that they were “scared” to take the T. I admit that it seems inconvenient from the blue line at Logan to have to change to the green line and then the red line to get to Harvard Square. They weren’t staying over night and they were just carrying brief cases. And the T was quite functional way back then. I explained how to do it and they took the T back to Logan. Several of them emailed me later and thanked me for the recommendation.

At the time, I wondered why people from the metro DC area were scared of the T. Back then it was no where near as “modern” as the DC Metro, but it was a lot faster than a group waiting for several taxis and getting stuck in traffic.

Giving parking rates in Boston, I’d guess using the T saved your company a lot more than $200!

These days, the T is barely functional. It’s atrocious and really sad how bad it is. I do think that given that traffic is now worse than pre Covid even at “off” times of day, and Boston enraged driving is getting worse, and parking is less available and more expensive, it’s worth thinking about the T if you aren’t coming from the suburbs. Or at least Uber or heaven forbid, a cab.

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I’m eavesdropping from California, but what is “the T”? Is that the train?

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Correct. It’s the Boston train/subway system.

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Sorry, MBTA. The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. Subways, buses, commuter rail, boats. The commuter rail goes as far south as Providence, RI, and close to the New Hampshire border to the north.

Massive failure in recent years for the subway trains. Too depressing to try to summarize here, beyond saying farming out by the state government especially endorsed by several governors to private firms that never intended to fulfill contracts and passing along massive debt from the big dig highway construction project to public transportation, corrupt practices all around, numerous safety and maintenance failures, no oversight, etc.

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I agree. So raise the food prices to adjust to what it costs to pay all employees a living wage.

If some restaurants do that, they’ll get slammed for higher prices. And more people will stop going to restaurants.

That’s why all the restaurants need to do it.

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Yes dining out seems to get crazy expensive. But I’m not aware that running a restaurant in Boston is the equivalent of a cash cow - it seems that restauranteurs of all calibers are surviving on thin margins. I was flabergasted to hear how much Barbara Lynch was paying in rent in Fort Point - more than $80K/month. That adds up fast.

I have been disppointed that the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t usher in a change in how restaurant staff are compensated - it should include paid sick leave, shouldn’t it? That’s a public health imperative.

Cost of goods and services are creeping up across the board, but rent seems to be the killer. I asked in another thread why communities don’t treat restaurants as they would other cultural organizations. We don’t expect players in the BSO to cover the rent on Symphony Hall. Could communities invest in restaurant properties, and invite restauranteurs to take up residence? Charge rent, but keep it proportional to revenues, not property values.

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I think your vent applies pretty much everywhere. Not just Boston. But also NYC, Charlotte and Tampa. I also think the issues you listed are not going away. I think over the past 20 years or so there has been a remarkable confluence of awareness of food and explosion of restaurants that were able to run on very tight margins because they didn’t pay their workers much so that we got used to dining at reasonable prices for good food. That has changed and so the cost of dining will go up and the staffing will drop. When I was a kid, dining out was rare. When my dad’s business began to grow, we went out more but it wasn’t much more than a once a month type of thing.

We eat out all the time. I don’t expect the food to be any better than what I can make. I am happy if it’s well made, served promptly with service that at least has a smile. A basic dinner on a weeknight for the wife and me easily costs $200-250 now in NYC. That’s just a basic nice neighborhood place. Nothing fancy. A weekend dinner at a nicer place is double that and a dinner at one of the temples of fine dining is another double of that. The service does get better with the prices.

It is what it is. If you want to dine out, that’s the cost.

On the reservation thing, my prediction is that it will get worse. First you will have to get a reservation. Then if you don’t use it, it will cost you. It only makes sense. Many other businesses where they are committing to provide some service to you require you to pay upfront and you bear the risk of changing your mind. Look at theater tickets, airline tickets, sporting events and such. Many reservations I make these days requires minimum notice of cancellation otherwise there is a fee.

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if you have kids you are leaving home, add $25-35 an hour to the cost fo your meal out!

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I have a handful of beloved heirloom recipes that call for ingredients no longer sold in their original weights/measures. It’s frustrating to compensate for that.

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Dining out for us is less and less entertainment/indulgence and more and more substitute for the “same old” humdrum, usually by necessity. Not to say we don’t plan a drive, trip, journey with a meal or two in mind. That confessed,

If restaurant is confessing to recruiting issues with BOH and FOH suggestions and bill assessments, maybe it’s the ownership/management/staff compensation structure that could stand adjustment to the changing times. Old models might not work in today’s reality, wherever encountered. Be upfront on menu what prices mean; be upfront about degree of FOH and BOH staff compensation is fixed or variable – hey, we’re grown-ups footing the check so we can read and comprehend (well, most of us and leaving out politics) . . . . ; be upfront that you’ve chosen the hospitality industry to provide for you, your family, and most important – your patrons and employees, and maybe (as they say in old time baseball interviews in the movies), it’ll all work out . . .

Any chance?

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But doesn’t the BSO own Symphony Hall? So they don’t pay rent that can vary at landlords’ whim.

However, BSO does have to cover maintenance of the old building, as the owner, and that is considerable. Same for the MFA: they own the building, and the maintenance. As someone who owns a house built in 1845, I know that maintenance is huge. However, we as owners for 20+ years can anticipate and budget for routine costs. Still of course a few surprises here and there.

So it’s not quite comparable. Landlords raising rent to astronomical, unpredictable levels in hopes of forcing out tenants, sitting on empty buildings in hopes of extorting higher rent from potential future tenants is very different. An owner/resident of a four family in my neighborhood increased rent to a reliable, good tenant by 300% to get him to move out so her adult son could move in to that apartment. Extortion.

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@Madrid yes the analogy is not perfectly apt, but you caught my drift. Why should restaurants, that enliven our neighborhoods, be subject to the whims of landlords who don’t appreciate the cultural role of restaurants? Why not direct some of our tax and philanthropic dollars toward venues that can sustain restaurants? It’s being done at the incubator level in some places, but why not also the neighborhood boite?

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I agree with you but most of the world doesn’t. A primary example of this was when Danny Meyer changed all of his restaurants to an all in price for the menu. No tips, no service charges. The only thing extra was tax. Heck the coat check wouldn’t even take my dollar. It didn’t last. People looked at the prices and said nope. Too much to pay and the staff said not enough for them. Broke down from both ends. Being transparent and open often works that way. You piss everyone off.

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