Small Plates, Big Checks

Why restaurant prices feel so high—and why they’re going to stay that way.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

The other week, a woman I know—let’s call her Anna— managed to get a reservation at Libertine, the popular Manhattan bistro that opened last spring. She and her fiancé were planning a date night, and they were ready to spend. “I was really excited,” she told me. The feeling didn’t last. “We looked at the menu, and it was just so ridiculously expensive that we called it off.” The restaurant, where “poulet à la crème” goes for $48 and a single sausage runs $33, doesn’t post its prices online; Anna had done some sleuthing and found user-submitted photos of its chalkboard menu on Yelp. “It was kind of a jump scare,” she said.

Something happened to the casually uncasual restaurant, slowly and then all at once. It has always been possible to eat out expensively in New York, and it has always been possible, with some ingenuity, to eat out cheaply. But anyone going out occasionally, as Anna does, or constantly, as I do, has likely noticed a change in the wide belt of the middle at the new establishments that fashion themselves easygoing wine bars or nouveau diners or drop-in whenever neighborhood spots. It’s now difficult, if not impossible, to make it out for less than $100 per person.