Have you noticed that the nicest, most expensive restaurants usually offer French / Continental cuisine, whereas Asian restaurants (Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.) and Mexican restaurants are usually at a much lower price point?
Of course, that statement is not an absolute – but on the whole, the most expensive restaurants (think those with Michelin stars, $300+ meals, and extensive wine / alcohol lists) are French or continental restaurants. Fast food places, meanwhile, are far more likely offer Chinese, Indian, or Mexican fare. Even Asian restaurants that are nicer and more expensive are almost uniformly “fusion” restaurants (with the exception of pricey Japanese sushi houses).
As a big lover of almost all cuisines, I’ve wondered about this disparity for a long time. I thought about titling this post Disparity in Restaurant Prices by Different Ethnic / Cultural Cuisines, but wow, a mouthful, eh?
For ease of writing purposes, I’ve decided to make French restaurants and Chinese restaurants my two subjects of study.
Non-Scientific Survey of # of High-Class French Restaurants vs. Chinese Restaurants
If I search for “French restaurants” on Yelp in San Francisco and focus only on the $$$$ price category, I come up with 8 results on the first page. If I search for “Chinese restaurants” with the same price designation, however, there is only one result - Jai Yun.
A similar search for New York City – the dining capital of the U.S. – resulted in 5 Chinese restaurants categorized as $$$$ on Yelp. There are, however, 10 results for French restaurants on the first page alone, and many more restaurants extending beyond the first page.
Why Are There More Expensive French Restaurants Than Chinese Restaurants?
Can it be that French cuisine requires more skill / expensive ingredients than, say, Chinese cuisine? I don’t know – perhaps, but I am hesitant to attribute only skill or ingredients to such a great disparity. Somehow, in the “restaurant hierarchy”, consumers (and I admit, myself included) have become accustomed to pay much more for a plate of beef bourguignon than a plate of stir-fried beef and broccoli.
A large part of this restaurant hierarchy comes down to branding and history. French and continental cuisine have been branded as an exquisite dining experience, whereas Chinese or Mexican food have been categorized as mostly “fast-food” – delicious, yes, but still “fast food”. A couple that want to celebrate their 20th anniversary goes to a 4-star French restaurant. A couple that is exhausted after work orders Chinese takeout from the corner cafe.
From a historical perspective, fine dining in America has traditionally belonged to French / continental cuisine. The best chefs at the best restaurants are frequently trained at French culinary institutes. Also, French cuisine is still more mainstream / less foreign than Chinese or Vietnamese cuisine might be to the general American public.
The market supports different cuisines at separate price points.
Self-Perpetuating Circle & Challenges of Rebranding
This phenomenon has become self-sustaining – as more French restaurants are usually acknowledged as “occasion” restaurants – the places you go to celebrate an engagement, wine and dine clients, or impress your parents, it becomes easier to find backing and the dining base needed to sustain a high-class French restaurant. It’s a circle that perpetuates itself.
People have come to expect different things from French restaurants (service, ambiance, exquisite meals) than Chinese or Mexican restaurants (fast service, low prices). In addition, there are such a proliferation of cheap, mom-and-pop Chinese / Mexican restaurants (especially in big cities with a large immigrant population) where you can get an entire lunch for $5. It’s even cheaper than McDonald’s!
The chef who wants to start a 4-star Chinese restaurant not only has to compete with (1) the French restaurants for patrons who would pay $100 for a meal for two, (2) he/she must also convince the patrons of the cheaper Chinese restaurants that it IS worth it to pay $25 for beef & broccoli (which at his shop may be made with organic grass-fed beef) instead of $8 for the same dish a few blocks over, and (3) change the mentality of future patrons that Chinese food is only for take-out or casual sit-down dining.
The chef who wants to open and make a profit from a 4-star, $30-per-entree Chinese or Vietnamese or Mexican restaurant must redefine an entire consumer mindset. They must rebrand an ethnic cuisine. Rebranding is hard work – and it’s no wonder that few chefs have successfully accomplished such a task.
What do you think? I love food and I love consumer behavior, so I find this a fascinating topic. Please share & discuss!
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh my gosh, I LOVE this topic. I think that once a cuisine has been accepted long enough in "mainstream" U.S. culture you are able to purchase it at ALL price points, not just the very high or low end pricing. Exhibit A: Italian Food. You can purchase very inexpensive italian food or very expensive italian food. But I'd love to see additional thoughts on this… and on other types of cuisine as well, say, Thai food or Irish food.
I'd like to try Irish food. Haven't found a place here that serves that.
Thai is incredibly hard to make too. Lots of spices, curries.. things to grind up.
You know, even Malaysian or Indian cuisine is time consuming. It takes at least 3 hours to grind that stuff, and then mix it, and then make a sauce, then cook the meat….
i think it has a lot to do with the cost of the ingredients. french food has a lot of expensive cuts of beef (filet mignon) and cheeses.
and, i don't know about where you live, but around here there are a fair number of fast service crepe places which certainly fit within the boundaries of french food.
Crepes are delicious. BF makes them as a quick snack and I love it.
Savoury OR sweet!
But for me, it is fast French cuisine, and perhaps not what Well-Heeled is referring to as what is served in restaurants where you sit down and pay through the nose.
Boeuf Bourguignon, Coq au Vin (also a long, tedious dish), etc.
Oh I agree!
Rick Bayless does Mexican cuisine and apparently he's the king of it now
As for French food I think the high cost comes from:
- Actual skill to make the sauces
I watched BF once for 2 hours, make a slow sauce that took so much straining and draining.. And if he burnt the sauce he had to start over… gosh it was hard.
And you had to make sure the sauce didn't break.. etc etc.
- Cuts of the meat that tend to be better, are what cost more money.
- Cost of other ingredients: Boeuf Bourguignon also requires alcohol, and wine, or whatever needs to be added to the dish, tends to be pretty expensive.
BF makes a Poulet Marengo, and the stuff he adds for the sauce is $40! And then the prawns (not shrimps) on top of that are $25/lb, etc etc..
- The time it takes is the worst.
French food is not really (for me) on the same level as Italian or Chinese food in terms of the time it takes to make it
For Chinese food, I chop up things, I throw it in a pan and I stir. Done.
For Italian food, I guess if you don't make the pasta from scratch (which we don't, we buy the good expensive pasta)… everything is pretty simple to make in an hour or less.
And the taste is fabulous, on par with French cuisine in my books, considering the time it takes to make it vs. French food.
Phew!
I should note that in France, their fast food is ironically considered to be pizza.
I think they actually eat more, or just as much pizza as Americans.
But they eat gourmet pizza, with good cuts of meat and cheeses.. it's incredible the variety you get on the street.
It is on 3 levels higher than Pizza Hut or those crap pizza chains.
Chinese is cheaper in general because the dishes that are popular are the easy, low-cost dishes. Shark's fin soup and Bird's nest soup are expensive as they should be due to the ingredients. As Victoria says, you can purchase a given cuisine at all price points. French baguettes are cheap and French people are not eating duck everyday. It just depends on what the restaurants choose to serve within that specific cuisine. Another example: Japanese food. Sure, sushi is expensive, but when you go to Japan, you will find that most people save sushi for special occasions. Everyday food is a noodle soup such as udon or ramen, which are much cheaper.
Also, it depends on the demographic. There are plenty of expensive ethnic restaurants in San Franciso, for example. Are they making beef and broccoli? Hell no. Because there is so much competition, in order to stand out, you have to be innovative. People are willing to pay for it. These people recognize that there is a difference between extremely well done food versus take-out Chinese. The person who sees no difference typically is not willing to pay X amount for any type of cuisine, regardless if it's French. It's not a matter of changing the mindset. Good food is good food and certain people recognize and care about it and that's the target customer of expensive restaurants.
I agree that there is a certain demographic who can 1. afford to eat at a 4-star establishment, and 2. who chooses to do so. However, even for such a person, I don't think they would view a 4-star French restaurant vs. a 4-star Mexican restaurant in the same light. The fact of the matter is there are very few 4-star restaurants that caters to "ethnic" cuisine.
I don't think that can be attributed solely to ingredients, or to skill of the chefs, after all, a Chinese cuisine can have ridiculously expensive ingredients, and expensive, better versions of the same basic ingredient (for example, cheap beef cuts vs. grass-fed, organic beef). Customer perception and market mentality must, IMHO, play into the fact that the marketplace seems to support continental / French cuisine as the top echelon of dining experiences.
Thanks for your comment!
This is an interesting topic. I don't have much to add…except….it is really difficult to come by good French or Chinese food here in the US. It just doesn't taste like the way it does in those countries. I'm always disappointed. And then it's overpriced. Bah.
I also think that the US has a certain fascination with everything French. The food, the culture, the women. How come US women view French women as sophisticated and thin? Not all of them are like that.
Also, the majority of Chinese dishes have been Americanized. Where can you find good shark fin soup or sea cucumber here? I don't think the majority of Americans would want to eat that, let alone pay the big bucks to eat it. They'd rather go for escargot instead of sea cucumber.
I think it has a lot to do with class.
French food came from the aristocracy, and was something people could "aspire" to. A lot of Mexican food, Chinese food, etc. came from immigrant populations who didn't usually have a ton of money when they first established themselves (Chinese workers and the Canadian Railway come to mind).
Due to living/spending restrictions (Whites only restaurants, "Yellow" washrooms, etc.), those restaurants catered to a certain population. Chinese food couldn't really be expensive, because the people eating it couldn't usually afford it. While it gradually gained a following, `it still hasn't shaken that notion of being "poor food".
My hunch is that immigrant groups that came later on, with more financial resources, have had better luck in pricing their traditional foods higher, Japanese + sushi for instance.
Italians are the exception to this theory though.