As you’ll have noticed if you’ve been reading this newsletter for awhile, I write about urbanism and land-use issues mostly, but not exclusively. And one of those other topics I come back to occasionally is food and restaurants.

This ties into my interest in retail and business, and the way restaurants fit into cities and neighborhoods. And also, well, food. But as much as I enjoy going out to eat, I also love cooking at home. And with prices being what they are, cooking at home is a huge way to save money.

But while inflation might be a proximate cause for cooking more at home, there’s a much longer-term trend that I’ve thought about here and there, and want to write about today.

I first mused about this when I wrote about an old-school bar and grill in my hometown that closed in the later half of the pandemic. There were multiple reasons: the place had gone downhill even before the pandemic, the food didn’t translate well into carry-out form, and, at least for me, it felt kind of stuffy and tired.

But there was another thing going on. The menu was your classic steaks/chops/seafood: beer and wine, clams and oysters, roast chicken, grilled steak, prime rib, chicken marsala, shrimp scampi, crabmeat-stuffed fillet of sole. That kind of thing. The entrees ranged from the high teens to the high $20s.

Why, I wondered, did these feel like poor values to me, compared to, say, a Thai restaurant, or an all-you-can-eat sushi place, or the other newer types of places my wife and I usually go? Or compared to just cooking at home? Some of it is that we often make this sort of bar-and-grill fare at home. But part of it is the expansion of supermarket choices.

If you live in a major population center today, you probably have a Whole Foods, and some kind of higher-end supermarket like a Wegmans, or whatever the equivalent in other regions is. You may also have a modern Asian supermarket like an H-Mart. We have all of these within a 15-minute drive here in Fairfax County; even my parents, in semi-rural central New Jersey, have all of these within 45 minutes (the H-Mart is furthest away.)

For prices far lower than what you’d pay in a restaurant—if you can even find a restaurant that serves these things—I can buy, at my convenience, dry-aged and/or USDA Prime steaks; rack of lamb; Berkshire pork chops; any number of very good quality charcuterie items or cheeses; any number of domestic or imported fine wines and beers; sashimi-quality tuna, salmon, and sea scallops; fresh littleneck or cherrystone clams and a number of oyster varieties; inexpensive (same price, roughly, as Barilla) imported bronze-die pasta; and much more.

In addition, the presence of several Asian supermarkets means I can buy anything I need to try making Chinese food at home (occasionally I’ll try Korean dishes; H-Mart is Korean and most of the others are Chinese, but there’s a lot of product overlap).

In general, people in most American metro areas these days, and maybe since the 1990s, can buy raw or base ingredients that exceed the quality of those served by the average restaurant. I’ve rarely seen this particular development noted, but I think it’s a big deal.

Now cooking restaurant-style meals at home is tough. It takes a lot of time, for one. Much of it is technique—or, in some cases, tricks (butter, sugar, salt, MSG; I use all of them). But a lot of it is ingredients. When all you had were the inexpensive or plain versions of things, the restaurant offered more of a value proposition. But once you can spend less money for better ingredients, it’s harder to make it feel worthwhile.

It’s hard to pay close to $30 for what might very well be a frozen fish fillet stuffed with canned crab, when that’s the price per pound of sashimi-grade fresh fish. It’s hard to pay $20, or $25, or easily more for a steak when we can buy and share a very fine Prime steak for about that price. Or pay for upcharged, fairly generic bottles of wine when you can buy lots of very, very good French or California bottles for under $20.

In other words, consumers have seen an incredible increase in the variety and quality of what they can buy in the supermarket—even in fairly “regular” supermarkets. Old-school restaurants with Italian-ish American menus and Sysco deliveries don’t fill the same niche they used to.

I want to show you a few meals I’ve made in the last few months. Everything in these pictures is either from Wegmans, Whole Foods, H-Mart, or 99 Ranch (a Chinese supermarket chain). Yes, I spent a lot of time making these, and no, they’re not everyday meals. But my point is that they can be made at home entirely with ingredients from supermarkets within a 15-minute radius.

The ingredients in that last meal cost about $80; with the wine, about $100. And we had leftovers! With drinks and appetizers, and tax and tip, you can spend that much at Applebee’s. There is probably no restaurant, even here, where we could order food like this for anything approaching a reasonable price. This one is based on meals we had in Croatia. I can reproduce it pretty faithfully with my local supermarkets. That’s amazing. My grandparents probably couldn’t have done that.

Older folks with less expensive tastes may have no interest in eating like this, or going out for this kind of thing. A restaurant is just a place to meet people or take a night off from cooking and cleaning, and the food just has to meet a minimum level of quality. I’d see it the same way if the prices were what they were in the ’90s, or even pre-pandemic. But restaurant inflation has hit even harder than grocery inflation. And restaurants may be cutting corners in ways that you can’t discern—or maybe can only discern after the fact. If a raw ingredient is fresh, it’s fresh. I increasingly value the sense of control and care in making my own food.

But this isn’t about me; it’s really a reflection on the marvel of a modern supermarket.

Related Reading:

Culture, Nostalgia, Cuisines as Living Things

Meat and Money in Northern Virginia

Beef Two Ways

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