Board 8 > What's the most you've spent/would spend on a single item of food or drink?

(+) Yeah! (+)

XIII_Rocks posted...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/21/harrods-28-sandwich-we-find-out-if-the-taste-matches-the-price-tag

Reminds me of this article I remember reading last year

Oh hey, that is pretty much exactly my hypothetical haha. Though apparently more expensive since that'd work out to a but over $35.

Aecioo posted...

Why spending a few hundred for a restaurant experience which blows your hair back is considered beneath other experiences that last the same or slightly longer will always baffle me.

Reminds me something I thought of here though. It's all about comparison. Food is one of the most common things in our lives and we have thousands of points of comparisons. So it's really easy to look at the $200 restaurant bill and remember a bill from 24 hours ago that was only $15. You can't do that with concerts and trips and big purchases as easily.

I mean I see gamers complaining about indie games with hundreds of hours of gameplay being $30 instead of $15, or that a $10 is too short and you should wait until it's on sale for $5. But then they buy some wendy's for $15 without even thinking.

It's all because you can easily compare the $30 new indie game purchase to the old $5 indie game that's on a deep discount. There's a thousand cheaper options right there on Steam at all times. But you can't get fast food for less than $15 nowadays, so wendy's seems fine.

birria is not super premium, no. $22 is def overpriced on that one, unless it's stuffed to high hell. then that's a different story.

It is premium. You can get it cheap but you can also get cheap wagyu. Any comparison to the good stuff is wrong.

foolm0r0n posted...

Those aren't the best examples. Wagyu sandwiches do typically get into the $30-40 range, same with lobster rolls. You should suspect ones that don't since they are probably fake and bad. Banh mi is supposed to be $4 for the same reason, since the $10-15 ones typically taste worse with a bunch of extra crap.

Complaining about a birria burrito for $22 is different though. Birria is a super premium food that should be expensive, but burritos and Mexican food in general are seen as cheap crap food in the US. So that one is more about racism than actual value judgment.

To be clear, I wasn't directly comparing the banh mi and a wagyu sandwich, but rather just sandwiches in general. I will say there's a lot of stuff that's advertised as "wagyu" without any real connection to Japanese wagyu.

Disagree with the idea that more expensive banh mis are necessarily worse, and this is kinda my point-- other sandwiches are allowed to experiment with more expensive ingredients (or alternatively claim cost of labor, but that's another thing), but if you do something similar with a banh mi then people object.

wagyu is at least a specific kind of cut of meat and while i do agree can be different on price, that's because it's heavily mislabeled with quite a few examples just being overrated and overly expensive. birria is... birria. it's not that crazy, anyone can slow cook meat and make the sauce with some basic ingredients. you pay a bit more for that sure, same way you'd pay a bit more for something being pickled, but it's an entirely different category from literally coming out of a cow in a certain way. one of these you can find a mom or grandma doing it, the other is specifically engineered.

I recently spent like $25 or so on cocktails in Las Vegas, but I was okay with paying the Vegas tax in that instance. If I were back home I wouldn't have been willing to spend that much for one drink.

VintageGin posted...

Disagree with the idea that more expensive banh mis are necessarily worse, and this is kinda my point-- other sandwiches are allowed to experiment with more expensive ingredients (or alternatively claim cost of labor, but that's another thing), but if you do something similar with a banh mi then people object.

i think those objections would fade more rapidly once it becomes more american-ized.

like nobody bats an eye to Italian sandwiches having a range of like $3 to $30 but it's understood that the latter had better be chonky as all hell and put you into a coma a third of the way in whereas the former, if barely more than bread, is a good value.

Vietnamese food is in a weird category of 'there' but not there. people will play with Japanese plenty, whether it's sushi or ramen/udon. Chinese food isn't really "Chinese" half the time but distinctly Chinese-American. Indian food has non-spicy without coconut variants (some rebel to this admittedly) and even Thai food has variety. Filipino fully embraced the Americanism before it even left the mainland. Viet food ended up as one of the most conservative ones but as more places become more Viet-American those dishes will change too. technically already has with coffees and drinks.

VintageGin posted...

Disagree with the idea that more expensive banh mis are necessarily worse, and this is kinda my point-- other sandwiches are allowed to experiment with more expensive ingredients (or alternatively claim cost of labor, but that's another thing), but if you do something similar with a banh mi then people object.

I see your point, but there ARE a ton of expensive banh mis, moreso than cheap ones. So they are allowed to experiment just the same. It's just sad when you're surrounded by $15 banh mis and can't get a real one.

The 2 best ones I've had were a $4 super classic one, and a $12 one from a local shop. But I've had so many meh expensive ones made by non-Viet people.

Tacos took a super long time to get "permission" to be more premium though, and they still struggle with it (see: birria).

On work trips to our other locations I get a 55 dollar per diem but since we have a kitchen I get lunch at the job so I have done 50+ dollar meals for dinner before

Just tried the infamous $22 birria burrito

It was very good, though so rich that I probably should have saved half for later. I'm not normally the sort of person who shares burritos but I actually think it would be warranted in this case.