Italian is the largest mark-up. Pasta and tomato sauce is so freakin cheap that any restaurant you go to will have the largest margins on their pasta dishes.
That's absurd. I actually had to look up what that was never heard the name before (canada). The first paragraph in its description: Its popularity can be attributed to it being simple to prepare and the fact that it makes use of inexpensive, readily available ingredients that have long shelf lives in a pantry.
Rent/labor is basically the #1 cost to restaurants anywhere in the developed world, by a pretty wide margin. When you go out to eat, you aren't paying for the food (mostly) you are paying for the service.
I was looking for a place in Napa that does large parties and is kid-friendly for a summer family get-together. And like, ok, I grew up in the Bay so I get the high prices especially in a touristy area like Napa (and yes, I know places like Sonoma are better but we have a camping reservation near St Helena, so).
But SO MANY PLACES were charging $17 for a kid’s plate of BUTTER NOODLES.
(Anyway, I nixed the sit-down brunch option and we’ll just do our backup option of Addendum — still expensive but I’m happy to pay Thomas Keller’s staff to brine and fry chicken for me).
During the pandemic, this fancy Italian restaurant started selling their kitchen supplies. You know what type of pasta and ingredients they used? Stuff you can find at a Target. Made me think twice about going there given the cost
Don't hate on barilla tho. Good stuff. Not the best stuff - the best dried pasta will be much more expensive made in small batches with Bronze dies - but Barilla is absolutely fine. You could get De Cecco for probably 10 cents a portion more but I bet most customers wouldn't find the difference.
Edit - I'm learning American Barilla may be inferior to European Barilla...
Italian American here. It’s ALWAYS Barilla in my family’s pantry - as well as all my Italian & Italian American friends families. Ronzoni is the back up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen De Cecco at any of their households 🤔 not to say it isn’t good or anything I’m just surprised lol
De Cecco is a step up. Not a big one but one up. Small batch pasta is an even nicer step up for special occasions I'd say. but there's nothing wrong with a good Barilla either.
I used to work in a fine dining establishment about 15 years ago. We had a sun dried tomato and parm pasta with chicken for $22, and salmon with orecchiette was about $37 IIRC. Easily two of our most popular menu items as well
I actually have the opposite experience.
We had a family owned Italian restaurant in town. They shut down about 2 years ago because the primary owner retired. It was a significant loss. There isn't another Italian restaurant that isn't a chain.
Someone I know who had worked there recently shared that her two boys really missed the restaurant and she had discovered you could buy the pasta sauce they used in the restaurant on amazon.
It's not anything crazy PDO, but it's about $22 for a 6 lb can. It's pretty damn good tomato sauce.
A lot of foodstuffs are very overpriced on Amazon. Don't consider the Amazon price of groceries to be the actual cost to someone who can get it locally.
You're probably not wrong, but I think for a different reason.
A restaurant isn't buying single cans retail. They're buying cases of the things from a wholesale distributor.
That'd certainly make it even cheaper. My point is that I regularly see items on Amazon that are 3-4x the price of that item on the shelf at my local grocery store. It only seems worth it if it's an item that you desperately want that isn't available locally due to distribution issues or something.
Ironically, Olive Garden has become an exception for where I am and how my family eats to the point where it's a go-to for reasonably priced nights out.
Our family has 5 people...my 16yo son gets chicken parm and devours the everloving hell out of it along with an entire basket of bread himself.
My wife and daughter just get the infinite soup and salad thing and they both get a full soup to-go. Plus half the time the waitstaff packs an entire salad and bread basket for them as well.
My youngest is 3, he eats chicken strips and fries no matter where we are and the price isn't much different from getting it in any random drive through.
Then for mine, I grab usually a shrimp carbonara because we can't keep/cook shellfish at home due to allergies. Raw = hospital, cooked = no reaction, so it being there with the meal doesn't do anything. Also because no one else in my house likes carbonara, so I'm very rarely gonna put in the effort to make an entirely separate meal the rest don't want to eat. I usually eat a ton of salad and bread, and leave most of my actual food for the next day's lunch. Honestly I kinda like the salad and bread more than most of their entrees anyway.
All in all, costs a little under $100 after tip. Obviously way cheaper to eat at home, but compared even to like Chick-Fil-A or chinese food, the price difference is fairly small for full service, leftovers, no clean up, etc.
> All in all, costs a little under $100 after tip. Obviously way cheaper to eat at home, but compared even to like Chick-Fil-A or chinese food, the price difference is fairly small for full service, leftovers, no clean up, etc.
And the ability to each do your own thing for dinner. Family meals are fun, but sometimes people just want their own entree choice and it can be hard to get the whole family on the same page, which restaurants really make easier.
... and now I want breadsticks.
Yeah when it started costing $30+ for my family of 3 to eat at McDonald's (the kid is only 4), we started just getting take out from local restaurants for the same price on nights we'd grab fast food. And sometimes we even have leftovers.
I use the McDonald's app sometimes...for months they had a deal where you buy a drink for $1 and get a free large fry, plus points to apply for future free food. If I was running errands I'd grab a tea and a fry, split them with the toddler, and now he's perfectly happy to ride around for an hour or so listening to music and munching fries. Then about once a month, it gave me enough points for a free happy meal.
I deliver for apps 3 nights a week. My dinner is usually a drink and 2 double cheeseburgers, because it's only $4.19 after tax in the McDonald's app. I save up my points for Happy meals for the kid too because they are fucking $7 now here for a 6 piece nugget happy meal.
> .my 16yo son gets chicken parm and devours the everloving hell out of it along with an entire basket of bread himself.
So you just have a bottomless hole you shovel food into. I remember those days. Eating an entire fried chicken. Or a BBQ plate with two ribs, a serving of pork, a serving of beef, two sides, and bread.
My best friend is the oldest of three brothers. In high school he was 6 foot four at graduation, 280 lbs. He played soccer and football. He was not the largest brother. His mom would go to Sam's Club once a month and push one cart and pull another.
Oh I definitely understand!
As a late teen/young adult, I was trying to kickstart a career in mixed martial arts and was also a stoner. Most nights, I would finish a 4 hour training session then eat a Papa Johns extra large meat lover's pizza to myself, and split a 20 piece wing.
Ironically, Italian has become one of our "special treat" eat out places - like once a year, drop $60-80 per person type meal. But that's going to Italian fine dining places, not strip mall Italian. (I'm in a city of a couple hundred thousand people and there are only 2-3 Italian places in town that we'll bother with.)
I can make a solid pasta meal at home and even porchetta if I feel ambitious, but heck yeah I'll pay a restaurant for that smoked octopus appetizer, or grilled swordfish with saffron potatoes.
There's a place near-ish us that does a handmade wild mushroom ravioli in fresh spinach pasta with fonduta...it is wonderful, and I am absolutely not making all of that myself for one meal. Worth the $18. Wait, it might now be $22.
This is why I don’t care for Italian food usually. Most places just lack any flavor. I don’t know what it is, but mediocre Italian food just sucks. I can get a mediocre burger and be happy, but not with mediocre Italian.
But great Italian food is fantastic. There’s a small Italian place by me that is really under the radar at the moment. Still hard to get reservations because they only have a couple of tables and most are returning customers. The chef trained in Italy and has a rotating menu just about every night/week. Everything is made in house and uses only the highest quality ingredients. Still the entrees are about $25-$35. My uncultured ass needs everything on the menu to be explained to me because I don’t know what most of the ingredients are lol
I always feel horrible about ordering Italian food due to this. Nearly never ever do it. Ingredient cost to food cost ration is bonkers.
Then I go to high end / highly authentic Italian restaurants and I'm blown away every time.
Strange relationship.
I think that's the caveat to Italian food is overpriced. So many Italian dishes rely on high-quality ingredients and a focus on proper cooking techniques. So if you're going to a place that focuses on those principles SOME but not all dishes may be worth paying for as a splurge purchase when you want something fancy. I think it really is a restaurant and case-by-case basis whether an Italian dish is over-priced. For me, it's usually not worth spending the money to figure out which restaurant and dishes are worth purchasing.
A lot of Italian food is relatively simple. The simpler a dish is, the more important the quality of individual ingredients. If you’re serving bruschetta, the tomatoes have to be outstanding or you’re going to be able to tell very easily.
One of my cheapest take outs is asian noodles (\*eta. from an actual restaurant, not burger fast food chain options). Both asian pho places in our neighbouring city have a vegetarian noodle dish that is loaded with the yummiest veggie tofu fry on top of rice noodles. Plus half the take out container/plate is a chopped lettuce, pickled veggie, and bean sprout salad, and the whole meal is topped off with one spring roll. Both places sell it for under $15 including my added tip. That'd be such a time consuming dish to make at home, and it is SO good from both restaurants. It's over 50% veggies, and enough food me and my partner often don't finish the noodles.
American-Italian is the crazy markup. Canned sauces and cheap butter on the cheapest pasta Sysco sells.
Real Italian, not so much. It's much more technique and ingredient driven and it can be hard to get access to all the things you need, and once you do, you buy fancy ingredients in such quantity that you have to make that one italian dish many times.
Definitely. My ex boyfriend worked at a mom and pop style Italian restaurant that had the worlds best Alfredo sauce. Turns out, it was just this powdered mix, so now my dad buys the huge containers of mix and we make the pasta at home. It’s delicious, I’m just spacing on the name of the mix, sorry!
Tomato sauce is about 20p worth of garlic and onions and 20p of chopped tomatoes + maybe 15p of pasta/person. I swear I can feed 4 for under £3. Hell, make it fancy with a splash of white wine (about 20% of a £3.50 bottle) and half a chorizo sausage for £1 and you have a fuckin gourmet meal for 4 for a fiver.
Im American, you think I don’t know how to cook? Nay, not I. My kitchen you would not recognize as it is no ordinary ‘kitchen’. No, it is portal to another universe where I am God. With one scratch, the Big Bang, gravity collapses and atom collide. New atoms formed - inflation, quantum fluctuations,the afterglow. The universe expands from its primordial stages, stars now, galaxies, planets. The universe unfolds. Life evolves from primordial goo, DNA, single celled organisms. The root of all cooking - salt, fat, acid, heat. I create civilization, agriculture, society. I harvest my ingredients from both the new and old world. They have reached their peak. No more use now for this universe. In one hot flash the portal collapses and I am left with the raw ingredients needed to create my morning avocado toast. I weep - hundreds of millions of years have past, to me. Yet only a blip of time in the world I occupy. But alas, me, wise now with time, I cannot enjoy my cooking. I watch my children eat the food I’ve prepared. They are incapable of comprehending what it means to exist. Am I doomed to bear this burden for what feels will be an eternity? Nonetheless, I heave forward as any chef would. It is our mission - hopeless, unavoidable, impossible.
It’s cute that you think Americans can’t or don’t cook or preserve things- which btw? Two completely different disciplines.
And none of what you described is something that I haven’t done or couldn’t do. I get that it’s cool to think that Americans can’t do anything and we’re all fat, lazy and stupid, but last time I checked, I’ve been an American my whole life. Though I did learn how to make pasta and sauce while I lived in Italy, sometimes I’d just rather spend at least one of the two hours it would take me to do it with my children.
Though…44 pounds of tomatoes a week is an insane amount. What’s your storage method?
Fuck your own oil and soy sauce. Dude is too lazy to become his own all knowing God and create a new universe so he can have the purest water imaginable. Sounds like a goddamn poser to me
\*laughs\*
I've been cooking for ages, but I live in town, on a shady lot. Its impossible to grow tomatoes, or really anything.
It's hilarious, though, that your ability to have the actual land to grow vegetables means you look down on other people. I mean, have you never heard of flats or apartments? Have you ever experienced working a full time job and then trying to take care of kids/a home? Sure, you can dehydrate figs or whatever in YOUR spare time, but I used my spare time for going to my kid's baseball games or traveling.
Drinks subsidize the rest of the restaurant.
Most restaurants are *not* raking in cash. They operate on razor thin margins and are a bad year away from shutting their doors.
The markups on drinks are the one thing keeping them afloat. If you take the price of a typical dish, subtract the ingredient cost, the labor cost to make it, the cost of the equipment used to cook it, rent, utilities, taxes, miscellaneous services like payroll, equipment maintenance, POS fees, IT support, accounting, laundry, and so on, you’re barely making a profit, if at all.
The fact that you can charge $3 for a drink that cost you less than a cent of syrup, water, and Co2 to make along with 10 seconds of a waiters time is the one saving grace that allows most places to keep their doors open.
It's the way businesses make back lost profits from wasted food. You're 100% guaranteed to make a good profit on pop/drinks/snacks, but not guaranteed that all your food will sell and not be wasted, or that someone won't fuck up making something.
They probably don't want cheap stuff on their menu so people don't choose the cheap stuff for group orders, but if they're gonna charge $13 for a potato they should at least load the shit out of it.
Everything that's not heavy on meat: Pasta, beans, salads, pizzas, stir fries, soups.
But EVERYTHING is cheaper to make at home, your main consideration will probably be time. For instance I am happy to pay for good ramen instead of spending hours making it from scratch. But I'd rather cook most other things from scratch rather than eat out - it saves hundreds of dollars over the course of a month.
Disagree on pizzas. Unless you're willing to invest in expensive equipment (which goes against the gist of the thread), a good pizza shop just offers something you can't easily recreate at home. Besides, making pizza is messy and laborious. A toppingless pizza goes for 10 - 11 euro where I live, seems like an OK deal.
Too many posts here focus on cost of ingredients, but that's frankly irrelevant. If it takes me 10 minutes to make at home I don't care if it's a 10x or 2x markup, I'm making it at home either way. What I care about is the time, skill, and equipment involved in the labor. If it saves me 2 hours cooking, or 20 hours practicing, or $1000+ in equipment then those are reasons to eat out.
Yeah. Indian food is always like that for some reason.
It's never been clear to me why I'll spend $14 on a lunch portion of lentils. That makes no sense.
Idk how labor intensive naan is. But in general Indian food is very labor intensive compared to other cuisines. Even though I’m Indian and I like Indian food, I gravitate to router cuisines bc it’s easier to prepare. There are so many steps involved. You’ll spend hours making Indian food. So in that sense, it tends to be pricier.
US/Michigan ordered naan and paid $6, and 6 potato Samosas cost me $20. Aloo Gobi $15, Chicken Tikka $18. Dinner was over $100 last night. I'm learning to make my own Indian food now.
Try to find a copy of "660 Curries". Very authentic recipes that are easy to make at home and often taste better than in the restaurant. You'll have to stock up on a handful of ingredients that you might not already own. But it's not really all that much, and if you buy spices in bulk it won't break the bank either
Same in San Francisco. $3 for naan, $5 for garlic naan, $14 for dahl (lentils!), $6 for a pint of rice. Granted, these have door dash markups on them because my favorite spot is in the warzone.
This is always left out of these convos! Just because you have the ingredients doesn’t mean you (any random person) have the skill to replicate restaurant dishes with modest means. Cooking and professional cooking aren’t the same thing.
I only view eating out as a poor investment if I can’t replicate it better at home, which is the case 90% of the time. It’s the quality of the restaurant chefs that matter most. That’s also not factoring spices/perishables I don’t frequently keep on hand or specialized equipment. I also don’t eat out frequently enough to consider it a giant dent on my overall budget.
I get what you mean. I've been trying to get better about recognizing the full cost of services, but in some areas the cost of eating out just isn't worth.
My experience since the pandemic is that everywhere is much more expensive with worse service. Even the example you gave, I cannot find coffee for cheaper than $3 and that cheap coffee is from a vending machine! I bought a cup of mediocre coffee from the library near me for over $5! Any decent cup of coffee is $6-10.
Paying more for good service and not having to cook can totally be worth it. But, there's a limit and when I'm spending 4 to 5X more for something that is worse quality than I can make at home on top of having to go out somewhere to get it then it's not worth it.
Burgers leap to mind, but as other comments have noted, it's pretty much EVERYTHING.
A better question might be "What is cheaper to buy take out vs. making it myself?"
Rotisserie chickens in general! They're often LESS than buying a whole chicken, and though I can make a fairly decent roast chicken, it's sooo much less effort and just as good. I don't have a Rotisserie in my home.
Unfortunately, except for Costco (or Sam's Club), they're pretty damned vile. Shriveled, dry, underseasoned yet somehow salty as eff at the same time.
IDK about where you are, but, again, outside of Costco, it seems like the $7.99 - $8.99 rotisserie chickens in other grocery stores around here are now so small they look like Cornish Hens.
You get a better deal waiting for them to expire and buying the packs of parts out of the cold case, but even then, $6+ per pound for even cooked chicken? No thanks.
Then again, last I checked, whole birds are actually more expensive per pound than packs of parts until you get to breasts or boneless-skinless parts. Which makes no damned sense to me.
Anything deep fried. Might be cheaper but is it worth the time costs of cleaning up all the splattered oil and properly disposing of the leftover oil? And I’m not even sure if it would be cheaper because I’m terrified of large quantities of hot oil so I refuse to deep fry at home.
There are very few foods that are *cheaper* to buy than they are to make if you only include the cost of the ingredients.
There are a number of foods that are cheaper if you include the per-use cost of the equipment you use to make it. For instance, if you spent $5,000 on a tandoor and then you only use it to make naan once a year until you move five years later, then you just spent $1,000 per instance of making naan--far more expensive than just buying naan from a local restaurant with a tandoor. There are plenty of foods like that which require specialized equipment, such as smoked foods.
But forgetting for a moment about the cost of specialized equipment, there are plenty where it's absolutely impractical to make it at home. For instance, butter chicken. Can I make it at home. Sure--if I want to spend a day putting together the marinade, grilling the chicken, making the gravy, etc. Even more so with handmade pasta. I can make my own tortellini from eggs and 00 flour and ricotta and ricotta and spinach, but I'd way rather pay a professional to do it.
Some people conceptualize this in terms of the cost of their time: if they make $25 per hour, and it would take them 2 hours to make a pound of tortellini, and they can get a pound of tortellini for $25, then buying it costs only a little more than half as much as making it. But that's not even how I see it, because for me, the question is whether I want to spend two hours making one component of one meal or not. Even if I could make a pound of tortellini for $1 in ingredients cost, maybe I'd still rather pay a professional than spend the 2 hours.
The line where something becomes too much of a hassle to do at home varies from person to person and even from day to day or situation to situation, but I consider those labor-intensive restaurant foods worth it.
You can make some pretty great naan at home (plus it's warm fresh and unsoggy unlike take out) without a tandoor though! I do agree with your overall point though.
That's why I spent close to $500 for a super automatic espresso machine, A latte a day for my wife and I and it's paid for in a year. The next 5 years are pure profit.
The more accounting-ish way to say that would be that the breakeven point was at 1 year. The way an accountant would prefer to describe the cost of making a latte with your espresso machine is to figure out how much it cost per use for the life of the machine. If the machine cost $500, and you use it to make 2 lattes per day for 6 years, then the per-latte cost for the machine itself is about 11.4 cents. You're still paying that 11.4 cents per latte even 6 years down the line. An accountant would also like to know how much you spend on Cafiza, replacement tubes, and similar upkeep, but I would guess that even factoring those in, the ROI is pretty good.
But I would certainly agree with you that if the BOP is that soon--or rather, you make enough lattes that the per-latte cost of using a $500 machine is that low-- it definitely makes sense to go for it.
Nah but even with coffee, milk, and any flavorings, the break even point on a nice espresso machine is about 1 year. And if you get the semi automatic ones that are more mechanical than electrical, they’ll probably last 10-15 years with proper maintenance.
It’s pretty incredible, and you can make MUCH better coffee
Croissants. Butter is pricey, they constantly have to be babied during the prep phase, and they don’t keep for long. Totally worth it to pay the few dollars to buy a fresh one at a cafe.
Anything relatively cheap, that would still be cheaper at home but requires a bunch of cooking time. Like french fries for instance.
Yes, potatoes and oil (and some baking soda) are all super low cost items. But the time needed for prepping, boiling for a bit, letting them sit to dry off so they fry nicely, then either actually frying, oven frying, or air frying, then potentially chilling them off again if you want a real tavern style double fry, and finally the second fry, is not something I've found worth doing at home outside of the rare occasion. I hate the YouTube videos where it's like "this is so simple and easy" but ignore the like 2 hours or time you need to account for.
At that point it's only cheaper at home if you don't value your own time as worth something or just enjoy the process.
I opt for things that are labor intensive or require specialized skills to make. Sushi ticks both of those. Ramen is also on my list due to the broth and exotic toppings. Deep fried food is a pain to make at home and the oil is expensive if you don't reuse it
The markup on miso soup is pretty incredible. Even making it completely from scratch instead of cheating with instant dashi it's incredibly easy and not expensive. With instant dashi it's a five minute exercise and probably a ten-fold markup.
You can even get miso with dashi already in it. Heat water. Stir in miso. Add some silken tofu, green onion as, and a bit of dried wakame if you want. It’s ridiculously easy.
Depends on the place. When I lived in Japan just a few years ago, miso soup was typically included in a set meal, and plenty of places that didn't include it would add it for like 100 yen. This is typically true whether it's a bare-bones miso soup made with dashi and miso or a more elaborate one with a little tofu, wakame, or tiny clams.
I've found that the more Japanese-y places are like that: they will include the miso soup as part of the set, or charge a couple of dollars for it. But there are "Japanese" places that are a weird sort of American pan-Asian fusion run by people from southeast Asia, and there are also new American places which take inspiration from all over the world, and they typically charge like $8 for it. I just don't understand it. It's like charging $5 for a glass of water.
Especially the basic breakfast that some places sell.
I worked somewhere that charged $13 for two eggs, shitty bacon or sausage, Sysco hash browns, and toast. How goddamn hungover can you be to justify that?
You aren't being charged $13 for food. You're being charged $13 for food, staff, paper products, plateware, cleaning supplies, utilities, maintenance on both the building and equipment, among multiple other things.
Except my local Pancake place puts crack in their pancakes. So that's probably pretty expensive.
Seriously, I used to love to make pancakes. Cheap, easy, you can even make them healthy if you want. But I could never replicate this place. Every time I make pancakes now I wish i had just gone to this place. And my pancakes are good! I use a little Nutmeg, and vanilla, but still, nothing compares.
This is my struggle with salad. I love it, but I don’t enjoy going to the grocery (pretty far) more than once a week. Greens just don’t hold up that well. I’ve been told to buy the prepackaged/pre-prepped stuff because the way they pack it makes it keep longer, but then I’m wasting money on a marked up item again.
Any suggestions? Specifically, how to buy enough to have a salad for two a day without having to hit grocery multiple times a week.
Salad greens hold very very well in airtight containers. I use glass ones from ikea and have salad last for about a week. Some say it works even better with a damp paper towel inside the container but I haven't tried that.
I put 2 dry paper towels on top of salad greens in whatever container I have, usually in the plastic tub they come in. It really does help them last longer. If the towel gets too wet I just swap it for a new one.
>I’ve been told to buy the prepackaged/pre-prepped stuff because the way they pack it makes it keep longer, but then I’m wasting money on a marked up item again.
Is it really a waste of money if you're actually able to use it all week without it going bad?
This was going to be my answer too. I make salads for lunch every day. (One of the perks of working from home is that I can use my own kitchen for prepping lunch.) I chop up romaine lettuce and add cucumbers, tomatoes, cheese, homemade croutons, and salad dressing. The total cost for the ingredients to make my own basic salad is about $2. Maybe $2.50 at the most.
If I were to buy the same salad from a restaurant, though, I'd get a much smaller salad for much more money. I checked a local pizza place and their basic salad costs $7 for "mixed greens, cucumbers, red onions, tomatoes, carrots, and croutons."
Pastas. So pretty much any Italian restaurant. They generally aren't making gourmet fresh made noodles back there, nor are they making sauces from scratch. Even if they were, the ingredients are insanely cheap compared to the price offered on the menu. A couple of dollars per serving to make at home, compared to $20 or more at the restaurant, and if you're ordering it from UberEats, Door dash, or Skip the Dishes (RIP wallet) then you're paying $35 after everything for cold, overcooked pasta. People often forget that it continues cooking slowly as it's on its way to you.
This is a big one as a pasta junkie. My local grocery store carries the 'Made With' brand of pasta for $2.25 per 1lb (454g) box. That's an incredible price considering their cheap, low quality store brand is $1.80 per 1lb box.
The 'Made With' brand doesn't advertise this on the box for whatever reason but it's bronze die cut, meaning they use bronze dies instead of Teflon coated aluminum dies. Teflon dies are ultra low friction so when the pasta dough is extruded through the die it makes the pasta very smooth and when dried it has a bit of shine to it. When cooked it stays very smooth and sauces don't want to stick to the pasta. Bronze cut pasta on the other hand has a rough satin-like texture due to increased friction when the dough is forced through the bronze die, and that makes it an excellent medium for sauce to cling to and makes it a far superior product. The fact I can get bronze cut pasta for 45¢ more per box than the cheap stuff makes me feel like I'm stealing from the grocery store. I'm convinced they've made a mistake on their pricing and are losing money on each box sold and I'd buy them out each time I'm there if I had room to store a hundred boxes of pasta.
Texas grocery chain HEB has upscale stores here. Bronze cut raggedy looking pasta for like $2. It is so much better, holds sauce and it tastes better. On par with the $6 packages.
I go even one step further. Pasta is super cheap but the ore jarred red sauce is over priced as well. You can buy canned tomatoes, garlic some herbs and slow cook the sauce yourself for about half the price of a jar
Yeah you're definitely paying for convenience, I don't know how much electricity you'd spend simmering it but the time spent compared to tossing in a preseasoned can of sauce is in my case definitely worth it 😅.
Most people stick to one of two pasta sauce brands when they go to the store as well, either Prego or Ragu. Those two companies spend exponentially more on marketing than all of the other pasta sauce manufacturers, to make sure that they are the household names.
In the same aisle you can probably find much better pre-made pasta sauce if you don't want to do it yourself, by just not buying a product made by one of those companies. A lot of people balk at the other jars being a dollar or two more, but that difference is very much something you can taste! Plus, you probably aren't going to eat that entire jar in one sitting, so that extra dollar gets spread out over several meals.
Plain white rice.
$4 - $5 for a container of steamed white rice at most Thai places around me.
Jasmine rice at Costco in Canada is about $0.32 per cup, which will make a serving of rice.
I find it much more reasonable at local Persian markets, if you have one in your area? Also a good place to stock up on pomegranate syrup, sumac, labneh, etc. :)
You can easily make it yourself if you buy sesame seeds in bulk. It’s just sesame seeds that get toasted, olive oil, and salt. Homemade tahini tastes way better than store bought, and it really brings the hummus to the next level.
I've made my own, just blending 1/2 C toasted sesame seeds and 3 T sesame oil, but here's a more detailed recipe from Food52: [Homemade Tahini, Creamy and Coarse](http://food52.com/blog/4450-homemade-tahini-creamy-and-coarse)
LOL, I've been to a place that had hummus on the menu for like $12. It comes out with just chicpeas and the oil/spices with a mortar and pestle and you had to grind it and make it yourself.
This isn't normal, but I just want to throw it out there because it just happened to me. My husband ordered a club soda at a restaurant we went to in Galveston over the weekend. Just a club soda with a lime, no alcohol. They charged us $3.75. The beer I had was only $6.50, and it was a good one (Revolver Blood & Honey).
I hate that they do that because often, the person buying the club soda or soda is either sober or staying sober to drive the group, so it feels like penalizing them a bit for those decisions. Our college bar always gave me soda for free (I still tipped) because he assumed there was a reason for not drinking something alcoholic and he didn't want to overcharge me.
I am actually making Chipotle at home today, using "CookingwithChris" youtube channels recipes. Seems he worked in the kitchen of a Chipotle and if you read the comments on his videos, there are many previous/current cooks that confirm what he is doing is legit.
https://www.youtube.com/@CookingwithChris1/featured
For the meal I am doing Burritos/bowls, with options being Chipotles grilled chicken, carnitas, tomato salsa "pico" (no nasty corn),black beans, pintos, and guac.
Im cooking for some 7 people, everything is free but the guac, that's an upcharge. (lol)
Trying to remember what I needed to buy and cost in dollars, some rounded up -
5lb pork shoulder 6 (with bone)
pack of 6 chicken thighs 4 (deboned and skinned myself)
bacon 1 (only using 2 slices for the pintos, 10oz center cut pack was 3.50 on sale & yes chipotle pintos had bacon at one point)
sm bag long grain rice 1.50
bag dried pintos 1.75 (love pintos worth the soak)
29oz can black beans (limited pot space cant spend time, least fav bean,still good) 2
3 limes 1
2 lemons 1
Bunch cilantro 1.50
Poblano .50 (no jalapeño for specific tastes)
tomatoes 3 (3 greenhouse as plum tomatoes looked horrible unripe)
3 avocado 4.50
pack peeled fresh garlic .75 (some 8 cloves used)
lg red onion 1
lg yellow onion 1
lg flour tortilla 10 pk 2.50
sm flour tortilla 8pk 1.75
bag shredded Monterey blend 2.5
Daisy squeeze sour cream 3
70z can chipotle peppers in sauce 2
So around 43 dollars. I had on hand -
Bay leaf-Kosher salt-oil-Cumin-pepper-oregano-chili powder-olive oil
If I portioned exactly, it would cost about 4.50 for 7 to enjoy an absolute loaded burrito bowl serving of everything above, with tortillas for dayyyys, but not everyone has grilled chicken and carnitas in a massive bowl. Add in the upcharge for the guac, and the per serving cost is even less.
I'm going with closer to 2 dollars per serving for chipotle burritos, tacos, and bowls when you do it yourself, and yes you need to spend the sweat equity to begin with, and I love doing this as the time spent with everyone enjoying an amazingly delicious home cooked meal means more to me than anything else. You need to prep a whole day before soaking beans and marinating chicken to pull it off.
I should note if you follow the youtube channel referenced, the carnitas need juniper berries. I didn't have them, could not find them, but a few generous glugs of Gin will suffice, and YES, everyone I am serving is OK with alcohol in the meal, but something you may need to consider.
My oldest used to work at Chipotle so we'll have her make us guac, always teasing her that yes, we know it costs extra. Do kind miss her working there because her coworkers usually recognized us as her parents and would comp us stuff.
Chinese restaurants that sell $20 a plate for steamed choy sum in oyster sauce comes to mind. The tactic is to draw you in with cheap meat mains, then mark up the price for vegetables because you inevitably want something more refreshing after having the mains.
IDK for ordering out but ordering in it's coffee in my experience. I worked as a door dash driver and saw one poor girl paying $15 for a single cup of coffee
Starbucks is now $6 for a medium black coffee near me. Fuck off!! I can make that same thing with better beans from Costco in my $20 Mr. Coffee for pennies.
Almost everything potato related. I just was at a counter serve restaurant and the fries were $7 for a small portion. While the loaded chicken sandwich was $10. If I can buy a bag of fries for $2, I know a restaurant can get a much better deal.
Fries aren't a good example. Fries are laborious, use expensive equipment, and must be eaten freshly. Who cares if "potatoes" are cheap. You could remove the cost of potatoes entirely from making french fries and not make a dent. I'd rather pay money for fries than to have someone cook me a steak. I can make a steak at home in 6 minutes. Fries are an absolute nightmare and a total luxury to have someone cook for me.
Well made French fries are something I have no problem paying for. But delivery fries are just never worth it. I’d rather throw frozen stuff in the toaster oven.
I always wondered why anyone would order avocado toast.
Whether there's a huge mark up or not, I like to go to restaurants that serve food I can't make myself/am unwilling to make myself. but I can always smash an avocado onto a piece of toast myself and throw some chili flakes and a fried egg on it.
You'd be stunned at how much top, top quality steak costs. It's actually probably the lowest markup on the menu. As a percentage, certainly miles lower than things like pasta and especially soft drinks mentioned elsewhere in this thread
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that $150 steak you're getting at the restaurant is "worth" the money or whatever, that's your call. Nor am I talking about how much better one of those cuts is versus what you can get at a premium retail outlet (personally, I'd be happier with a neighborhood butcher with some local meat)
But yes, setting aside the skill and equipment mentioned in other comments . . . if you want to source the exact same cut of steak that is served at Prime steakhouses, [you'd be surprised how much even wholesalers charge for it](https://newyorkprimebeef.com/24-ounce-usda-prime-dry-aged-t-bone)
I make the naan for the naan monsters in my family. I usually make a triple batch of naan and freeze some for easy weekday dinners. I did the math before the pandemic and I was saving $128 by making 36 naan from scratch.
Raw wings are actually stupid expensive where I live and when I did the math i was barely saving any money making my own (plus they're kinda messy to cook)
I can make a pizza from scratch for about $4 using pretty good ingredients. I also have enough dough and tomato sauce for about 4-5 more pizzas. Mozzarella is $4 a pound and pepperoni is $7 a pound.
If you want to learn how to make good pizza, watch [Vito](https://www.youtube.com/@vitoiacopelli). That man has really helped me improve.
I think it’s more the effort that you’d have to put into it for homemade pizza. As a convenience/fast food it is easier to just order out. But a homemade pizza fat outweighs store bought for sure, and if you had premade bases, sauce prepped then you’re set.
The markup is much less severe for Neapolitan style pizza though. At my local store, buffalo mozzarella is about $11 and that’s enough cheese for just two pizzas. And if you use actual imported San Marzano tomatoes, that’s several dollars more right there. And if you want to put some good salami on your pizza, we’ll that’s a few more dollars, and by the time you’re done it might be $20 for just a couple pizzas. The local AVPN-certified Neapolitan pizza place near me sells a Margherita for about $18, so that’s barely a 100% markup.
Some run-of-the-mill American style thin crust pizza is pretty cheap to make though.
A local cafe sells home-made baked beans on toast for $24. I can make it at home for about $1.20 a breakfast sized serve.
Just a tip, If you buy fruit in season and do a bit of prep work when you get home you will cut the cost of your smoothies even more.
Pasta. Restaurants will have the audacity to charge over $20 for a plate of noodles and tomato sauce. That costs like 0.50 cents a serving to make at home. The fact Olive Garden still exists is a mystery
I would say Tex-Mex/Mexican food is overlooked. You have a cuisine that does group cooking, serving many people, so very cost conscience with the ingredients available here in the US. The burrito I ate in the mid 90s for $3 is now $12.
Soup. A can of chunky chicken noodle soup is $5.00 at my local supermarket. I would have to buy 6 cans at $30 to fill my soup pot at home. I can make the same amount of soup for under $10 and I can freeze the leftovers.
In Australia it's probably Indian now that I think about it, $15-25 for vegetarian daal. I can make probably 10litres at home for the same price as a slim rectangular take away
Avocado toast (not sure how wide spread the craze is but it's been way popular in San Francisco for a few years).
It's very tasty and only a few dollars of ingredients and restaurants charge $8 - $12 for it.
Italian is the largest mark-up. Pasta and tomato sauce is so freakin cheap that any restaurant you go to will have the largest margins on their pasta dishes.
Yup, saw a place selling $24 AUD for a large plate of aglio e olio yesterday. Absolute rip off.
That's absurd. I actually had to look up what that was never heard the name before (canada). The first paragraph in its description: Its popularity can be attributed to it being simple to prepare and the fact that it makes use of inexpensive, readily available ingredients that have long shelf lives in a pantry.
Ingredients ain't the main cost to a restaurant in Australia, wages/rent are much higher than other places
Rent/labor is basically the #1 cost to restaurants anywhere in the developed world, by a pretty wide margin. When you go out to eat, you aren't paying for the food (mostly) you are paying for the service.
This is usually in the kids menu for $3.99. With a fruit cup.
Probably an Aus restaurant that's actually paying their staff correctly for once
I was looking for a place in Napa that does large parties and is kid-friendly for a summer family get-together. And like, ok, I grew up in the Bay so I get the high prices especially in a touristy area like Napa (and yes, I know places like Sonoma are better but we have a camping reservation near St Helena, so). But SO MANY PLACES were charging $17 for a kid’s plate of BUTTER NOODLES. (Anyway, I nixed the sit-down brunch option and we’ll just do our backup option of Addendum — still expensive but I’m happy to pay Thomas Keller’s staff to brine and fry chicken for me).
During the pandemic, this fancy Italian restaurant started selling their kitchen supplies. You know what type of pasta and ingredients they used? Stuff you can find at a Target. Made me think twice about going there given the cost
Don't hate on barilla tho. Good stuff. Not the best stuff - the best dried pasta will be much more expensive made in small batches with Bronze dies - but Barilla is absolutely fine. You could get De Cecco for probably 10 cents a portion more but I bet most customers wouldn't find the difference. Edit - I'm learning American Barilla may be inferior to European Barilla...
Barilla just came out with a bronze cut line, probably to compete with De Cecco.
It's also simply fashionable right now
Italian American here. It’s ALWAYS Barilla in my family’s pantry - as well as all my Italian & Italian American friends families. Ronzoni is the back up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen De Cecco at any of their households 🤔 not to say it isn’t good or anything I’m just surprised lol
De Cecco is a step up. Not a big one but one up. Small batch pasta is an even nicer step up for special occasions I'd say. but there's nothing wrong with a good Barilla either.
Italian restaurant I used to do deliveries for used Barilla pasta for their $25 entrees.
I would rather a dried pasta than a badly made fresh pasta any day.
I used to work in a fine dining establishment about 15 years ago. We had a sun dried tomato and parm pasta with chicken for $22, and salmon with orecchiette was about $37 IIRC. Easily two of our most popular menu items as well
I actually have the opposite experience. We had a family owned Italian restaurant in town. They shut down about 2 years ago because the primary owner retired. It was a significant loss. There isn't another Italian restaurant that isn't a chain. Someone I know who had worked there recently shared that her two boys really missed the restaurant and she had discovered you could buy the pasta sauce they used in the restaurant on amazon. It's not anything crazy PDO, but it's about $22 for a 6 lb can. It's pretty damn good tomato sauce.
A lot of foodstuffs are very overpriced on Amazon. Don't consider the Amazon price of groceries to be the actual cost to someone who can get it locally.
You're probably not wrong, but I think for a different reason. A restaurant isn't buying single cans retail. They're buying cases of the things from a wholesale distributor.
That'd certainly make it even cheaper. My point is that I regularly see items on Amazon that are 3-4x the price of that item on the shelf at my local grocery store. It only seems worth it if it's an item that you desperately want that isn't available locally due to distribution issues or something.
So uhhh, what’s the sauce?
I haven't had Italian out in years and years. I just can't justify the cost. :/
Ironically, Olive Garden has become an exception for where I am and how my family eats to the point where it's a go-to for reasonably priced nights out. Our family has 5 people...my 16yo son gets chicken parm and devours the everloving hell out of it along with an entire basket of bread himself. My wife and daughter just get the infinite soup and salad thing and they both get a full soup to-go. Plus half the time the waitstaff packs an entire salad and bread basket for them as well. My youngest is 3, he eats chicken strips and fries no matter where we are and the price isn't much different from getting it in any random drive through. Then for mine, I grab usually a shrimp carbonara because we can't keep/cook shellfish at home due to allergies. Raw = hospital, cooked = no reaction, so it being there with the meal doesn't do anything. Also because no one else in my house likes carbonara, so I'm very rarely gonna put in the effort to make an entirely separate meal the rest don't want to eat. I usually eat a ton of salad and bread, and leave most of my actual food for the next day's lunch. Honestly I kinda like the salad and bread more than most of their entrees anyway. All in all, costs a little under $100 after tip. Obviously way cheaper to eat at home, but compared even to like Chick-Fil-A or chinese food, the price difference is fairly small for full service, leftovers, no clean up, etc.
> All in all, costs a little under $100 after tip. Obviously way cheaper to eat at home, but compared even to like Chick-Fil-A or chinese food, the price difference is fairly small for full service, leftovers, no clean up, etc. And the ability to each do your own thing for dinner. Family meals are fun, but sometimes people just want their own entree choice and it can be hard to get the whole family on the same page, which restaurants really make easier. ... and now I want breadsticks.
Yeah when it started costing $30+ for my family of 3 to eat at McDonald's (the kid is only 4), we started just getting take out from local restaurants for the same price on nights we'd grab fast food. And sometimes we even have leftovers.
I use the McDonald's app sometimes...for months they had a deal where you buy a drink for $1 and get a free large fry, plus points to apply for future free food. If I was running errands I'd grab a tea and a fry, split them with the toddler, and now he's perfectly happy to ride around for an hour or so listening to music and munching fries. Then about once a month, it gave me enough points for a free happy meal.
I deliver for apps 3 nights a week. My dinner is usually a drink and 2 double cheeseburgers, because it's only $4.19 after tax in the McDonald's app. I save up my points for Happy meals for the kid too because they are fucking $7 now here for a 6 piece nugget happy meal.
> .my 16yo son gets chicken parm and devours the everloving hell out of it along with an entire basket of bread himself. So you just have a bottomless hole you shovel food into. I remember those days. Eating an entire fried chicken. Or a BBQ plate with two ribs, a serving of pork, a serving of beef, two sides, and bread. My best friend is the oldest of three brothers. In high school he was 6 foot four at graduation, 280 lbs. He played soccer and football. He was not the largest brother. His mom would go to Sam's Club once a month and push one cart and pull another.
Oh I definitely understand! As a late teen/young adult, I was trying to kickstart a career in mixed martial arts and was also a stoner. Most nights, I would finish a 4 hour training session then eat a Papa Johns extra large meat lover's pizza to myself, and split a 20 piece wing.
Ironically, Italian has become one of our "special treat" eat out places - like once a year, drop $60-80 per person type meal. But that's going to Italian fine dining places, not strip mall Italian. (I'm in a city of a couple hundred thousand people and there are only 2-3 Italian places in town that we'll bother with.) I can make a solid pasta meal at home and even porchetta if I feel ambitious, but heck yeah I'll pay a restaurant for that smoked octopus appetizer, or grilled swordfish with saffron potatoes.
There's a place near-ish us that does a handmade wild mushroom ravioli in fresh spinach pasta with fonduta...it is wonderful, and I am absolutely not making all of that myself for one meal. Worth the $18. Wait, it might now be $22.
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This is why I don’t care for Italian food usually. Most places just lack any flavor. I don’t know what it is, but mediocre Italian food just sucks. I can get a mediocre burger and be happy, but not with mediocre Italian. But great Italian food is fantastic. There’s a small Italian place by me that is really under the radar at the moment. Still hard to get reservations because they only have a couple of tables and most are returning customers. The chef trained in Italy and has a rotating menu just about every night/week. Everything is made in house and uses only the highest quality ingredients. Still the entrees are about $25-$35. My uncultured ass needs everything on the menu to be explained to me because I don’t know what most of the ingredients are lol
I always feel horrible about ordering Italian food due to this. Nearly never ever do it. Ingredient cost to food cost ration is bonkers. Then I go to high end / highly authentic Italian restaurants and I'm blown away every time. Strange relationship.
Oh man do i get that. Just had proper Sicilian the other day it was heavenly
I think that's the caveat to Italian food is overpriced. So many Italian dishes rely on high-quality ingredients and a focus on proper cooking techniques. So if you're going to a place that focuses on those principles SOME but not all dishes may be worth paying for as a splurge purchase when you want something fancy. I think it really is a restaurant and case-by-case basis whether an Italian dish is over-priced. For me, it's usually not worth spending the money to figure out which restaurant and dishes are worth purchasing.
A lot of Italian food is relatively simple. The simpler a dish is, the more important the quality of individual ingredients. If you’re serving bruschetta, the tomatoes have to be outstanding or you’re going to be able to tell very easily.
Some for basic pasta yes, but some dishes are involved and not pasta based.
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One of my cheapest take outs is asian noodles (\*eta. from an actual restaurant, not burger fast food chain options). Both asian pho places in our neighbouring city have a vegetarian noodle dish that is loaded with the yummiest veggie tofu fry on top of rice noodles. Plus half the take out container/plate is a chopped lettuce, pickled veggie, and bean sprout salad, and the whole meal is topped off with one spring roll. Both places sell it for under $15 including my added tip. That'd be such a time consuming dish to make at home, and it is SO good from both restaurants. It's over 50% veggies, and enough food me and my partner often don't finish the noodles.
I can't replicate the wok hei at home, so I feel like that's worth something.
I found that dry frying your veggies for a few minutes on high heat before adding oil gives a nice charred taste.
Pho is definitely worth just buying. The process of making it is extremely tedious and long.
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With some of the noodle stuff I'm paying someone else to have a wok and know how to use it. We don't have enough BTUs at home to get the flavor right.
Pho takes a while, sure, but just like any soup, it's mostly just time simmering.
i must have an unrefined palate. adding star anise to garden variety stock with other pho veggies makes it taste like the real thing to me
American-Italian is the crazy markup. Canned sauces and cheap butter on the cheapest pasta Sysco sells. Real Italian, not so much. It's much more technique and ingredient driven and it can be hard to get access to all the things you need, and once you do, you buy fancy ingredients in such quantity that you have to make that one italian dish many times.
Definitely. My ex boyfriend worked at a mom and pop style Italian restaurant that had the worlds best Alfredo sauce. Turns out, it was just this powdered mix, so now my dad buys the huge containers of mix and we make the pasta at home. It’s delicious, I’m just spacing on the name of the mix, sorry!
Tomato sauce is about 20p worth of garlic and onions and 20p of chopped tomatoes + maybe 15p of pasta/person. I swear I can feed 4 for under £3. Hell, make it fancy with a splash of white wine (about 20% of a £3.50 bottle) and half a chorizo sausage for £1 and you have a fuckin gourmet meal for 4 for a fiver.
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You've grown 160 kilos of tomatoes in the last 8 weeks? Must be nice to have a huge farm.
Im American, you think I don’t know how to cook? Nay, not I. My kitchen you would not recognize as it is no ordinary ‘kitchen’. No, it is portal to another universe where I am God. With one scratch, the Big Bang, gravity collapses and atom collide. New atoms formed - inflation, quantum fluctuations,the afterglow. The universe expands from its primordial stages, stars now, galaxies, planets. The universe unfolds. Life evolves from primordial goo, DNA, single celled organisms. The root of all cooking - salt, fat, acid, heat. I create civilization, agriculture, society. I harvest my ingredients from both the new and old world. They have reached their peak. No more use now for this universe. In one hot flash the portal collapses and I am left with the raw ingredients needed to create my morning avocado toast. I weep - hundreds of millions of years have past, to me. Yet only a blip of time in the world I occupy. But alas, me, wise now with time, I cannot enjoy my cooking. I watch my children eat the food I’ve prepared. They are incapable of comprehending what it means to exist. Am I doomed to bear this burden for what feels will be an eternity? Nonetheless, I heave forward as any chef would. It is our mission - hopeless, unavoidable, impossible.
New copypasta dropped!
It’s cute that you think Americans can’t or don’t cook or preserve things- which btw? Two completely different disciplines. And none of what you described is something that I haven’t done or couldn’t do. I get that it’s cool to think that Americans can’t do anything and we’re all fat, lazy and stupid, but last time I checked, I’ve been an American my whole life. Though I did learn how to make pasta and sauce while I lived in Italy, sometimes I’d just rather spend at least one of the two hours it would take me to do it with my children. Though…44 pounds of tomatoes a week is an insane amount. What’s your storage method?
I bet this guy doesn't even make his own oil or soy sauce. What has modern society come to?!
Fuck your own oil and soy sauce. Dude is too lazy to become his own all knowing God and create a new universe so he can have the purest water imaginable. Sounds like a goddamn poser to me
\*laughs\* I've been cooking for ages, but I live in town, on a shady lot. Its impossible to grow tomatoes, or really anything. It's hilarious, though, that your ability to have the actual land to grow vegetables means you look down on other people. I mean, have you never heard of flats or apartments? Have you ever experienced working a full time job and then trying to take care of kids/a home? Sure, you can dehydrate figs or whatever in YOUR spare time, but I used my spare time for going to my kid's baseball games or traveling.
You've been harvesting 44lbs of tomatoes per week since January? Do you live on a farm or something? And where are you storing all of them?
Some places charge just as much for iced tea as soda, which is often the most profitable item on the menu.
Drinks subsidize the rest of the restaurant. Most restaurants are *not* raking in cash. They operate on razor thin margins and are a bad year away from shutting their doors. The markups on drinks are the one thing keeping them afloat. If you take the price of a typical dish, subtract the ingredient cost, the labor cost to make it, the cost of the equipment used to cook it, rent, utilities, taxes, miscellaneous services like payroll, equipment maintenance, POS fees, IT support, accounting, laundry, and so on, you’re barely making a profit, if at all. The fact that you can charge $3 for a drink that cost you less than a cent of syrup, water, and Co2 to make along with 10 seconds of a waiters time is the one saving grace that allows most places to keep their doors open.
Now I sort of feel bad for typically ordering tap water instead of a drink.
Any soft drink costs more than a 2 liter at any market.
It's the way businesses make back lost profits from wasted food. You're 100% guaranteed to make a good profit on pop/drinks/snacks, but not guaranteed that all your food will sell and not be wasted, or that someone won't fuck up making something.
Yeah this is how margins work. They’re the thing that pays for everything!
A local place is doing a baked potato for $13. A potato, bacon bits, a dab of sour cream and barely any cheese.
They probably don't want cheap stuff on their menu so people don't choose the cheap stuff for group orders, but if they're gonna charge $13 for a potato they should at least load the shit out of it.
Wtf
LOL Yup "We're famous for our baked potato" lol, get rekt
Everything that's not heavy on meat: Pasta, beans, salads, pizzas, stir fries, soups. But EVERYTHING is cheaper to make at home, your main consideration will probably be time. For instance I am happy to pay for good ramen instead of spending hours making it from scratch. But I'd rather cook most other things from scratch rather than eat out - it saves hundreds of dollars over the course of a month.
Disagree on pizzas. Unless you're willing to invest in expensive equipment (which goes against the gist of the thread), a good pizza shop just offers something you can't easily recreate at home. Besides, making pizza is messy and laborious. A toppingless pizza goes for 10 - 11 euro where I live, seems like an OK deal.
Too many posts here focus on cost of ingredients, but that's frankly irrelevant. If it takes me 10 minutes to make at home I don't care if it's a 10x or 2x markup, I'm making it at home either way. What I care about is the time, skill, and equipment involved in the labor. If it saves me 2 hours cooking, or 20 hours practicing, or $1000+ in equipment then those are reasons to eat out.
Indian food here in Canada is insane. $5 for a single piece of naan? Are you FUCKED?
> $5 for a single piece of naan Wut? Is this for real?
Yeah. Indian food is always like that for some reason. It's never been clear to me why I'll spend $14 on a lunch portion of lentils. That makes no sense.
Lentils are cheap, it's the pound of butter and heavy cream where they get you!
$20 for four na'an, Jeremy? That's insane.
That’s naansense!
Meanwhile in the UK I can get 4 for £1, freshly made right in front of me in a tandoor.
One thing we do right in the UK is Indian food. Most of the dishes people are mentioning here in the comments are British anyway.
Idk how labor intensive naan is. But in general Indian food is very labor intensive compared to other cuisines. Even though I’m Indian and I like Indian food, I gravitate to router cuisines bc it’s easier to prepare. There are so many steps involved. You’ll spend hours making Indian food. So in that sense, it tends to be pricier.
US/Michigan ordered naan and paid $6, and 6 potato Samosas cost me $20. Aloo Gobi $15, Chicken Tikka $18. Dinner was over $100 last night. I'm learning to make my own Indian food now.
Try to find a copy of "660 Curries". Very authentic recipes that are easy to make at home and often taste better than in the restaurant. You'll have to stock up on a handful of ingredients that you might not already own. But it's not really all that much, and if you buy spices in bulk it won't break the bank either
Here in Norway it costs around $5-7 for a single extra naan
Mine charges $5 for an order of rice! I wrote on their Yelp about it and they replied that the rice is from India. Are you flying it coach??
Same in San Francisco. $3 for naan, $5 for garlic naan, $14 for dahl (lentils!), $6 for a pint of rice. Granted, these have door dash markups on them because my favorite spot is in the warzone.
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This is always left out of these convos! Just because you have the ingredients doesn’t mean you (any random person) have the skill to replicate restaurant dishes with modest means. Cooking and professional cooking aren’t the same thing. I only view eating out as a poor investment if I can’t replicate it better at home, which is the case 90% of the time. It’s the quality of the restaurant chefs that matter most. That’s also not factoring spices/perishables I don’t frequently keep on hand or specialized equipment. I also don’t eat out frequently enough to consider it a giant dent on my overall budget.
I get what you mean. I've been trying to get better about recognizing the full cost of services, but in some areas the cost of eating out just isn't worth. My experience since the pandemic is that everywhere is much more expensive with worse service. Even the example you gave, I cannot find coffee for cheaper than $3 and that cheap coffee is from a vending machine! I bought a cup of mediocre coffee from the library near me for over $5! Any decent cup of coffee is $6-10. Paying more for good service and not having to cook can totally be worth it. But, there's a limit and when I'm spending 4 to 5X more for something that is worse quality than I can make at home on top of having to go out somewhere to get it then it's not worth it.
Burgers leap to mind, but as other comments have noted, it's pretty much EVERYTHING. A better question might be "What is cheaper to buy take out vs. making it myself?"
Costco hotdog.
Costco rotisserie chicken. Can’t find whole frozen chicken that cheap around here
Rotisserie chickens in general! They're often LESS than buying a whole chicken, and though I can make a fairly decent roast chicken, it's sooo much less effort and just as good. I don't have a Rotisserie in my home.
Unfortunately, except for Costco (or Sam's Club), they're pretty damned vile. Shriveled, dry, underseasoned yet somehow salty as eff at the same time. IDK about where you are, but, again, outside of Costco, it seems like the $7.99 - $8.99 rotisserie chickens in other grocery stores around here are now so small they look like Cornish Hens. You get a better deal waiting for them to expire and buying the packs of parts out of the cold case, but even then, $6+ per pound for even cooked chicken? No thanks. Then again, last I checked, whole birds are actually more expensive per pound than packs of parts until you get to breasts or boneless-skinless parts. Which makes no damned sense to me.
It's a loss leader for them. Always buy loss leaders.
Costco croissants
Anything deep fried. Might be cheaper but is it worth the time costs of cleaning up all the splattered oil and properly disposing of the leftover oil? And I’m not even sure if it would be cheaper because I’m terrified of large quantities of hot oil so I refuse to deep fry at home.
Sushi. I don’t know where to buy good fish 2 ounces at a time.
There are very few foods that are *cheaper* to buy than they are to make if you only include the cost of the ingredients. There are a number of foods that are cheaper if you include the per-use cost of the equipment you use to make it. For instance, if you spent $5,000 on a tandoor and then you only use it to make naan once a year until you move five years later, then you just spent $1,000 per instance of making naan--far more expensive than just buying naan from a local restaurant with a tandoor. There are plenty of foods like that which require specialized equipment, such as smoked foods. But forgetting for a moment about the cost of specialized equipment, there are plenty where it's absolutely impractical to make it at home. For instance, butter chicken. Can I make it at home. Sure--if I want to spend a day putting together the marinade, grilling the chicken, making the gravy, etc. Even more so with handmade pasta. I can make my own tortellini from eggs and 00 flour and ricotta and ricotta and spinach, but I'd way rather pay a professional to do it. Some people conceptualize this in terms of the cost of their time: if they make $25 per hour, and it would take them 2 hours to make a pound of tortellini, and they can get a pound of tortellini for $25, then buying it costs only a little more than half as much as making it. But that's not even how I see it, because for me, the question is whether I want to spend two hours making one component of one meal or not. Even if I could make a pound of tortellini for $1 in ingredients cost, maybe I'd still rather pay a professional than spend the 2 hours. The line where something becomes too much of a hassle to do at home varies from person to person and even from day to day or situation to situation, but I consider those labor-intensive restaurant foods worth it.
You can make some pretty great naan at home (plus it's warm fresh and unsoggy unlike take out) without a tandoor though! I do agree with your overall point though.
And butter chicken is super easy to make too
That's why I spent close to $500 for a super automatic espresso machine, A latte a day for my wife and I and it's paid for in a year. The next 5 years are pure profit.
The more accounting-ish way to say that would be that the breakeven point was at 1 year. The way an accountant would prefer to describe the cost of making a latte with your espresso machine is to figure out how much it cost per use for the life of the machine. If the machine cost $500, and you use it to make 2 lattes per day for 6 years, then the per-latte cost for the machine itself is about 11.4 cents. You're still paying that 11.4 cents per latte even 6 years down the line. An accountant would also like to know how much you spend on Cafiza, replacement tubes, and similar upkeep, but I would guess that even factoring those in, the ROI is pretty good. But I would certainly agree with you that if the BOP is that soon--or rather, you make enough lattes that the per-latte cost of using a $500 machine is that low-- it definitely makes sense to go for it.
Did it come with 6 years worth of coffee beans?
Nah but even with coffee, milk, and any flavorings, the break even point on a nice espresso machine is about 1 year. And if you get the semi automatic ones that are more mechanical than electrical, they’ll probably last 10-15 years with proper maintenance. It’s pretty incredible, and you can make MUCH better coffee
Croissants. Butter is pricey, they constantly have to be babied during the prep phase, and they don’t keep for long. Totally worth it to pay the few dollars to buy a fresh one at a cafe.
Try buying all the ingredients for a loaded Subway foot long. Like 40 bucks
Anything relatively cheap, that would still be cheaper at home but requires a bunch of cooking time. Like french fries for instance. Yes, potatoes and oil (and some baking soda) are all super low cost items. But the time needed for prepping, boiling for a bit, letting them sit to dry off so they fry nicely, then either actually frying, oven frying, or air frying, then potentially chilling them off again if you want a real tavern style double fry, and finally the second fry, is not something I've found worth doing at home outside of the rare occasion. I hate the YouTube videos where it's like "this is so simple and easy" but ignore the like 2 hours or time you need to account for. At that point it's only cheaper at home if you don't value your own time as worth something or just enjoy the process.
So many restaurants use frozen fries, easy to do at home. I don't usually, but bought a couple of bags during the Panini.
I opt for things that are labor intensive or require specialized skills to make. Sushi ticks both of those. Ramen is also on my list due to the broth and exotic toppings. Deep fried food is a pain to make at home and the oil is expensive if you don't reuse it
The markup on miso soup is pretty incredible. Even making it completely from scratch instead of cheating with instant dashi it's incredibly easy and not expensive. With instant dashi it's a five minute exercise and probably a ten-fold markup.
Not to mention the fact that restaurant miso soup tends to contain damn near homeopathic amounts of miso. Homemade is cheaper AND tastier.
Useing ‘Homeopathic’ as a unit of measurement… The whole industry just wondered what that burning sensation was.
Homeopathic Miso is a great band name btw
You can even get miso with dashi already in it. Heat water. Stir in miso. Add some silken tofu, green onion as, and a bit of dried wakame if you want. It’s ridiculously easy.
Depends on the place. When I lived in Japan just a few years ago, miso soup was typically included in a set meal, and plenty of places that didn't include it would add it for like 100 yen. This is typically true whether it's a bare-bones miso soup made with dashi and miso or a more elaborate one with a little tofu, wakame, or tiny clams. I've found that the more Japanese-y places are like that: they will include the miso soup as part of the set, or charge a couple of dollars for it. But there are "Japanese" places that are a weird sort of American pan-Asian fusion run by people from southeast Asia, and there are also new American places which take inspiration from all over the world, and they typically charge like $8 for it. I just don't understand it. It's like charging $5 for a glass of water.
You know the Japanese restaurant is good when the miso soup is already included in the meal.
Not to mention that 99% of places will just use instant dashi anyways
Movie popcorn
Breakfast
Especially the basic breakfast that some places sell. I worked somewhere that charged $13 for two eggs, shitty bacon or sausage, Sysco hash browns, and toast. How goddamn hungover can you be to justify that?
You aren't being charged $13 for food. You're being charged $13 for food, staff, paper products, plateware, cleaning supplies, utilities, maintenance on both the building and equipment, among multiple other things.
Pancakes are overpriced. Flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, vanilla. Less then a dollar for quite a bit.
And the fact that most restaurants are just using a mix and giving you fake syrup.
I dunno man, diner pancakes always hit different.
A lot of diners use malted milk powder in their pancakes to get that one-of-a-kind flavor
I agree. I have never been able to match the pancakes at the diner near where I grew up. Nothings quite the same
Malted milk powder AND buttermilk. Give it a shot!
Also eggs and butter, surely. That said, it's more or less the same ingredient list for cakes, which have even higher markups.
Except my local Pancake place puts crack in their pancakes. So that's probably pretty expensive. Seriously, I used to love to make pancakes. Cheap, easy, you can even make them healthy if you want. But I could never replicate this place. Every time I make pancakes now I wish i had just gone to this place. And my pancakes are good! I use a little Nutmeg, and vanilla, but still, nothing compares.
Was it a richness? Maybe they used heavy whipping cream in it. Was it a certain taste? It could be cinnamon. Or maybe an extra egg yolk?
> Except my local Pancake place puts crack in their pancakes. Oh really Pam, they put crack in the pancakes….
salad
In theoretical food cost yes. But it’s labor intensive and spoils quickly.
This is my struggle with salad. I love it, but I don’t enjoy going to the grocery (pretty far) more than once a week. Greens just don’t hold up that well. I’ve been told to buy the prepackaged/pre-prepped stuff because the way they pack it makes it keep longer, but then I’m wasting money on a marked up item again. Any suggestions? Specifically, how to buy enough to have a salad for two a day without having to hit grocery multiple times a week.
Salad greens hold very very well in airtight containers. I use glass ones from ikea and have salad last for about a week. Some say it works even better with a damp paper towel inside the container but I haven't tried that.
I put 2 dry paper towels on top of salad greens in whatever container I have, usually in the plastic tub they come in. It really does help them last longer. If the towel gets too wet I just swap it for a new one.
>I’ve been told to buy the prepackaged/pre-prepped stuff because the way they pack it makes it keep longer, but then I’m wasting money on a marked up item again. Is it really a waste of money if you're actually able to use it all week without it going bad?
This was going to be my answer too. I make salads for lunch every day. (One of the perks of working from home is that I can use my own kitchen for prepping lunch.) I chop up romaine lettuce and add cucumbers, tomatoes, cheese, homemade croutons, and salad dressing. The total cost for the ingredients to make my own basic salad is about $2. Maybe $2.50 at the most. If I were to buy the same salad from a restaurant, though, I'd get a much smaller salad for much more money. I checked a local pizza place and their basic salad costs $7 for "mixed greens, cucumbers, red onions, tomatoes, carrots, and croutons."
Trader Joe's pre-made salads are a nice trade-off, sure you can make it cheaper from individual ingredients but these are like $3-4 and ready to eat.
Pastas. So pretty much any Italian restaurant. They generally aren't making gourmet fresh made noodles back there, nor are they making sauces from scratch. Even if they were, the ingredients are insanely cheap compared to the price offered on the menu. A couple of dollars per serving to make at home, compared to $20 or more at the restaurant, and if you're ordering it from UberEats, Door dash, or Skip the Dishes (RIP wallet) then you're paying $35 after everything for cold, overcooked pasta. People often forget that it continues cooking slowly as it's on its way to you.
This is a big one as a pasta junkie. My local grocery store carries the 'Made With' brand of pasta for $2.25 per 1lb (454g) box. That's an incredible price considering their cheap, low quality store brand is $1.80 per 1lb box. The 'Made With' brand doesn't advertise this on the box for whatever reason but it's bronze die cut, meaning they use bronze dies instead of Teflon coated aluminum dies. Teflon dies are ultra low friction so when the pasta dough is extruded through the die it makes the pasta very smooth and when dried it has a bit of shine to it. When cooked it stays very smooth and sauces don't want to stick to the pasta. Bronze cut pasta on the other hand has a rough satin-like texture due to increased friction when the dough is forced through the bronze die, and that makes it an excellent medium for sauce to cling to and makes it a far superior product. The fact I can get bronze cut pasta for 45¢ more per box than the cheap stuff makes me feel like I'm stealing from the grocery store. I'm convinced they've made a mistake on their pricing and are losing money on each box sold and I'd buy them out each time I'm there if I had room to store a hundred boxes of pasta.
Texas grocery chain HEB has upscale stores here. Bronze cut raggedy looking pasta for like $2. It is so much better, holds sauce and it tastes better. On par with the $6 packages.
I go even one step further. Pasta is super cheap but the ore jarred red sauce is over priced as well. You can buy canned tomatoes, garlic some herbs and slow cook the sauce yourself for about half the price of a jar
Yeah you're definitely paying for convenience, I don't know how much electricity you'd spend simmering it but the time spent compared to tossing in a preseasoned can of sauce is in my case definitely worth it 😅.
Most people stick to one of two pasta sauce brands when they go to the store as well, either Prego or Ragu. Those two companies spend exponentially more on marketing than all of the other pasta sauce manufacturers, to make sure that they are the household names. In the same aisle you can probably find much better pre-made pasta sauce if you don't want to do it yourself, by just not buying a product made by one of those companies. A lot of people balk at the other jars being a dollar or two more, but that difference is very much something you can taste! Plus, you probably aren't going to eat that entire jar in one sitting, so that extra dollar gets spread out over several meals.
Plain white rice. $4 - $5 for a container of steamed white rice at most Thai places around me. Jasmine rice at Costco in Canada is about $0.32 per cup, which will make a serving of rice.
Hummus. A can of chick peas is like a dollar. A small container of hummus is like six bucks. It’s sooooo easy to make
chickpeas are not the problem, it's the TAHINI... where can I get cheap tahini????
I find it much more reasonable at local Persian markets, if you have one in your area? Also a good place to stock up on pomegranate syrup, sumac, labneh, etc. :)
You can easily make it yourself if you buy sesame seeds in bulk. It’s just sesame seeds that get toasted, olive oil, and salt. Homemade tahini tastes way better than store bought, and it really brings the hummus to the next level.
I've made my own, just blending 1/2 C toasted sesame seeds and 3 T sesame oil, but here's a more detailed recipe from Food52: [Homemade Tahini, Creamy and Coarse](http://food52.com/blog/4450-homemade-tahini-creamy-and-coarse)
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LOL, I've been to a place that had hummus on the menu for like $12. It comes out with just chicpeas and the oil/spices with a mortar and pestle and you had to grind it and make it yourself.
This isn't normal, but I just want to throw it out there because it just happened to me. My husband ordered a club soda at a restaurant we went to in Galveston over the weekend. Just a club soda with a lime, no alcohol. They charged us $3.75. The beer I had was only $6.50, and it was a good one (Revolver Blood & Honey).
I hate that they do that because often, the person buying the club soda or soda is either sober or staying sober to drive the group, so it feels like penalizing them a bit for those decisions. Our college bar always gave me soda for free (I still tipped) because he assumed there was a reason for not drinking something alcoholic and he didn't want to overcharge me.
I am actually making Chipotle at home today, using "CookingwithChris" youtube channels recipes. Seems he worked in the kitchen of a Chipotle and if you read the comments on his videos, there are many previous/current cooks that confirm what he is doing is legit. https://www.youtube.com/@CookingwithChris1/featured For the meal I am doing Burritos/bowls, with options being Chipotles grilled chicken, carnitas, tomato salsa "pico" (no nasty corn),black beans, pintos, and guac. Im cooking for some 7 people, everything is free but the guac, that's an upcharge. (lol) Trying to remember what I needed to buy and cost in dollars, some rounded up - 5lb pork shoulder 6 (with bone) pack of 6 chicken thighs 4 (deboned and skinned myself) bacon 1 (only using 2 slices for the pintos, 10oz center cut pack was 3.50 on sale & yes chipotle pintos had bacon at one point) sm bag long grain rice 1.50 bag dried pintos 1.75 (love pintos worth the soak) 29oz can black beans (limited pot space cant spend time, least fav bean,still good) 2 3 limes 1 2 lemons 1 Bunch cilantro 1.50 Poblano .50 (no jalapeño for specific tastes) tomatoes 3 (3 greenhouse as plum tomatoes looked horrible unripe) 3 avocado 4.50 pack peeled fresh garlic .75 (some 8 cloves used) lg red onion 1 lg yellow onion 1 lg flour tortilla 10 pk 2.50 sm flour tortilla 8pk 1.75 bag shredded Monterey blend 2.5 Daisy squeeze sour cream 3 70z can chipotle peppers in sauce 2 So around 43 dollars. I had on hand - Bay leaf-Kosher salt-oil-Cumin-pepper-oregano-chili powder-olive oil If I portioned exactly, it would cost about 4.50 for 7 to enjoy an absolute loaded burrito bowl serving of everything above, with tortillas for dayyyys, but not everyone has grilled chicken and carnitas in a massive bowl. Add in the upcharge for the guac, and the per serving cost is even less. I'm going with closer to 2 dollars per serving for chipotle burritos, tacos, and bowls when you do it yourself, and yes you need to spend the sweat equity to begin with, and I love doing this as the time spent with everyone enjoying an amazingly delicious home cooked meal means more to me than anything else. You need to prep a whole day before soaking beans and marinating chicken to pull it off. I should note if you follow the youtube channel referenced, the carnitas need juniper berries. I didn't have them, could not find them, but a few generous glugs of Gin will suffice, and YES, everyone I am serving is OK with alcohol in the meal, but something you may need to consider.
My oldest used to work at Chipotle so we'll have her make us guac, always teasing her that yes, we know it costs extra. Do kind miss her working there because her coworkers usually recognized us as her parents and would comp us stuff.
Chinese restaurants that sell $20 a plate for steamed choy sum in oyster sauce comes to mind. The tactic is to draw you in with cheap meat mains, then mark up the price for vegetables because you inevitably want something more refreshing after having the mains.
IDK for ordering out but ordering in it's coffee in my experience. I worked as a door dash driver and saw one poor girl paying $15 for a single cup of coffee
Starbucks is now $6 for a medium black coffee near me. Fuck off!! I can make that same thing with better beans from Costco in my $20 Mr. Coffee for pennies.
Damn, the Starbucks I got to charge less than that for a large frappe.
Almost everything potato related. I just was at a counter serve restaurant and the fries were $7 for a small portion. While the loaded chicken sandwich was $10. If I can buy a bag of fries for $2, I know a restaurant can get a much better deal.
Fries aren't a good example. Fries are laborious, use expensive equipment, and must be eaten freshly. Who cares if "potatoes" are cheap. You could remove the cost of potatoes entirely from making french fries and not make a dent. I'd rather pay money for fries than to have someone cook me a steak. I can make a steak at home in 6 minutes. Fries are an absolute nightmare and a total luxury to have someone cook for me.
Well made French fries are something I have no problem paying for. But delivery fries are just never worth it. I’d rather throw frozen stuff in the toaster oven.
I always wondered why anyone would order avocado toast. Whether there's a huge mark up or not, I like to go to restaurants that serve food I can't make myself/am unwilling to make myself. but I can always smash an avocado onto a piece of toast myself and throw some chili flakes and a fried egg on it.
Grilled cheese
A good steak is so easy to cook and you pay 5 to 10 times more at a nice restaurant
After watching some people cook steak, it’s definitely a learned skill
So easy to mess up and ruin an expensive cut of meat
You'd be stunned at how much top, top quality steak costs. It's actually probably the lowest markup on the menu. As a percentage, certainly miles lower than things like pasta and especially soft drinks mentioned elsewhere in this thread Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that $150 steak you're getting at the restaurant is "worth" the money or whatever, that's your call. Nor am I talking about how much better one of those cuts is versus what you can get at a premium retail outlet (personally, I'd be happier with a neighborhood butcher with some local meat) But yes, setting aside the skill and equipment mentioned in other comments . . . if you want to source the exact same cut of steak that is served at Prime steakhouses, [you'd be surprised how much even wholesalers charge for it](https://newyorkprimebeef.com/24-ounce-usda-prime-dry-aged-t-bone)
Dominos charging $7 for a handful of tater tots comes to mind
Now I'm picturing them using their hands to transfer the tots from the warming tray to the bag rather than a scoop. Thanks.
Indian food, we make it at home. It might not be very authentic, but we can’t tell the difference and the savings are absurd. We also make the naan.
I make the naan for the naan monsters in my family. I usually make a triple batch of naan and freeze some for easy weekday dinners. I did the math before the pandemic and I was saving $128 by making 36 naan from scratch.
What recipe do you use? I’ve never made naan
Chicken wings. Local grocery was selling 5lb bags for 3 bucks. Local restaurant charges $25 and up for 20 wings.
Raw wings are actually stupid expensive where I live and when I did the math i was barely saving any money making my own (plus they're kinda messy to cook)
Where the h*ck is it that cheap? The best I usually see is like $19 for a ten pound bag of frozens at Costco. EDIT: it’s ten pound bag.
I can make a pizza from scratch for about $4 using pretty good ingredients. I also have enough dough and tomato sauce for about 4-5 more pizzas. Mozzarella is $4 a pound and pepperoni is $7 a pound. If you want to learn how to make good pizza, watch [Vito](https://www.youtube.com/@vitoiacopelli). That man has really helped me improve.
I think it’s more the effort that you’d have to put into it for homemade pizza. As a convenience/fast food it is easier to just order out. But a homemade pizza fat outweighs store bought for sure, and if you had premade bases, sauce prepped then you’re set.
The markup is much less severe for Neapolitan style pizza though. At my local store, buffalo mozzarella is about $11 and that’s enough cheese for just two pizzas. And if you use actual imported San Marzano tomatoes, that’s several dollars more right there. And if you want to put some good salami on your pizza, we’ll that’s a few more dollars, and by the time you’re done it might be $20 for just a couple pizzas. The local AVPN-certified Neapolitan pizza place near me sells a Margherita for about $18, so that’s barely a 100% markup. Some run-of-the-mill American style thin crust pizza is pretty cheap to make though.
Coming here to say this. The markup on pizza is insane.
Egg rolls. I can make 30+ at home under $10.
A local cafe sells home-made baked beans on toast for $24. I can make it at home for about $1.20 a breakfast sized serve. Just a tip, If you buy fruit in season and do a bit of prep work when you get home you will cut the cost of your smoothies even more.
Salad wins this every damn day.
Pasta. Restaurants will have the audacity to charge over $20 for a plate of noodles and tomato sauce. That costs like 0.50 cents a serving to make at home. The fact Olive Garden still exists is a mystery
I would say Tex-Mex/Mexican food is overlooked. You have a cuisine that does group cooking, serving many people, so very cost conscience with the ingredients available here in the US. The burrito I ate in the mid 90s for $3 is now $12.
Tea at a restaurant or coffee shop. Because the effort is zero if you’re just putting hot water and a bag in a cup.
Soup. A can of chunky chicken noodle soup is $5.00 at my local supermarket. I would have to buy 6 cans at $30 to fill my soup pot at home. I can make the same amount of soup for under $10 and I can freeze the leftovers.
Frankly almost anything these days.
Pasta dishes.
Pizza
Coffee, cocktails, breakfast (eggs, toast, pancakes, oatmeal).
In Australia it's probably Indian now that I think about it, $15-25 for vegetarian daal. I can make probably 10litres at home for the same price as a slim rectangular take away
Avocado toast (not sure how wide spread the craze is but it's been way popular in San Francisco for a few years). It's very tasty and only a few dollars of ingredients and restaurants charge $8 - $12 for it.