Gluttony

Over on the "What are you cooking tonight?" thread, @Homer Potvin has been sharing his accumulated wisdom on restaurant costs and profits, which I find absolutely fascinating.

No, really, I'm not being sarcastic.

So I went out to tabe/nomihodai (an all you can eat, all you can drink restaurant) with a friend the other week. There were options from two to three hours, with last order coming thirty minutes before your time was up. Since the breakdown between two hours (90 minutes ordering) and three hours (two and a half hours ordering) was only about $4 each, we decided to go with the three hour option. Two people, three hours all you can eat, all you can drink alcohol, for 8400 yen (roughly $84 bucks, since we get paid in yen as well).

This was an ideal venue to figure out the customer cost/benefit equation, since the restaurant offers ala carte as well as all you can eat, but the ala carte has a fixed price of 300 yen ($3) per item, so it's easy to figure out how much we would have spent had we not done the all you can eat.

Japanese izakaya (the best translation is "pub", although there are differences) eating style isn't one where you order your meal, it comes, you eat it, and commence to drinking, it's more of a tapas type thing where you continuously order small food and drink until you lose consciousness or start a fight with a mirror.

For simplicity's sake, I've divided things up into courses, as defined by one or both of us ordering another drink.

Let's go, shall we?



If you're having trouble focusing on the pics, that's:

9 mugs of beer
1 chu-hai (alcopop)
9 glasses of wine (the carafes are 90ml each, one glass of wine is 30ml)
7 orders of sashimi
1 order of fried chicken
1 order of edamame (possibly two, it's automatic)
1 Caesar salad
1 sliced tomato salad
1 ginger salad
2 (miniscule) sirloin steaks
3 orders of grilled shiitake
1 small mixed pizza
1 order of corn tempura
1 order of sauteed shimeji mushrooms
1 order of sauteed pork and onions
1 order of chicken skewers
3 slices of tiramisu
2 mini parfaits
and
3 pieces of strawberry cheesecake

For a total of 49 items, at $3 each, or a tab that would be $147 which we paid $84 for.

Not sure if the restaurant lost money on us or not that night, but I can't try much harder that I did.