Gluttony

By Iain Aschendale · Apr 29, 2018 · ·
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  1. 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?

    Tabehoudai Small.jpg

    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.
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Comments

  1. GrahamLewis
    So where's the blowfish sushi?

    Sounds good, except for the steak -- having grown up in the heart of beef country, I learned long ago to never order steak anywhere else.
      John-Wayne likes this.
  2. Iain Aschendale
    That "steak" has a diameter of about two inches, and is maybe 3/8ths of an inch thick. The menu calls it a steak, I think of it as a couple bites of medium to medium well beef and forget about it. Kind of like Philadelphia maki roll sushi, there's a name and one or two basic ingredients in common, but you can't be a purist and enjoy everything. Blowfish (fugu) requires a special license to buy or prepare: Do you really want to pay $3 (or less) for something that can kill you? OTOH, they do have raw whale meat, if that's your thing. I'm kind of opposed to it, got cajoled into taking a bite once and it wasn't horrible, but not good enough to overcome my ethical concerns.
  3. John-Wayne
    Oh man! Now I'm hungry for some sushi. I like the idea that they give you hour options as opposed to someone just sitting there all day eating. I think there was a thousand ways to die on that one.
      Kinzvlle likes this.
  4. paperbackwriter
    I'm a Japanophile who lived there for 15 years (mostly Tokyo). 8400 yen sounds like a lot even in the days when you got a decent income. Now I imagine 8400 yen is a lot of money ...for an English teacher. But I guess you aren't an English teacher.
    And big eater as I am, 3 hours to drink and eat your fill sounds disgusting to be honest.
  5. Kinzvlle
    John-Wayne There was indeed I used to watch the show a lot with my step dad, (odd method of bonding but) and only a few bits of it have stuck with me but that one always has. It was a Chinese buffet (which I enjoy myself) where this guy just sat and kept eating and a chemical common in Chinese food killed him more or less it`s spotty. The idea of dieing from eating Chinese though...man. I mean if I remember right it was something with the way he was gorging on it made him intake more of it in such a short amount of time than you should so normal people who eat normal amounts should be fine. Don`t know if thats what you were thinking but thats the one I remember.

    Other than that, I just find this interesting. Both the cost analysis and just the system on dining in itself.
      John-Wayne likes this.
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