Don’t forget the fact that despite it’s just a cheeseburger, it’s named “The Vonderbilt Wonder”, “Halfsie Pattsies”, or “Edmonton the Second”. Ideally on a menu so scant on details it’s hard to tell the french fries from the extra avocado.
I would 100% patronize a restaurant that had full transparency and decent no-frills food. They publicly post all their expenses and how much profit they make. Charge a table/dine-out fee, then actual cost of food and prep on top. Pay their workers in full, so no tipping required. Explain things like dining hours that help the business keep down costs.
I would too. Unfortunately I’m pretty sure most places that check even half those boxes still fail in the market. You often have to drag consumers kicking and screaming towards something more equitable and less exploitative, even when they’re the ones being exploited.
Funnily enough here the prices of fast food chains have risen so sharply that the fancy hipster burger places are now priced the same or even cheaper. Like a double cheeseburger at a McDonalds is 5.50 euros but a local burger joint with burgers twice as big, filling and so much tastier are 6 euros, it’s a pretty simple choice.
I went to one of these wanky places in London and had to use my phone light to illuminate the menu sufficiently so I could see it, thanks to those shit light bulbs they insist on hanging everywhere. There are dozens of them and yet they give off no light… wtf is the point.
And you just know that this is the type of restaurant to throw out still edible food in a dumpster and then call the cops when starving people try to take stuff from the dumpster.
Gentrified takes on junk food with gratuitously expensive ingredients that are a slightly more subtle equivalent to just sprinkling everything with gold leaf like in 1990s Moscow or somewhere (“Our Southern-fried hog jowls come from rare heritage-breed hogs sourced from a tiny family-owned farm in the Outer Hebrides”)
My daughter begged us for a year to take her to a place called the Sugar Factory. It has really fancy and overpriced milkshakes. So we finally relented. They have the monstrosity below for $150.
I can’t speak for how that tastes because we weren’t willing to pay for food there, but the drinks (my wife and daughter got milkshakes, I got an appletini) were not good. Fun to look at, but pretty mediocre. I’m guessing the burger is more of the same.
Question for the audience: what city do you most associate this style with? For me it’s Seattle, because that’s where I live, and ugh, it’s everywhere.
Came here to call out Seattle too. Those chairs especially show up in any style of restaurant it is wild. I see this some in Spokane (or I did when I was there last don’t know if there are more or fewer of them in the last few years).
I don’t associate this with any particular city, but with the rich neighbourhoods in every city, particularly the recently rich neighbourhoods built from gentrification and forcing the existing poor residents out. An upscale “urban eatery” is a sure sign that the neighbourhood is destroyed.
Winston-Salem, NC. This looks like 3/4 of our downtown hipster spots. Except everything here is also a microbrewery. Soooo many different IPAs. I didn’t realize that there were so many ways to make beer that tastes like shit.
Are IPAs somehow cheaper to make or something? Like the whole microbrewery scene has devolved into “We make nine IPAs, whatever the fuck a cucumber lager is, and a stout.”
I was gonna say SF, but now that I think about it the burger places there tend to be a bit more quaint and definitely don’t have the live laugh love shit everywhere. At least I’ve never seen one, but it’s a big fucking city so there’s almost definitely at least one.
The difference is that fixed capital matters little to the rate of profit, so they can spend a lot of money and it still evens out over the period of operation. The food and wage, on the other hand, affects the rate of profit a lot. So we can usually see restaurants with “fancy” decors, but with shitty food and low wages.
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