Restaurants like these give me mixed feelings. I feel strongly about charging enough to pay restaurant workers a livable wage and I believe in food as an experiential art form that should be celebrated. That should lead me to be in strong support of restaurants like these.
The flip side is that my on both my American side and my Japanese side, I come from poor areas (Okinawa in Japan and the rural southeast in the US). My dad’s restaurants always sourced the best ingredients he could find at the time but we never charged more than what the common person could afford, even just if it was a couple times a month treat.
I think the rub for me is choosing to have a restaurant that only serves the rich (which is implicitly decided by a stratospheric price point). Let’s be real: there are a lot of good chefs and a lot of great cooking, but it says a lot about who you are and what you want to do to only make it available to those who have enough disposable income to throw down around $500 for a date night ($180x2 plus drinks, tax, gratuity).
I feel strongly that good food and good cooking should be something that the average person can experience. And I get that we need chefs at all ends of the dining world spectrum. It just seems a little self-aggrandizing to spend so much money on something so plainly instagrammabale in both appearance and in the tasting notes.
Lastly, I come from sushi. I’m tired of people paying stupid money for caviar topped toro and gold flakes on uni. If you’ve ever been to a real sushi-ya san, you know how divine a craftsman’s shime saba can be. The whole fish is ¥300 so the neta itself is only thirty to forty cents. I’d even argue that culinarily speaking the saba is more interesting than the toro. But diners seem to be more interested in eating impressive looking and impressive sounding food that they can brag about.
