During my senior year of high school, it became a tradition to go out for dinner to celebrate the birthday of every one in our friend group. Diverse with our taste buds, we covered a range of Chinese, Thai, Ecuadorian, Korean, and Indian cuisines, having nothing to do with our ethnicities. Each of the aforementioned cuisines cost me about $6 – $20, but after several birthdays and day activities that accompany each birthday, my expenses built up. Though these nights with friends were enjoyable, there’s a limit to how much I’m willing to spend per day out, especially without having a job. I wasn’t the only one, of course. All my college-bound friends have the same thought process. Accustomed to Chinese cuisine, I am used to getting a wide variety of dishes and being too full to eat any more, for the cost of maximum $20 per person after tax and gratuity.
To celebrate the birthday of my Guyanese friend, my Bengali friend suggested an Italian restaurant located near Central Park, reassuring the rest of us that it is family style and the cost wouldn’t be more than $20. Seating thirteen people around a table, we ordered about 6 family style dishes and passed them around clockwise one by one. Looking around, seeing that there were twelve more mouths to feed after me, I took my fraction of each dish: a piece of fried calamari, some spaghetti, a meatball, a fried zucchini, and maybe some more pastas, but not much, hoping that the dish would come back around with some extras later. Unfortunately, by the time each dish reached around the eighth person, they were almost cleared and the interesting meats were already all taken. It was clear no one was completely full even after licking each plate clean; we ordered some desserts – a birthday cake – to sing the traditional Happy Birthday song with.
A few appetizers, six family style dishes, and a dessert for the birthday boy split between twelve people. “No big deal,” I thought.
Dropped jaws and wide eyes spread as the receipt came to the people sitting closest to the waiter. “Well how much is it?” echoed across the table.
After intense mathematical analysis, long division, and triple checking, the table’s smartest math guy concluded $40 per person without the birthday guy pitching in.
Our wallets were already flattened at the movies earlier that day, and now this dinner completely emptied them.
This was my first Italian cuisine, and now I thought, this is going to be my last. Never do I want to pay so much for not being full again. Maybe for my birthday – when I won’t need to pay. Just kidding. I’ll just stick to Chinese cuisines.
A nice little piece on the “economics” of eating out. Guess you get more for your money with Chinese cuisine!
This post is very relatable because I would go through the same thought process. Every time my friends and I celebrate special occasions, we would worry about the price of the food and opt for the cheaper cuisine. However, at the last moment, someone will always decide that the more expensive food was tastier and that it was more important for us to be able to enjoy the celebration than to save money. My friends and I never seem to learn from our experiences. Instead, we convince ourselves that everything was worth it. Adding onto what Professor Bernstein mentioned, I believe that one has to compare the opportunity cost and benefit when choosing one cuisine over another.
This is something that I think about every time I plan to go out with my friends. Back in high school, my friends and I liked to go out after school on Fridays but after the first few Fridays, the cost started building up and it definitely wasn’t something I could afford to continue even though it was really fun for all of us to have dinner together. After a while, I decided against going out after school and soon enough my friends realized that too. Even though other cuisines like Italian or French, Chinese is definitely one of the cheapest and the way to go if you’re on a budget like me, haha.