For discussion purposes, let’s assume you serve one dish - a Margherita pizza. It has the standard Margherita pizza ingredients (i.e., no caviar). There’s a broad consensus that you operate the best pizzeria in the world so there are lines out the door every day, or perhaps you take reservations and they’re always booked up for months - point is, there are way more people that want to dine at your pizzeria than you can accommodate.
How much do you charge for your “best in the world” Margherita pizza?
All of those things are irrelevant for this thought exercise. The idea is to put yourself in the shoes of the owner of the “best” pizza place in the world. To be clear, the important thing is that it’s viewed by critics and the public as the best pizzeria in the world. It’s your restaurant, you can set the price of a pizza at anything you want. How much do you charge?
The price is a statement by the owner of their desired customer base. It’s entirely possible that the $48 pizza shop will pencil out less profitably than a dollar slice place. The difference is that one owner wants to sell the experience of “sitting down to the most exclusive pizza in the world,” to an elite clientele, and the other wants to sell a metric fuck-ton of pizza.
Assume that your cost structure is at or below the 75th percentile of the cost structure of pizzerias in your area. The point is that your cost structure might be a bit higher than an average pizzeria due to your chef’s perfectionism and dedication to the craft, but not astronomically so - you’re still sourcing the same couple ingredients as any other pizzeria. The restaurant interior may be decently nice but you didn’t spend millions on designer furniture. You can be located wherever you want, but to make things easier let’s say you’re either in Naples or New York City.
i went the first week. it was underwhelming and expensive. the soft serve was great but the price an insult. sometimes it feels like a restaurant is laughing at you.
yes, the first week is famously how people should judge restaurants. in any case, the fact is that they could charge double for the pizza and soft-serve and it would still be worth it. and ultimately, that’s the only price calculus that matters here
The Margherita pizza was $24 on the last published menu. I don’t care how good it is - there is no Margherita pizza in the world that is worth $48 in 2025.
If there was broad consensus that it was the “best pizza in the world”, I might try it once. More than that? Definitely not, because I have too much self respect to let a restaurant repeatedly rip me off.
I am exclusively talking about the standard definition of a Margherita pizza here - if there were special ingredients or prep work that caused it to genuinely cost 2x to make compared to a regular Margherita pizza, that would be a different story, but then it wouldn’t really be a standard Margherita pizza, would it.
That’s just a marketing tool by the chef/owner (not saying that it isn’t his own creation but other pizza places all over the world also often develop their own doughs etc but don’t give it automatically an own name)
wait wait so a chef makes the consensus best pizza in the world and you refuse to pay 48 whole dollars for it because you don’t want to lose your self-respect? when you go to restaurants, do you ask them the marginal cost of each dish so that you can ensure that you don’t lose your self-respect when you order
do some of you even like food, what’re we doing here
i think you misread my post. i’m not talking about leopardo’s 24 dollar margherita pizza. i’m talking about the hypothetical 48 dollar best pizza in the world pizza
No, I didn’t say I wouldn’t pay $48 for it, I said I might pay $48 for it (once at least), but way to distort the plain meaning of what I said.
No, I don’t go around asking restaurants the marginal cost of every food item on their menu. You’re being purposefully obtuse. The point that I was making, which I’m sure you understood but for reasons unknown are misconstruing, is that restaurants that charge obscene amounts just because they can, because someone will pay, are treating their customers as rich fools.
I was at Somni shortly after it opened. I clearly have no qualms with expensive meals. What I have qualms with are ludicrously unjustified prices. A $48 Margherita pizza would be ludicrously unjustified.
i know what you said — you said that you might pay $48 for the best pizza in the world once but that you wouldn’t do it more than once because you would be being ripped off repeatedly and you have too much self-respect to do that.
so let’s frame the disagreement. i think that $48 for the best pizza in the world is a steal. and you think that it’s ludicrously unjustified and, apparently, a chef who would do that rips off their customers and treats their customers like rich fools.
good of you to bring up somni. somni costs 495 per person. you could buy 10 of the best pizzas in the world for that amount. and you could feed 10-15 people with all that pizza. that’s a heck of a lot of joy for only 480 — seems like money well spent to me.
so to go back to my original point — 24 bucks for a pizza at leopardo seems like a fair price to me