There is not a single dish at Somni that even remotely compares to a Margherita pizza in terms of complexity (and thus labor required to make it).
Someone charging $48 for a Margherita pizza is doing so because they know you’ll pay for it. You seem to think $48 is a great deal, so why don’t they keep upping the price until they find your absolute highest propensity to pay, until they find the exact price where a $1 further price increase would lead to a marginal decrease in profit. You have every right to order that pizza weekly, and I have every right to think you’re a sucker for doing so.
Let’s turn the question on its head because I would like to hear your perspective on this. If you owned a pizza place that served the consensus best pizza in the world, and let’s say the one and only pizza you served is a Margherita pizza - how would you price it - what would your process be to set your price, and what final price in dollars do you think you’d settle on?
I’d pay $48 for the hypothetical best pizza in the world because it would taste really good — way better than lots of other things that i could pay $48 for. this is not hard stuff.
maybe the argument is stupid. but, to me, it gets to an important question: what are you willing to pay for good food, and why. and what i was driving at with my admittedly (perhaps even knowingly) very fanciful example of the hypothetical $48 best pizza in the world is that — maybe, just maybe — normal microeconomic ways of thinking such as marginal cost and price equilibria don’t apply to aesthetic experiences like food. or at least they apply a little differently.
and to loop this directly back into leopardo: a constant criticism of leopardo seems to be the prices. but it doesn’t seem like people are saying that the quality of the food isn’t worth it. instead, the criticism more often seems to boil down to something like “ice cream shouldn’t cost this much.” and i think that’s just the wrong way to think about leopardo — a restaurant whose very concept is (as best i can tell) fine-dining-ish-takes-on-classic-comfort-food. and indeed, i think that sort of approach is ultimately harmful to restaurants more broadly.
there are lots of fair criticisms to make about leopardo — the service is bad, the menu and concept can be so uneven and unfocused to the point of being alienating to the customer and self-defeating. but, “is leopardo justified in charging this much for food?” doesn’t strike me as one of them
They went out of business because they didn’t have enough covers per night, not because they weren’t charging enough. (Sure they could have charged more, but it would have further decreased nightly covers).
Can’t speak for others, but I made specific criticisms of how the food tastes.
And this has become a microcosm for the Leopardo debate at large, faithful and heretics. Respectfully, why is it so hard to believe that some of us didn’t like the food at Leopardo as much as others?
Assessing food isn’t purely objective. Ingredient ‘quality,’ technique, experience all matter, but it’s a matter of taste. I’m more interested in why someone likes something and what they’re experiencing than objective assessments, though it can be fun to bicker and talk in absolutes on the internet.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that no one has criticized the food. Because they have. And that includes me — I haven’t been too adventurous and have generally stuck to the stuff that everyone likes (pizza, soft serve, mostarda, cali-prese). but i’ve had a handful of things that i thought were just not good — including things where it is really hard to explain why it isn’t better, such as the garden lettuces
For me with the garden lettuces, it’s not even about it being the best, better than, whatever
It’s just straight up the version of a salad that I want to eat. Like I don’t even care about comparing it to other things
Have I had other great salads in my life? Yes 100%.
Same with the milk curds. Obviously there’s great versions of dairy, grain and oil all over the place. But the milk curds nails it in a way that appeals to me above and beyond just being delicious
but in a real sense it’s also celebration of creativity in my eyes, which is part of what we’re paying for sometimes.