An article in the SF Chronicle regarding restaurants judged as worthy of waiting in line for has set me off. In my opinion, no restaurant is worth waiting in line for. It can’t be innovative enough or cheap enough or trendy enough or fancy enough or legendary enough to make it worth waiting for. A restaurant, when you get right down to it, is a room with tables and chairs, plus kitchen, plus staff. That’s it. The rest—decor, ambiance, all that—is piddly. It’s a box. Why wait in line to eat food while sitting on a chair in a box? Trust me: you can eat food while waiting in line. And you can sit on a chair in a box for free in lots of places.
When I lived in San Francisco’s Castro district I saw lines of mostly young folks clustered around certain restaurants on Sunday or holiday mornings. The brunch crowd. There they were, waiting in line, and some of those lines were damn long. They weren’t going to be brunching for an hour or more, it looked to me. In the time they were standing around on the sidewalk (often being pestered by fog, mist, cold, wind, and wino-druggies) I could have easily whipped up pancakes, French toast, fruit, even eggs Benedict or eggs Florentine or something suitably brunch-y, eaten it, and plopped the utensils and such into the dishwasher. And I would have paid a fraction of what those kids were paying.
What does two person’s worth of home-made pancakes cost? A cup of flour, an egg, some milk, baking powder, salt, perhaps a bit of sugar. A few tablespoons of butter and some syrup. $3? Then add four strips of bacon, coffee and fruit juice. Unless you’re a spendthrift doofus you can bring it in for under $10, easy.
And what would that same brunch for two cost in one of those brunch joints? $30? $40? And don’t forget the tip and, if you’re in San Francisco, the add-on fee that goes to pay the workers’ health insurance costs.
And that’s not even factoring in the wait time, which in my view completely trumps any consideration of “well, this way I don’t have to cook and I hate cooking.” But you like waiting in long lines? Paying four to five times what the meal should actually cost?
I wrote an article in Free Composition some years ago (all right, a decade ago) all about the discomforts of brunch in San Francisco. Those discomforts are considerably ameliorated out here in Far Outerburbia. But even if the restaurants themselves are several orders of magnitude nicer, the fundamental question remains the same: why pay so much, and wait for so long, for simple meals?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like restaurants for dishes requiring considerable training and expertise, or ethnic delicacies that I’ve never even heard of. There’s also a fine social component to restaurant dining, especially if you can find one that isn’t airplane-hanger noisy and cattle-car crowded. But I keep such visits to an absolute minimum, so as to reserve my disposable income for things that I consider valuable and worthwhile.
The ever-wise Julia Child preached: to streamline your food budget, learn to cook. How right she was, and no better time than Sundays and holidays!