Stack of Pancakes

Forbes: Restaurant Foods That Are Ripping You Off

When you order the pancakes at brunch, it’s the kitchen crew who gets the last laugh. They combine flour, eggs and milk (buttermilk, if you’re lucky) with some leavening agents, griddle cupfuls for a few minutes on either side, then charge you upwards of $10 for a dish you make at home every other Sunday for less than $1.00 a portion. The very least you can do is drain the bottle of “artisan” Vermont maple syrup, as you can be sure that that’s the most expensive thing on your plate.

(Ciaran Griffin/Getty Images)

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Restaurant Foods... If you thought you bagged a bargain by skipping the $29, slow-cooked, burgundy-braised beef short ribs and opting for the $18 baked ziti with mushrooms, marinara sauce and chicken, you’d be wrong. With food costs only accounting for about 18 percent of the menu price, the pasta dish is where the restaurant is making the most profit. Believe it or not, the beef is actually the better deal, since it costs nearly half the menu price to source and prepare it.

Despite inflated prices in the appetizer sections, there are still parts of the menu where diners can find good value. Red meat and seafood dishes will get more bang for your buck—and don’t forget the dessert list. “Dessert used to be a low-cost, money-maker until the ambitions of the modern day pastry chef got in the way,” says Pennette. Nowadays, indulging in elaborate, luxurious desserts is reason alone to eat out. Go on, order that triple-layered chocolate torte. You owe it to your wallet.

(Lawrence Lucier/Getty Images)

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Gourmet Burger W... When a diner sees a familiar item on a menu like a burger, they have a maximum price that they’re willing to pay for it, explains restaurateur and consultant Jody Pennette. Using high-end ingredients like foie gras and truffle to glamorize the burger and to remove it from the everyday category, allows eateries to hike up the menu price, without offending customers who believes they’re getting a taste of luxury at a relative bargain. “But the miniscule use of that luxury ingredient – the co-star, never justifies the price increase,” say Pennette. You’ll get much better value if you stick with a good old-fashioned, no-frills, all-beef patty.

(Lawrence Lucier/Getty Images)

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Spaghetti With M... There’s nothing like low-cost pasta to bulk up a restaurant’s profits – and remember a little goes a long way since pasta expands as it cooks. One pound of dry spaghetti will yield almost three pounds of cooked pasta. That’s right – you’re paying for water! Meatballs are similarly inexpensive to prepare: ground meat which is always considerably cheaper than whole cuts, is padded out with breadcrumbs, minced vegetables and simmered in plain old tomato sauce. “When I was the manager of a restaurant, I wanted the customers to order spaghetti and meatballs because it cost me 90 cents a plate to make, and we sold it for $6.75 with salad and bread,” says restaurant consultant Linda Lipsky. “I didn’t really want them to order the steak!”

(James Baigrie/Getty Images)

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Edamame Walk into a Japanese restaurant hungry and you’re likely to order the $6 bowl of soybeans or edamame to tide you over while you ponder the menu. Next time, avoid the temptation. Restaurants buy frozen edamame for $1.95 a pound, or sometimes even less depending if it’s a chain. There’s little preparation involved – the pods are blanched and tossed through some seasoned salt or soy, before a 4-ounce portion costing the kitchen less than $0.50 arrives at your table.

(Getty Images)

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Guacamole The rule "don’t order what you can make at home" definitely applies here. And you should be especially wary of eateries that make your guacamole tableside and serve it up in fancy traditional molcajete stone bowls. All that “authenticity” and traditional preparation comes at an added cost – a trick that restaurants use to apparently “add value” or rather a few extra dollars to the price of an otherwise relatively basic dish. Restaurants pay about $0.50 -$1.00 for a single avocado but will charge a party of diners anything up to $14 for a bowl of tableside-prepared guacamole with tortilla chips, salsa and other additional but inexpensive flourishes.

(Heath Robbins/Getty Images)

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Shrimp Caesar Sa... Large, Atlantic shrimp, factory-farmed medium shrimp from Thailand, and shrimp “pieces” are just a few options available to chefs - and of course they come at different price points. Chances are the shrimp in your Caesar salad have traveled half way across the world and aren’t that great quality – in fact they probably cost the same if not less than the mass-produced chicken that was the other, less expensive option for the salad. But because we conventionally think of shrimp as being a higher value protein we’ll unwittingly pay more for it. As for the romaine lettuce, croutons made from yesterday’s leftover bread and the cheesy vinaigrette, they cost the kitchen merely cents.

(Rita Maas/Getty Images)

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The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Comcast.
Stack of Pancake... When you order the pancakes at brunch, it’s the kitchen crew who gets the last laugh. They combine flour, eggs and milk (buttermilk, if you’re lucky) with some leavening agents, griddle cupfuls for a few minutes on either side, then charge you upwards of $10 for a dish you make at home every other Sunday for less than $1.00 a portion. The very least you can do is drain the bottle of “artisan” Vermont maple syrup, as you can be sure that that’s the most expensive thing on your plate.

(Ciaran Griffin/Getty Images)

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The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Comcast.
Shellfish "Fruit... Restaurants love to dazzle diners with spectacle and drama because it gives them leverage to bulk out the check. And there’s little more dazzling than a towering, 3-tiered platter of shellfish, sitting on a bed of ice with accompanying sky-high price tag. But take a closer look, and you’ll find that the tastier morsels like oysters, large shrimp, clams and lobster are scarce and overwhelmed by an abundance of less desirable “creatures”! You’d get much better value and food you actually want to eat if you declined the entertainment and just ordered a dozen oysters.

(Robert Caplin/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

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Chicken Noodle S... One chicken can yield a huge pot of soup, especially if coupled with a little bouillon for an extra boost of flavor, plenty of noodles and some carrots and celery for good measure. One portion can only cost a restaurant 30 cents to make, yet it features on menus for around $4.95. If you’re in the mood for soup, and want to stretch your dollars that little bit further, opt for creamy seafood chowders or thick, chunky gumbos. Not so good for the waistline, but great for the wallet.

(Sang An/Getty Images)

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The 3-Egg Omelet A Park Avenue restaurant in New York charges $23 for a 3-egg omelet with a choice of two fillings. If you’ve recently bought eggs, you’ll know that even organic eggs work out at about 33 cents each at retail – and you can be sure restaurants are paying less. Add a handful of decent quality cheese, and chopped tomatoes (whatever kind is cheapest at market – grape, roma etc.) and the cost price is still only hovering at a couple of dollars. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that you’d be much, much better off ordering the $29 14-oz, all-natural Angus beef steak and eggs from that same menu.

(James Baigrie/Getty Images)

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Chinese Fried Ri... Like Italian restaurants that rely heavily on low-cost, non-perishable pasta and cheap–as-chips pizza dough, Chinese restaurants are lucky as dishes revolve around similarly cheap staples: rice and noodles. Bringing the cost down even further is the convenience of buying in bulk – there’s no danger of these carbs spoiling quickly, and they mostly don’t require refrigeration. Ordering a $9 dish then that comprises mostly of rice tossed through with a little protein, eggs and a handful of that day’s cheap market vegetables may well fill you up, but it won’t give you value for money. Instead, opt for a beef stir-fry with specified vegetables such as green beans or broccoli. At $15 a portion, this might seem steep, but rice will be included and you’ll get a lot more protein and nutritious greens than with the greasy fried rice meal.

(Getty Images)

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Home-Style Meatl... Restaurants love to reference relatives or specific individuals because they give a dish a story and a provenance. A diner sees this and begins to imagine who Nellie might be, and a prosaic, “economy” dish, notorious for stretching out small amounts of meat with fillers, takes on a whole new significance. They invest the recipe with authoritative roots and believe it to be something special – otherwise why would Nellie, or Mom or Grandma be mentioned in the menu, right? Wrong. The meatloaf recipe is probably as generic as they get, made from the conventional mixture of ground meats - the proportions adjusted in the most cost effective manner. Nellie is merely a device to justify the extra $5 the restaurant tacked onto the price. As for the addition of “home-style,” suggesting warm and fuzzy notions of comfort, tradition and authenticity – well, that’s another $2 you’re paying right there.

(JupiterimagesSusan Bourgoin/Getty Images)

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The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Comcast.
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