Mo, actually, my estimates are fairly accurate. About $80- 150 per person is what you would spend at a Le Cirque or Le Bernadin or a similarly nice restaurant.
(For those who are not familiar with NYC, both of those restaurants are essentially the cream of the crop, both in prices and, arguably, in quality. (They get rated well - I actually don’t like the food at Le Bernadin. I would rather eat at some no-name seafood restaurant down at the Seaport than at Le Bernadin (which is known for its seafood), but I concede that I am almost alone in that view.))
Anyway, MO, I’ll show you. For fun, we’ll use “Windows on the World,” in the World Trade Center. (I lived on downtown, so I ate downtown a lot.)
Here’s how it breaks down:
Appetizer: $15
Entree: $29
Dessert: $ 9
Coffee: $ 5
$58
$58 x 5 people = $290 + 20 tax + 70 tip = $380
Tack on another $200 for wine. Assume three, maybe four, bottles of wine will run about $175 or so (plus tax, hence the $200). While you could spend more on wine, generally only those who are not familiar with wine will do so, since most wonderful restaurants have good wines in the $40-60 range. The wines in the excessive price range tend to be for show, though, for sure, some people really like them.
So now we are only at $580, with tax and tip.
Potentially, people could do after-dinner drinks. If so, it will run anywhere from $8-17 per cordial. My groups rarely did, however, because the kids often would go out clubbing/dancing after dinner, so they really didn’t want to fall asleep on the cab ride home.
(Before dinner cocktails were usually done at my apartment or at some random lounge along the way. I suppose if everyone had cocktails either before dinner or while ordering, we could tack on another $60.)
So there you have it. Dining in NYC for $600-700.
For the record, estimating at $80-150 a head almost always works at the fancy-fancy restaurants.
It was like riding an eel, LOL! But finally I fixed it.
Perhaps the local level trainers justify this by thinking they need to use the old, retired, well-trained horses for their beginners - and they are being rewarded by the local level judges.
