America’s 25 most expensive restaurants

by Laurel Miller on

What recession? Bundle just released a list of the 25 most expensive restaurants in America, and you’d never know the economy was still faltering. Your average diner would definitely require a stimulus package to pay the check.

Topping the list is The French Laundry, located in Yountville, in the Napa Valley. Chef/owner Thomas Keller’s three-star Michelin restaurant is ranked among the world’s best (as is Per Se, his New York outpost). An average check is $957 per visit, while Per Se bats $883. Also in the top five: Michael Mina (San Francisco), at $844; Alinea (Chicago), at $736, and Charlie Trotter’s (Chicago), at $666 (ironic, given Trotter’s reputation as…difficult).

To determine the list, Bundle examined spending data, then looked at average check sizes based upon millions of transactions in restaurants nationwide. Interestingly, the most expensive restaurants fell into two categories: French, and Contemporary American. But Robert’s Steakhouse in the Executive Penthouse Club (New York) and Mario Batali-co-owned Del Posto (Italian) also made the list.

So what does a $957 dollar meal taste like? Well, it damn well better be flawless–service included–but there’s a reason these chef/restaurateurs are at the top of their game. Prix fixe menus are a big reason tabs are so high. At Per Se, you’ll pay up to $295 a pop, while at Le Bernadin (New York, ranked 14th) it’s $330 with a wine pairing.

As a food writer, I admire the hell out of these guys for their talent as both chefs and businessmen. That said, I don’t think any meal on earth is worth nearly a grand, especially when said chefs generally aren’t the ones doing the cooking. It’s their hard-working, usually underpaid staff who do the heavy lifting, which is one of the great inequities of the restaurant business. I take issue when the people doing the cooking, serving, bussing, dishwashing, and cleaning don’t have the luxury of eating at their place of employment.

[Editor’s note: Bundle’s data take only take the average price per check per restaurant in their calculations, meaning some abnormalities may result from particularly large or small restaurants. They also don’t appear to include every possible, most expensive restaurant in the country. Please bear the limits of this data in mind — and try to have a good dinner]

Barbary Coast Sex: Satisfaction Guaranteed

by David Farley on
It’s not very often when a madam guarantees you’ll have the best sex of your life. Or at least so satisfying you’ll walk out of there thinking your twenty-five cents was very well spent. Such was the case in Barbary Coast-era San Francisco. Having walked from the Old Mint, the beginnings of the Barbary Coast trail, across wide Market Street (the city’s answer to the Champs Elysées), past the tourists queuing for a cable car on Powell Street, and, finally, across Union Square, I found myself standing on Maiden Lane. In the 1870s this narrow street, stretching from Union Square to Kearney Street, was the home of 1,000 prostitutes. Their houses of ill repute were called cribs.

I stood there trying to imagine the topless women hanging out of first-floor windows, yelling “Touch one breast for ten cents, two breasts for fifteen cents, or come on in for twenty-five cents.”

The men were encouraged to hang up their clothes in a closet. And once the they were, uh, preoccupied with their lady, a colleague from another room would remove the back panel of the closet and take the rest of the John’s cash.

I joined up with a walking tour on Maiden Lane. Sponsored in part by the San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco City Guides gives free tours throughout the city. This particular one, called “Bawdy & Naughty” focused on Barbary Coast-era prostitutes. Specifically, though, on Maiden Lane, today a posh pedestrianized street flanked by Chanel, Prada, Paul Smith, and Hermes shops.

The guide, John Ferriera, walked the group (of which there was a guy who bore a striking resemblance to everyone’s favorite news pontificator and Mexican immigration lover, Lou Dobbs) down the two-block street, regaling us with salacious stories of 19th-century San Francisco. As we stood in front of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building at #140, Ferriera told us about Bertha Kahn, a famous Maiden Lane madam who coined the term “Satisfaction guaranteed.” If you weren’t satisfied with your amorous encounter, she’d give you a token to come back and try again.


Today, randy San Franciscans can go to the Tenderloin to pretend they’re in Barbary Coast-era Maiden Lane. It’s highly doubtful, however, that anyone there is putting a guarantee on satisfaction. And it certainly will cost you more than twenty-five cents.

A bison is on the loose in Austin, Texas

by Kraig Becker on

Austin, Texas is a city that is use to large bovine creatures roaming around. After all, it is home to the University of Texas Longhorns and their mascot Bevo. But the city got an unexpected visitor earlier this week in the form of a North American Bison, who escaped from its owner on Saturday, and has been roaming free ever since.

Apparently, a rancher living not far from town purchased the bison last week, and upon returning home, the creature promptly escaped. On Saturday, it was spotted by gardeners at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, a local nature preserve, and has been wandering, and grazing, on the 280-acre site for the past few days.

After sighting the creature, officials at the Wildflower Center took the precautionary step of shutting down their trails in order to keep visitors, and the bison, safe. They say that the animal hasn’t caused any problems, or done any damage so far, and that they are rather pleased that she chose the preserve as her hideout.

Of course, a large animal, such as a bison, roaming around a highly populated urban area isn’t exactly an ideal situation. Austin animal control officers have been working hard to find the creature so that it can be tranquilized and safely transported back to its owner. So far, the creature has remained elusive however, and all attempts to find it have failed.

For now, Austin is where the buffalo roam.

[Photo courtesy of Joseph A. Marcus]

Photo of the day: Whippet in Texas

by Elizabeth Seward on

I smile just about as big as the Whippet in this photo each time I see this photo. Stephanie Williams is the co-owner of Bennu–a coffee shop here in Austin wherein I spend many of my days typing away at the good ol’ laptop, continually seduced by the iced teas and mate lattes. When my own travel site hosted a summer photo contest recently, Williams’ photo of Elliot won our readers’ approval by a landslide. And it’s not difficult to see why… look at this pup.

Now that I’m a (proud, so proud) dog owner myself (and she’s part Whippet herself!), I have a deeper respect for shots like these. Getting an energetic dog to sit still is a challenge in itself at times, so capturing a photo like this impressive. Moreover, a happy dog basking in the Texas sunshine is what’s depicted here, and sunshine is certainly synonymous with Texas this time of year.

Have photos of your own dog experiencing the landscape or season of a certain place? Share them with us at the Gadling Flickr Pool.

Barbary Coast Food: The Search for Chop Suey

by David Farley on
The Chinaman. For as long as I can remember, the only Chinese restaurant in the suburban southern California town where I grew up was named for this racial slur. No one, including the Chinese owner, seemed to mind. I can’t remember if chop suey was ever on the menu, but standing at the gate to Chinatown in San Francisco, on Grant and Bush Streets still following the Barbary Coast trail, I couldn’t help but link the two. Kitschy and part of the old school food culture many of us have long abandoned.

A few nights earlier I was eating at Incanto, a stellar restaurant in the city’s Noe Valley and ended up standing in the doorway to the kitchen chatting with Chris Cosentino, the restaurant’s talented chef. That’s when he told me that chop suey was invented in San Francisco. “Some time during the Barbary Coast era,” he said.

Or was it? It would make sense that San Francisco would have birthed this kitschy dish. Chinatown boasts the first Asian temple in the United States (on Waverly Place). San Francisco was the first place Chinese immigrants flocked to, hoping to strike it rich in the rush for gold. It had to have been invented here. So, on a whim, I decided to find out.

I went into the first restaurant I encountered. The young female servers in the Utopia Café had dystopian looks on their faces when I asked if they had chop suey on the menu. “Chop suey?” a woman repeated in a tone of such befuddlement, as if I had suggested we defecate on the floor together and then invent a dish out of it and call it “Chinese food.”

Which is one story how chop suey was supposedly invented. Well, sort of, minus the excrement. In author Herbert Asbury’s “The Barbary Coast,” which I happened to have in my bag, he claims chop suey was invented in New York City, created at a banquet for Chinese and non-Chinese. The chef, he wrote, threw together some meat and vegetables and doused it liberally with soy and fish sauce and created something he thought seemed vaguely Chinese but would suit the American palate as well. Chop Suey was, apparently, born.


In New Asia restaurant no one would talk to me. Or they didn’t speak English (or were pretending not to). It didn’t help that I was holding a journalists notepad and a pen. When I asked about chop suey I only received blank stares in return.

Finally, at Yee’s on Grant St., a lead. A young waiter new exactly what I was talking about. “Yes, it may have been invented here,” he said. “I’ve heard this story. But we don’t make it anymore. No one wants this dish.”

“It’s cheap stuff,” barked an old man sitting at a cash register. “Cheap stuff.”

He was right. Chop suey reeked of a dish that consists of leftover ingredients. It’s a combination of indistinguishable products – vegetables and meat and sauces – that somehow contains hints of Chinese cuisine for the naive palate.

Everyone at Yee’s shrugged when I asked where I might find it and, more importantly, if they know where it was invented.

I was ready to give up. I put my notepad back in my pocket and started walking back toward the Chinatown gate, ready to resume my Barbary Coast trail journey.

And then I spotted it: above the door of New Woey Loy Goey on Jackson and Grant Streets, two words: chop suey. I descended the stairs and accosted the first waiter I saw. Chop suey! I said. The waiter motioned for me to sit down. But I had a question: where was it invented? Sadly, he didn’t speak English. Neither did anyone at the restaurant. Instead, he just kept showing me the words “chop suey” on the menu. The fact is, I didn’t want to eat it. I just wanted to find out its origins, to find out if it was a product of the Barbary Coast.

Later that night at home, an internet search revealed new information: one source claims it really was invented in Barbary Coast-era San Francisco; a poor chef would take scraps and throw it all together for his own meals. Another story corroborated Asbury’s New York theory. And yet another said that it really came from China.

We may never know the answer to the origins of chop suey. Especially because it, like restaurants named “The Chinaman” have long faded from the American culinary landscape. For better or worse (probably the former).