Blog Why are Chicagoans okay with forking out big bucks for fancy dinners?

In mid-January, a list of the 25 most expensive restaurants in America hit the net and—surprise!—almost a fourth of them were in Chicago, including five of the top 10. Alinea was the fourth most expensive restaurant in the states, racking up an average check of about $736, $70 more than the fifth most expensive restaurant in the country, Charlie Trotter’s.

Sure, seven of the other restaurants are in New York City and eight others, including the most expensive restaurant in the country, The French Laundry, are in California. But that almost seems expected. Expensive restaurants are for rich New York investment bankers and retired couples celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversary, or movie stars and Silicon Valley billionaires. They’re not for normal Chicagoans like you and me, right?

When you really think about it, that’s who’s eating at these restaurants in Chicago: nerdy foodies who obviously have some money to spend on a stupidly expensive dining experience, but probably not enough money to really make it a prudent purchase or even something worth doing. So why are we, as Chicagoans, so apt and more than willing to fork over big bucks for some quality grub?

We at The A.V. Club will be the first to say “fuck if we know,” but we have some theories as to why Chicago’s so messed up in the food brain. As always, though, we welcome your suggestions in the comments below as to anything we missed or if we’re totally messed up in the food writing brain.

Chicagoans know that life is short, so we might as well eat ourselves to death.

Men’s Health recently ranked Chicago as the 22^nd fattest city in the country, awarding our fair city a solid D+ in health. That might seem weird, considering we walk—at least a little bit from time to time—bike, swim, whatever, but we also eat and drink a lot. Chicago’s food is hearty food like pizza, hot dogs, and big, wet beef sandwiches. Sure, no one eats Giordano’s every single day, but we’re also not known for our sensible portions of fish and brown rice either. Our signature fast food restaurant makes a milkshake out of chocolate cake, for chrissakes.

That’s not to say that we don’t at least try to be healthy sometimes. There are a lot of gyms in town and people eat sensibly from time to time. We have quite a few Whole Foods, after all. That being said, Chicagoans know that there’s not much time for restraint if it’s between salads and having fun. Think of it this way: This city spends six to eight months inside just waiting for spring and summer. When the warmth comes, people go ape shit, drinking, eating, and just having fun. It’s not ideal for bathing suit bodies, but who knows when it will get warm again, right? So we live it up now and deal with the consequences later, when we aren’t so comfortable sitting in a sunbeam.

Chicagoans like being first, new, and on it.

New Yorkers and Los Angelenos like being hip and new, too, just like young people everywhere, but here in Chicago, we have something to prove. It’s not a nice thing to say, but this city has a little bit of a chip on its shoulder. Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard that Momofuku is great or whatever, but that’s just because the New York media elite write about it a lot, right? We know that our restaurants are better than anything else in the world, and we’re going to make the foodie culture care about them by filling them to the brim, taking pictures of our food, and then blogging up a storm about just how insane the food is here in the Midwest. A lot of that is fair enough—apart from totally writing off David Chang—but Chicago’s fierce pride for who we are and we can do makes us stand out from other cities with a bit of vigor. Of course, it’s a double-edged sword, because the second we have to wait three hours in line at Kuma’s because it’s been on television 9,000 times, we curse our own brilliance and look for the next big thing.

Midwest trusts Midwest.

"Hot Doug" Sohn owns just one location, is open just for lunch, and is just fine with that. Kuma's Corner is also a single location and makes no apologies about it. Neither restaurant charges an arm and a leg for its food, even though we, as rabid fans and hungry people, would pay for it. We can get out of Hot Doug's for under $10 and and often so stuffed to the gills with food that we spend the rest of the afternoon napping.

In short, Hot Doug's and Kuma's are nice. They're run by nice people who are doing the nice thing and just living their lives how they want. They make enough to live–and live well, presumably–to pay their employees and, at least in Hot Doug's world, to let the staff have a few week-long vacations over the course of the year.

The Midwest has a rep for being full of nice people, and that's a stereotype that we don't really mind all that much. Sure, it's nice to make a few bucks here and there, but if we paid $5 for raw materials to make a hot dog, we're not going to charge you $20 just because you'll pay it. We'll charge you $9 and call it a day. And because we'd do that, we assume that everyone else who's here in Chicago, choosing to make a home in the Midwest, is like that too. Alinea must cost that much money because, well, they have to pay a lot of staff and buy a lot of equipment and use fancy ingredients and that's just how much it has to cost. Schwa, at $110 for nine amazing courses, doesn't cost enough. Chef Michael Carlson and staff deserve to make more money for the work that they do, and we as Midwesterners are happy to tip heartily and tell all our friends about the great experience we had. We pay it forward. Nice rewards nice.

Maybe we’re just a little dumb.

Next’s El Bulli menu, to be fair, sounds amazing. It’s 29 courses long and even comes complete with its own blend of Half Acre beer. It’s the hottest ticket in town, and it comes at a steep price: $473 a person including wine pairings. Including an 18% service charge and sales tax, that means dinner for two would run just under a grand. That seems like an awful lot, even for 29 courses and a dining “experience,” and as commenters on popular food forum LTH pointed out, it’s a bit over $100 more than they paid for a meal at the sadly now defunct El Bulli. Moreover, Next, originally billed as the somewhat economical alternative to sister restaurant Alinea, has been getting more and more expensive with each successive menu change. Diners for Paris 1906 may have gotten out the door for about $129 a person, but diners at Childhood, Next’s last menu, forked out about $200 each.

Next is, by all accounts, a really, really good restaurant, but $473 is also a sizeable portion of a rent check or a couple of car payments. Is it silly to spend that kind of money on something we’re going to just poop out the next day? It’s an experience, for sure, but so’s going to Six Flags or spending a day on the beach eating really delicious sandwiches made at home with love. Why do we trust places like Next to bend us over backwards just so we can say we’ve been there?

Experiences and all, it’s kind of a hard expenditure to justify, especially when it’s just laid out on some Tuesday at 5:30p.m., which might be the only seating young A.V. Club readers can land using the insane Next scheduling system. It might seem like an awesome idea, but try justifying it using the grandma test: Call up granny and tell her you spend $500 on a meal. She won’t like it, so see if you can convince her that you’re not frittering away money you could be putting toward your 401K while she’s scrimping together pennies for her heart medication. Similarly, think of the five excellent $100 meals you could have for the same price, and how even those might be hard to explain to a friend who’s a social worker or a dad who still pays your cell phone bill because “the family plan is cheaper.”

It’s completely dumb, for sure, but hey, it’s what we do as Chicagoans. After all, life’s too short, right?