We are friends, you and I, so I want to put my cards on the table: I like an Old Timer at Chili’s every now and again and take comfort in the biscuits at Red Lobster. Cheesecake Factory is where my bliss is and there is nothing wrong with diners because there is nothing wrong with a place where you can eat a 9AM pastrami sandwich and 6PM waffles.
Maybe I’m just a fat American idiot with an unrefined palette, but I’ve had a few expensive meals and while they are unquestionably better than you’re going to find at one of the oft-despised chain restaurants (just say that phrase, it makes your lip curl), is the experience twice as good? Is it three times as good? Four times? Not in my experience. Yet the price point is normally pretty close to obscene and for me those meals are reserved for the most special of occasions.
In the middle of August, I read a New York Times article about an experiment where you could eat anything on the menu at chef Zod Arifai’s two upscale Montclair, New Jersey restaurants — Blu and Next Door — and pay whatever you thought was fair. For a decade, Arifai had found success in Montclair, but with his lease expiring at the end of August, he decided to embark on this experiment in human behavior (and, as I discovered first hand, consumer guilt).
Arifai was the latest to flirt with what has seemingly become a micro-movement across the world, but while the experience might sound like Shangri-la for someone seeking a gourmet meal without the economic repercussions, there were a few unanticipated drawbacks.
I entered the restaurant with my wife, Michella, and had a $20 bill and a $50 bill in my wallet, convinced that I would spend one of them, depending on how good and plentiful the food was. Once we sat down, the waiter offered to explain how the Pay What You Want menu worked but I declined his offer, thinking that everything seemed self-explanatory.
Michella is an admittedly picky eater. She likes the basics but didn’t see anything that initially jumped out at her on the menu, which featured cheffed-up American fare. Meanwhile, my eyes caught on a hamburger with onions and cheddar on the plate of a man sitting next to us.
Eager to surrender to the experience, I had decided that I would order two entrees before sitting down, but when Michella seemed like she might refrain from ordering, I eagerly tried to push her into ordering my second entree so as to spare myself the embarrassment. This hope was extinguished quickly when she saw the fusilli bolognese.
Stuck having to out myself as a glutton, I ordered the chipotle glazed meatloaf and the rump steak with potato puree and wild mushrooms, hesitating and almost mumbling as I ordered the latter.
I want to pause for a moment to tell you that I feel pretty sh*tty about underpaying for a meal and then writing a less than glowing account of my experience, but the restaurant was a bit overstuffed and warm on a hot August night and it took awhile for us to get our food. Also, it would be shittier to let my guilt get the better of me, right?
The serving size left something to be desired — though I am a girthy man who is more accustomed to getting his food in baskets, bowls, and buckets. According to the Times report, the serving size was somewhat smaller than usual with the Pay What You Want menu, so I knew this was a possibility. Since I could order as many entrees as I liked and pay whatever I wanted, though, I figured that if I walked out hungry, it was on me and my hangups… and that very much was the case.
As for the taste, the rump steak was adequate if not a little on the chewy side, but the meatloaf was a flavorful delight — I wish I had ordered three of them.
Michella had no complaints about the fusilli, save for the serving size, but neither she nor I had any interest in the dessert menu, choosing to instead grab an ice cream cone on the way home. ‘Cause it’s summer, B.
Our meal done and only the bizarre check paying/price naming situation left to tackle, I signaled for the waiter while my foot tapped nervously. I felt notably anxious. I’m not the kind of person who worries about what others think about me, but we all say that until we feel like we’re about to be judged.
Earlier, we had briefly spoken to one of our restaurant-neighbors who expressed her own level of guilt over naming her own price, though her husband said he felt no such pangs. When their check came, I tried to peek or even summon the temerity to ask what they were paying and how much they had bought, but I’m a chicken-sh*t.
While I waited for the waiter to come over, I thought briefly about how I would react if someone had asked me what I was paying, and realized that I would have run out of the place screaming from embarrassment.
“I’d like the check, please.”
“And what kind of check would you like?”
Dude just went and asked me out loud with words and stuff. No piece of paper with numbers that I could circle or write in. Just a question, “Dear sir with potato puree in your beard still (probably… it happens), how much money do you think the food I lovingly handed you is worth?”
The $20 or the $50. It’s amazing that I didn’t throw both at him and run out of the place screaming from the relief of being done with the whole damn thing. But no.
“$20. 10 for you, 10 for the food.” I said somewhat quietly, my eyes searching for some kind of shocked reaction, but none came. He saw my jeans and my cheap haircut, he knew what this was.
A few moments passed as we waited for the check and I sat there, money clutched in my palm so no one could see, pondering what the point of Pay What You Want was, exactly.
Online, with media (as used by Radiohead and others) it makes sense as a part of an effort to quell piracy — but unless there has been an uptick in dine and dash crimes that I am unaware of, that isn’t what this is. And even if it were, it’s simply not the same, primarily because there is no human interaction in cases of media piracy.
Though the waiter probably didn’t care — in that he was presumably a few days from unemployment and battle-hardened from a few weeks of this “experiment” — I felt like a monster not paying a higher price for what would have been probably $40 worth of food. But deep down, I didn’t feel like there was enough of a good thing to pay the full amount and that was the point of this experiment as I understood it: to scrape the depths of one’s soul and pay what you think the meal was worth, so I did. Primarily because, as gauche as it is to say, we could have dropped $20 at a 24-hour diner and been twice as full while being at-least half as satisfied — something that puts the two experiences on par in my mind.
So I paid, then I left. The next night, I went to Olive Garden for breadsticks, soup, the above big-assed plate of middling chicken marsala, and left feeling pregggnant. For this feeling, I paid what they told me and I did so happily. Viva Italia!
