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Bulletin
With rare exceptions, restaurants have not lowered their prices. Also, why is a small foam-covered pond in Morningside Park the best place to examine algae?
By James Baron
Hi, it’s Monday. Today we’re going to look at why food costs have gone down, but not menu costs in many restaurants. We’ll also look at why an algae-covered pond is best for researchers at Columbia University.
Morgan’s Brooklyn Barbecue in downtown Brooklyn last month did what bucked an economic trend in restaurants: It cut costs for some menu items.
The fried bird dish went from $29 to $25. The two breast options, one fat and one lean, charge $3 less. The $19 red meat ribs have been converted into $17 red meat ribs, and the quarter salad (iceberg lettuce, bacon and blue cheese dressing) was reduced from $16 to $15.
“We had to settle for some value increases over the last two years,” said Mathew Glazier, one of the owners. “Everything got better. Then, some things came back. Where we could put this, we felt we had to.
But cost-of-living figures suggest that many more restaurants have kept menu costs where they were. For some consumers who returned to restaurants this summer amid diminishing considerations about covid-19, the time to “check” is followed by a surprise sticker that causes indigestion.
Overall, customer costs in the New York metropolitan domain were 2. 5% higher in June than in June 2022. The prices of some edible products actually fell this period: meat, poultry, eggs and fish decreased by 1. 1%.
But the “food out” category, which includes takeout and eat-in meals, increased 7. 2% year-over-year in the New York City area, less than the 7. 7% accumulated nationally. The Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks down the national figure into two components. 12 months
Thus, both locally and nationally, the burden of cooking at home has stabilized, while the burden of dining out has continued to increase at a steady pace.
For what?
Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, an industry group, called menu pricing a “tough issue. “
“While this doesn’t seem to be the case for the consumer,” he said, “many menu values are set at a lower value than they probably deserve to cover all of a restaurant’s expenses. “He talked about everything from the costs of hard work to insurance premiums to unpaid expenses left by the pandemic, which he said are “a recipe for keeping menu values high. “
Glazier said worth building into menus is tricky “because consumers are remarkably resilient. “
“You have to do it slowly,” he said. And cutting them “was altruistic. “
“We think it would be better for our business” because the cost reduction would make the restaurant more competitive, he said.
During the pandemic, and as restrictions were relaxed and places to eat reopened, places to eat had to deal with sky-high prices for ingredients they can’t live without, such as cooking oil and flour. Last year, David Ortega, a food economist who teaches at Michigan State University, attributed those increases in value largely to the war in Ukraine. The conflict disrupted shipments and raised wholesale prices of essential commodities such as wheat. They were accompanied by value increases for other oils that chefs can use instead.
And then there are the labor problems. It is difficult to work and keep workers in places to eat. Michael Whiteman, a food and places to eat industry consultant, said the “abandonment rate” remains high. “Given that the eatery industry is notorious for its low wages, the exodus is understandable,” Whiteman said.
Labor is said to account for one-fifth to one-third of a restaurant’s expenses, multiples of the cost of hard work in a supermarket, Whiteman said.
“The supermarket sells manufactured goods that someone else has made,” he said. “The place to eat manufactures the products on the spot. “Restaurants are looking to upgrade the hard work by automating or serving ready-to-eat products through other brands, for example, marinated and ready-to-fry chicken pieces.
The value of eggs has increased so much that some other people have the idea of creating their own chicken coop. But Glazier, who does the shopping for his home, said he saw a dozen eggs at the supermarket at a lower price than a few months ago. The story at Morgan is different: “We don’t see eggs going down that temporarily in our overall buying channels,” he said.
“The challenge with falling costs is that when they increased dramatically, peak restaurants couldn’t raise costs right away,” he said. “If they had done that, all the restaurants would have scared everyone. “
The result?” Restaurants have slowly slipped,” he said. It’s not like the surprise at the oil pump,” caused by costs that seemed to skyrocket overnight “because of everything that’s going on in the Middle East. “
Glazier said wholesalers added fuel surcharges a long time ago, and Whiteman said some restaurants have followed suit because “they’re afraid to reflect their true operating prices in their menu prices. “
Time
It is a partly sunny day near the upper 80s. At night, be prepared for a threat of past showers and thunderstorms. Temperatures will drop to the past 70s.
ALTERNATE SIDE PARKING
In force until August 15 (Feast of the Assumption).
A painting in a closet worth millions?: A dog walker in Upper Manhattan became the owner of a rolled-up painting. He thought it was worth millions. Sotheby’s has planned the auction, initially.
The local clothing store Bridgerton: Mendel Goldberg, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, opened Mendel Goldberg Fabrics in the late nineteenth century. Four generations ago, it was an unmissable destination for the most sensible clothing designers.
The synthetic pond in Morningside Park is covered in disgusting green algae.
Perhaps sickly-looking foam is a fitting symbol. The pond is a relic of one and two minor problems from beyond New York: the 1960s and 1980s.
Now it’s something else: a search site. Scientists from Columbia University and the city’s parks branch are at the pond in a new effort to examine the spread of destructive algal blooms around the world.
The pond was to be the site of a gymnasium for Columbia in the 1960s, but the university abandoned that plan amid objections from Harlem citizens and 1968 student protests. The crater that remained became a pond. The Columbia School of Engineering will repair the adjacent waterfall, which was rehabilitated in 2018 but is not working recently.
As my colleague Hurubie Meko explained, the assignment opens a new bankruptcy in Columbia’s strained relations with the surrounding network in a 13-block segment of the park, an irregularly shaped strip that extends to West 123rd Street.
The pond’s small length and the amount of water absorbed by the algae made it the best case study, said Joaquim Goes, the project’s principal investigator and a professor of biology at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
For years, Dr. Goes has studied poisonous algal blooms around the world, even tracking a bloom lasting “three times the length of Texas” per year off the coast of Oman. With the pond study, his team hopes to find the best way to mitigate the spread of destructive algae and create an “early warning system” for long-term blooms, he said.
METROPOLITANA Magazine
Dear Diary,
This was in the late 1950s. I was a freshman at City College and involved in a fraternity. The brothers of the fraternity tormented us with implausible orders. One of them was implausible: getting one of Harry Belafonte’s dazzling T-shirts.
Mr. Belafonte was performing in New York at the time. I decided which hotel he would stay in and, with an unusual nerve, I called the switchboard and asked to be put in touch with his room.
To my amazement, he was. Harry Belafonte was at the end of the line!As I babbled my story, I explained my mission: Get one of their shirts.
In fact, he laughed. He couldn’t give me one of his shirts, he said, but he could, and would, autograph one of mine.
I chose a favorite blouse and my mother sewed a piece of white cloth into white for a nameplate.
On the selected evening, myself and an up-and-coming couple attended one of M’s. Belafonte as guests. Then we went backstage, where, as promised, he signed his call on my shirt sticker.
Eventually, after the blouse was worn and removed several times, the call disappeared. And I ended up with an empty area where Harry Belafonte’s autograph had been.
—Ralph Blumenthal
Illustrated through Agnès Lee. Submit submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
I am glad that we can meet here. See you tomorrow. -J. B.
P. S. This is today’s spelling and crossword puzzle contest. You can all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero, Patrick McGeehan and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can join the team in nytoday@nytimes. com.
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James Barron is a Metro reporter and columnist who writes the newsletter New York Today. In 2020 and 2021, he wrote the column Coronavirus Update, a component of the policy that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. He is the author of two books and was the editor of the “New York Times Book of New York”. Learn more about James Barron
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