For years, the chef Hunter Evans worked in New York City restaurant kitchens owned by someone else. But even with places like Le Bernardin and Danny Meyer’s North End Grill on his résumé, opening his own restaurant in the city was out of financial reach.
So he moved back home to Mississippi, where he was eventually able to afford to open a Southern bistro, Elvie’s, in Jackson in 2020.
It stung a little when some early customers complained about the prices. “Feels like a whole lot of sugar for the dime” — slang for “not worth it” — wrote one reviewer on Yelp. “Prices are high,” said another.
In strict dollar terms, they weren’t wrong. The roasted chicken entree at Balthazar in Manhattan is $37. At Elvie’s, the poulette Wellington chicken thigh is $35. But according to the most recent census data, the median household income in Manhattan is $106,000; in Jackson it’s $44,000. It didn’t seem to make sense.
“OK,” said Mr. Evans while reflecting on that initial feedback, “you don’t want to pay for this kind of steak, that’s totally fine, but no need to dog us or write a review. That’s what it’s costing us. I’m not stashing piles of cash off your steak.”
Mr. Evans — and his customers — had run into the current reality of chef-driven, independent restaurants: There is no such thing as “big-city prices” anymore. While some items, mostly rent, are cheaper in Jackson, many things are not. Mr. Evans pays his cooks only a few dollars less per hour than what he made in New York, and things like credit card fees (some $50,000 for Elvie’s last year), Gulf shrimp, butter or a bavette steak cost about the same as a chef might pay in a major metropolitan area.
Just as the housing crisis, once confined to major cities, has gone national, so have inflation and the attendant cost-of-living increases flattened prices across the country.
“A lot of times, we would absorb some costs, hoping to blend in,” Mr. Evans said. “At the end of the day, we’re going to charge what we need to charge.”
But the mass shuffling of work-from-home professionals has also created more demand for hip restaurants in smaller markets, and customers are still showing up. Food is a cultural product now, and social media, among other factors, has given people all over America a taste for a fashionable bistro or a farm-to-table neighborhood spot. Just as Americans are now willing to pay $5 for a croissant, they seem increasingly willing to pay $200 for a date-night meal.
Gabriel Rucker, who opened the offal-forward Le Pigeon in Portland, Ore., in 2006, had an early glimpse of this shift. “People in small-market cities are hungry for something they can really get behind,” he said.
Aubrey and Tyler O’Laskey, who met at the Culinary Institute of America, saw such an opportunity while working as private chefs in the Lake Tahoe area in 2020. Perenn, the couple’s bakery in Reno, has grown to four locations in Nevada.
A patron told them that Franklin, Tenn., about 20 miles outside booming Nashville, was similarly flooded with transplants. So, they recently opened a cafe there, too.
“We do get inevitable feedback, ‘Oh, they are charging big-city prices,’” Ms. O’Laskey said. She said some of that revenue goes toward offering employee benefits, including health insurance and 401(k) contributions, as well as producing almost everything from scratch.
The transplant bug got them, too. “We have four little kids and moved to Tennessee full time,” Ms. O’Laskey said. “We’re living our Tennessee dream.”
But the arrival of new, moneyed residents can erode what makes a small-town restaurant sustainable in the first place. Jeff Galli, a co-owner of Campione in Livingston, Mont., struggles constantly with pricing, which has become a hot-button issue as the nearby Crazy Mountains become a destination for billionaires.
The restaurant charges $26 to $30 for pastas and up to $34 for a main course, like the braised beef shank. The owners want it to be a hub for the whole town, but it is not always received that way. “We got one email saying, ‘We can’t afford to live in Livingston anymore, you’re a part of the problem,’” Mr. Galli said.
Ambitious, expensive restaurants are thriving even in cities that haven’t necessarily attracted the dreaded California transplants. And they may attract less resentment, too.
Avishar Barua grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and spent most of his career in kitchens there. He didn’t intend Agni to be the city’s highest-priced restaurant. But when he decided to open a daytime cafe and a dinner restaurant in the same year — “very, very smart, genius,” he joked — a tasting menu was the only format that made sense.
A Columbus native, he’d worked in restaurants for more than 20 years, including at Mission Chinese and WD-50 in New York. But he was still afraid to open Agni with a $120 tasting menu, even after friends who tested the dishes assured him it was worth it.
“The nerves were through the roof. I’d never seen a price point that expensive before in the Columbus market,” he said.
To manage the sticker shock, Mr. Barua took under-promising and over-delivering to new heights. The opening menu had six courses listed, but the actual meal included 12. “I even offer a one-hour warranty: If you want to revisit any course, or if you’re not full for an hour after this, come back and I’ll cook whatever you want,” Mr. Barua said. “It helps to have a sense of humor.”
The tasting menu now costs $145.
The rise of food as culture and entertainment has also shifted consumers’ ideas about value. David Utterback, the chef and owner of Yoshitomo in Omaha, spent 10 years obsessed with the intricacies of high-end sushi. But it took the bromakase boom for him to fully pursue his vision. Now, Mr. Utterback’s omakase goes for $285.
Pursuing this project in Omaha instead of, say, Beverly Hills meant Mr. Utterback was able to open his own restaurant in the first place, and to maintain a better quality of life.
“I have no commute. I put my kids to bed every night and see them off to school every morning,” he said. “In Omaha, I can have a life here I could never have in a much bigger city.”
Even loyal customers notice the high prices. “The sticker shock was there for me for a while,” said Michael Lamb, a software engineer who dines regularly at Elvie’s. He largely attends the restaurant’s more affordable brunch, where he enjoys the housemade Bloody Mary mix. He added, “I kept having good experiences there, and kept seeing the value for the dollar I was paying.”
Mr. Evans doesn’t remember many complaints about prices after the first few months. One episode that came to mind was when some customers from out of town lit into the server about Elvie’s “greedy” practice of charging for bread.
The bread comes from a local sourdough bakery, and Mr. Evans said that putting it on the Elvie’s menu helped the baker open a brick-and-mortar spot.
“They were people from out of town,” Mr. Evans said of the aggrieved diners. “I guess if they had a perception about Mississippi, about Jackson, that it would be cheap food, we were not what they were expecting.”
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