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What?! A $107 steak?!

An elegant French restaurant. A divine entree. A shocking bill. Gastronomic joy becomes economic horror.

By LAURA REILEY
Published May 16, 2007

We were ushered in with the hushed tones a mortician uses for the viewing of the body. It was that kind of place - a single red rose, men to whom I'm not related easing linen napkins into my lap, cream sauces, vegetables manipulated energetically into geometric shapes. It was a traditional French restaurant, and anyone who dines out regularly has a rough idea of how this goes.

There's the recitation of the specials, the presentation of the cork, then the squinting at the menu through the romantic murk. It was my first visit to Chateau France, a fairly new restaurant on N Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa, sister property to the restaurant of the same name in St. Petersburg. Chef-owner Antoine Louro is opening a third location any day on S Howard Avenue in Tampa, so he must have hit upon a formula that works.

But this isn't a restaurant review. I'm reporting a freak accident, very rare in the Carrollwood area. I was blindsided by a Kobe beef. Stoic in the aftermath of the violence, I paid my bill and beat a hasty retreat.

What am I talking about?

It was right there on the bill: a $107 entree.

That's right, a single entree, for a single person. This entree might have broken the price barrier in the Tampa Bay area and, like the sound barrier, its sonic boom has left ringing in my ears. It was the cost of my part of the rent for my first apartment, the most expensive pair of shoes I ever bought by the time I was 30 - a weighty sum.

But it's not the amount that has caused my teeth to gnash; it is that the price was not on the menu. Our waiter pushed the specials, pushed the "market price" items, and never indicated their prices. I was the host that evening; my friend ordered the Japanese beef, and I felt like I'd look like a cheapskate if I asked the price. That price turned out, at the end of the night, to be $107.

'Don't tell' leaves diners in the dark

Who is to blame? We buy things all the time, the prices knowable or negotiable in advance. We see the price and buy, pass or dicker. Nowhere but restaurants are we expected to make a purchase based on faith. It's the lone arena in which we allow this strange don't-ask-don't-tell form of commerce to occur.

In response, the dining public has slowly adopted one of several strategies: Don't order specials for which prices are not volunteered; demand to know the prices even if it's awkward; or guess that the prices will be $10 more than the printed menu prices.

So what happens if the special is more than three times the price of most menu entrees? Some would say that the onus is on the dining public to be educated. Come on, they say, Kobe beef doesn't come cheap. Anyone knows that.

So I asked a couple of experts about all this. I called Chris Ponte, chef-owner of Cafe Ponte, and said, "$107!"

He said, "With a price like that, we would have our waiters state the price. The idea with specials is to be creative with something not normally on the menu. By not telling the price, you're almost trapping the customer; you can put the customer in a bad position. When it's going to be over $20 from the menu prices, it's our responsibility to tell the customer, be fair to the guest. You don't want them to leave feeling like they've been taken."

My point exactly. But then I said, "Kobe beef."

And he said, "That's a harder one. It's a touchy subject. If it's a regular filet mignon and they try to gouge you for 70 or 80 bucks, that's one thing. But if you use special ingredients, like a true Kobe beef, the responsibility of the waiter is to feel out that guest. How knowledgeable are they?"

So, it sounds like maybe we fell in the "not knowledgeable" category. Maybe we're just provincial. I decided to go further afield, to find out if everybody knows about this Kobe-equals-$107 phenomenon.

I called Ezra Eichelberger, a professor of menu development at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. He spends his days exploring just such issues with aspiring chefs.

"$107?!" I said.

His answer was more measured: "What I teach my students is that the rule is: The highest-priced entree should not exceed two and a half times the lowest-priced entree." The lowest-priced entree at Chateau France was $24, so, using this formula, the highest shouldn't be above $60?

Then I asked if Wagyu Kobe beef is a household word elsewhere in the country.

"Most people would know that Kobe is more expensive than regular beef, but how much more expensive? Gold is more than silver, but how much more? You'd know the price if you went to a jewelry store."

So I decided to go to the jeweler himself.

One disgruntled patron begets another

Antoine Louro told me the story of something that happened at his Chateau France in St. Petersburg three years ago. Two couples, all dressed casually, came in to dinner. The waiter ran through the specials, listing prices, and one of the gentlemen went ballistic. Getting up, he threw cash on the table, insisting that the waiter was insulting him by enumerating the prices, the implication being that the waiter was concerned about their ability to pay. Since that time, Louro's servers have ditched the verbal prices. The menus, instead, urge guests to "Please ask your server for market price."

And about the Kobe? Louro said the cost to him is $135 per pound, before trimming with up to 45 percent of the product lost during trim. That cost is passed on to the consumer.

Definitely more like gold than silver.

Jeannie Pierola, executive chef of Bern's Steak House and SideBern's (who, for the record, always prints her specials and their prices), tried to be gentle with me.

"Pricing specials comes down to one thing: What is the product involved? I understand that that is a high number for an entree. But I'm going to suggest that that particular piece of meat cost the restaurant half of that."

I think she was saying that I should have expected a price like that.

But then Pierola added, "But no one is going to buy a car without a price tag. Part of restaurateuring is building expectations. Being informed heightens any experience."

So here's my solution: Print the specials, list their prices in black and white, allow the servers to wax rhapsodic over them if the spirit moves, but leave the dining public to decide if they're in a $107 mood - a mood that I've yet to experience.

Laura Reiley can be reached at (727) 892-2293 or lreiley@sptimes.com.

[Last modified May 15, 2007, 02:26:11]