Fancy restaurants.

Low ambient lighting, oaken tables. Candles in the centre, real candles with real flames.

Menus printed on card stock, typeset in all lowercase. Layout is sparse and deliberate. Prices lack decimal points or dollar signs. A triumph of spaces over punctuation. Absolutely no sample photographs of food. A separate booklet for wines.

The waitress recites her spiel of evening specials with infinite grace and impeccable articulation.

The forks and knives you use for appetisers are replaced by different forks and knives for the entrées.

The food comes in diminutive portions, arranged on plates entirely too big for them. Nothing but a savoury drizzle covers the outer regions of the plates.

It’s invariably really good.

And pricey.

Sometimes I wonder why I would eat a $100 A5 wagyu steak. It’s invariably really good, yes. I understand there’s an incredible richness to its flavour that culinary students dream of. I concede that on average I will have a better experience than if I ate a $20 steak instead.

But will my experience be five times better? I don’t know.

(Related question: would I rather have a $100 steak for one weeknight and gruel for the rest, or $20 steaks every weeknight? I think I would like the latter.)

Given a choice between a $20 steak and a $100 steak at a fancy restaurant, why would I choose the $100 steak? The answers I can think of are

(a)   it tastes better,

(b)   you have to try it at least once in your lifetime,

(c)   you are signalling to the rest of the party that you are sophisticated and can definitely tell the difference in taste that $80 makes.

I think (b) is the rationale that has pushed me over the edge into ordering a $100 steak. Strictly speaking, though, it’s not true! Like, I don’t have to try it at least once in my lifetime. Many people don’t.

I think (a) is true, but it doesn’t push me over the edge. I think my experience of eating a $100 steak will be better, but not five times better. Maybe two times better? I don’t even know what that would mean.

I have tried my best not to fall for (c). I don’t know if I’ve succeeded.

If you pay a graphic design firm $25,000 for a logo, do you get a logo a hundred times better than you would get if you paid a part-time graphic designer $250?

If you paid $1000 for a wine, would it taste a hundred times better than a $10 wine?

If you paid $20,000 for a violin, would it sound a hundred times better than a $200 violin?

Does a $1,000,000 diamond, um, sparkle a hundred times better than a $10,000 diamond?

I’m sure graphic designers and oenologists and violin makers and lapidarists could argue circles around me, but my gut feeling is no?