Since 2007, the Michelin Guide has awarded The French Laundry their highest rating of three stars. Unless you’re really rich or a politician, you will likely have to wait months to get a reservation at this Yountville, California restaurant in Napa Valley.
Deca-millionaire California Governor Gavin Newsom and his wife were spotted having an opulent dinner with California Medical Association officials in mid-November. The 12 of them were all sitting in close quarters indoors without masks, which is against what Newsom has been encouraging Californians to do.
As a Financial Samurai, you know the rules are different for politicians and the rest of us. There are folks out there who learn how to befriend more politicians so they can do what they want. Therefore, none of us should be surprised or angry at the hypocrisy. After all, it is the people who give politicians power by voting.
Instead of getting upset, think about the bright side.
Perhaps Newsom and his rich and powerful friends know something we don’t? Maybe COVID-19 isn’t as deadly as they are making it out to be. Or maybe they secretly got vaccinated already since that’s what politicians tend to do, take care of themselves first.
If these things weren’t true, Gavin and his wife wouldn’t have risked dining with the glass doors closed with multiple households, especially since they still have young children. Politicians also wouldn’t sing the virtues of a public school education while sending their kids to private school.
But enough about Gavin’s actions. Let’s talk about the cost of The French Laundry and how rich one must be to dine at similar types of restaurants!
How Much Does It Cost To Eat At The French Laundry?
The French Laundry costs $350 per person to dine. There are two set menus to choose from, the Chef’s Tasting (meat and seafood) and the Tasting of Vegetables. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to spend $350 to taste some cabbage!
Each menu is nine courses, not including the opening “appetizers,” aka Amuse Bouche, which are included. To have the full French Laundry experience, you should consider pairing your food with wine.
Wines by the glass are around $35 for whites and $45 for reds. Bottles cost hundreds of dollars. And if you bring your own, there is a $150 corkage fee. Once you order a couple glasses of wine with your meal and a desert wine, expect to pay an additional $150 more.
Budgeting $500 per person is, therefore, recommended by patrons and the Napa tourist guide. Unless you plan to dine alone, expect to pay $1,000 or so if you’re taking someone on a date. At least they include a 20% tip in the price.
Sample French Laundry Menu
Would you pay $350 to eat everything on this meat and seafood menu? If someone else was paying using someone else’s money, probably. However, I think I could happily spend $70 – $100 and find the same amount of delight elsewhere.
If You Want To Spend Even More Money
If you want to spend even more money at The French Laundry, here are more options:
- $850 per person to eat inside the historic dining room
- $1,200 per person for a white truffle and caviar dinner
- And $800 per person for a New Years Eve Dinner
Bottom line: In order to eat at The French Laundry, you need to be rich or have rich friends who are willing to pay the bill.
On a related note, check out How Rich Must You Be To Attend The Met Gala?
How Rich Do You Have To Be To Dine At The French Laundry?
To comfortably afford paying $500 per person, my initial thought was that someone needs to earn at least a top one percent income of ~$470,000 or be worth at least $3 million.
Remember, you’re not just paying for yourself. You’re likely paying for between 1- 3 other people most of the time. This means your bill will usually be between $1,000 – $2,000.
Let’s put $500 per meal into perspective.
A top quality dry-aged steak dinner with wine and desert costs at most $250 per person after tip. You could also eat 20 slices of the finest blue fin toro for $250 as well. To spend 2X more is simply outrageous.
Of course, how rich you need to be depends on the frequency of dining at such establishments. If you’re going for your 10-year wedding anniversary or your honeymoon, maybe you can earn as little as $300,000 a year or be worth just $1 million. Even so, paying $500 per person still feels excessive.
But instead of going with my gut feeling, let’s review what the typical American spends on food and extrapolate.
The Average Expenditure On Food In America
Below is the latest average income and expenditures for Americans from the BLS. The average American makes a healthy $82,852 a year and spends $8,169 on food, which equals 10% of income. The average expenditure on food away from home was $3,526, or 4.25% of average income. This line item is where eating out at restaurants fits in.
The Frugal Fine Diner
Let’s say the average amount most frugal diners at The French Laundry spend on all restaurants a month is $1,000, or $12,000 a year. The $1,000 a month is spent on two dinners and two lunches a week on average.
Now let’s add on another $1,000 for an annual French Laundry-type dinner. The total annual restaurant expenditure is now $13,000. If we then divide $13,000 by 4.25%, the percent of income the average American spends a year on dining out, we get $305,882.
Therefore, earning around $300,000 a year or more is the baseline amount I think is necessary to spend $500 a person on a meal. Using a 2%, 3%, and 4% divisor means a person would need a $7.5 – $15 million net worth.
Newsom has an annual salary of $210,000 as the Governor of California. However, I’m sure he earns way more than $100,000 a year in distributions from his PlumpJack Group business. Therefore, Newsom is good to go for dining at The French Laundry.
The Realistic Fine Diner
If you ask anybody who is willing to spend around $500 per person for a meal, they’ll clearly tell you that budgeting just $13,000 a year for restaurants is way too low. These folks are “foodies” through and through. One of their hobbies is to try every Top 25-rated restaurants in Zagats each year, multiple times a year.
The realistic fine diner is likely spending at least $2,000 a month on restaurants. The $2,000 a month consists of two dinners for $400 and two lunches for $100 on average a week. If we take the annual expenditure of $24,000 and divide it by 4.25%, we get $564,705.
Let’s also assume that a foodie is willing to spend 5% of his or her annual income a year on restaurants, not just 4.25% like the average American. If we take $24,000 and divide by 5%, we get $480,000.
Therefore, to eat at a place like The French Laundry, you really do need to be making a top 1% income. My intuition was correct!
Fancy Restaurants Get Old And Take Too Long
Back in the good old days, when I didn’t have to pay for fine dining since I had a corporate card, I’d go out at least twice a week for a meal with clients. The corporate card had a limit of $200 per person and that felt like more than enough.
After about a year of going out to nice restaurants, my taste buds got used to the rich food. Instead of trying to maximize my $200 per person limit, I started trying to eat less food and more healthy items on the menu.
If you don’t have the most exciting guests or clients you want to get to know, then going out to an expensive restaurant can really be a chore.
I remember one time taking three hours to eat a 9-course meal with my wife at a restaurant called Michael Minna. It was our anniversary. I love my wife, but three hours was way too long.
We kept wondering where was the dang food after being served only portions large enough to feed a baby. We were used to eating in 45-minutes or less.
Food Delivery Is Our New Fine Dining
Nowadays, due to the pandemic, we enjoy ordering delivery. When we do, the average total cost per person for dinner is between $20-$30 per person. The most expensive items I usually order are sushi and prime rib.
We have every type of cuisine at our fingertips here in San Francisco. I’m talking Burmese food on Monday, Malaysian food on Tuesday, Japanese food on Wednesday, Italian food on Thursday, Vietnamese food on Friday, French food on Saturday, and American food on Sunday. But sadly, we are quite sick of almost everything.
Hedonic adaptation is real! Which is why finding joy in simpler things and basic foods may be the true secret to gastronomic happiness. Come to think of it, I could happily eat buttered corn and all types of fruit every day.
If you end up going to The French Laundry, make sure you get home by 10 pm. Newsom has issued strict curfew orders for California residents for the next month. But if you are able to eat with Newsom and his crew, feel free to party until the cows come home!
Unfortunately for Newsom, his political aspirations for ever-higher office are murky due to his French Laundry dining. We know he wants to run for president after Joe Biden. However, this do as I say not as I do attitude will likely come back to hurt him. Newsom managed to survive the recall election in California with 61.9% of votes to keep him in office through the end of 2022 and only 38.1% of ballots cast to remove him.
Related posts:
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This is one if the stupidest articles that I have ever read. I’ve eaten at The French Laundry. I don’t make anything close to that amount of money, and I’m not worth $3M. Spending money to eat at The French Laundry is just like any other entertainment expense. You eat there because you want to. A person making $30,000 or $40,000 a year can afford to eat there if they choose to do that instead of spend their discretionary income on some other form of entertainment. It’s $500 to eat there (with wine and gratuity) not $5000. Gratuity is included in the $350 dinner price.. I added some onto the base included gratuity and still walked away spending $1000 for two people. Do I eat there all the time? Nope. I can’t afford that and do some others things that I want to do. If you’re fretting about the money, then don’t go, but some arbitrary rule about how you “need to make”, or how “rich you have to be” is nothing short of ludicrous. I’m sure glad that I’m not so uptight that I wouldn’t allow myself the pleasure that it is to enjoy the dining EXPERIENCE that you can only get at a premiere restaurant like that.
If you want to spend thousands on a meal when you make only $40,000, then more power to you. But please don’t ask anybody to bail you out financially in the future.
My husband and I went to The French Laundry on our 25th wedding anniversary AND paid the $150.00 corkage to take our own wine because it was a special bottle. I still marvel that we were even able to get the reservation on our actual wedding day. It was over-the-top expensive but I’m so glad we did it. I think you have to equate it to doing something else really over the top that takes about 3 hours, like going to the final game of the World Series or the final match of the U.S. Open. Each serving was incredible; one was a tiny ice cream cone delivered standing up. It was the famous salmon cornet! The presentation was so unique. The hospitality was superb. We sat in a very old cave-like room that was enchanting. The staff created a special menu just for us with our names on it as a keepsake. Sam, wouldn’t you say that $1000.00 of fun for a 25-year investment is a bargain? I would — and who knows what will happen when we hit the big 50! We might take 2 bottles of special wine! Here’s to love, laughter, good health and (hopefully) an enduring bank account. Cheers!
Hmm, I was once working out of town every week as a consultant when I got official notice that, once I had finished my current client’s project in a couple of months, I was going to be laid off.
I was on expenses, not per diem, too. Sadly, I was in a medium-sized mid-western town and the best I could find was going every night to an Outback Steakhouse, although I did find a really nice deli that could throw together a most excellent lunch for about three or four times more than I had ever paid for one before. To be fair, I’m not sure a French Laundry would have tempted me that much, even if it had been an option.
It also developed that the only place I could get a room after that was at the hotel for the nice casino on the river. Not that I gamble, but they had some swell amenities.
I like how you try to legitimize the idea that the COVID-19 virus is not as bad as one might think. Drinking that anti-science juice, are we? While we’re at it, maybe you shouldn’t vaccinate your kids because it causes autism? And also maybe the world is flat? And maybe our flat world is the center of the universe? I mean, if we’re doubting the virus and whether it’s actually bad for you, might as well go down the entire rabbit hole.
The virus is very real. And it is very deadly. Maybe you are one of the lucky ones who are asymptomatic. By the way, there’s no vaccine at the moment so not sure what you even meant by secretly vaccinated. Nothing has been approved or released by the FDA.
Maybe it’s more simple than you think (or just won’t admit to. The good old feigning ignorance to promote ignorance trick). The politician is eating indoors with others not because they think the virus isn’t that bad or that they got a vaccine that doesn’t exist.
They just don’t care. It’s as simple as that. You see people who aren’t in a political position of power going out and being irresponsible all the time because of this selfish sense of individuality.
I wish I could take your article seriously but you lost me as soon as you started off the article legitimizing fringe theories.
And don’t even try to argue about “I was just trying to posit an alternative viewpoint”. No you weren’t. You truly think the virus is either fake or not as deadly so you posed a question to legitimize it while feigning ignorance.
Anyone with a clue on logic will see right through your little game.
But by all means continue to legitimize the false idea that this virus is a pushover. Oh . . . Sorry, I meant to say, please continue to just pose innocent questions without any built in assumptions on whether or not this virus is even that bad.
Great feedback. I’m more focused on how rich you have to be to spend $500 per person going out.
But I’ll humor you. If the virus is so deadly, why did Gavin, the medical association lobbyists, a CEO and others all gather for a celebration indoors for hours?
Perhaps your anger should be at the politicians instead? I’m trying to get where you’re coming from. Maybe you can tell me more about your health and your job situation etc.
You should not be a food critic
you might want to buy a used
Chevy Caprice it will still get you to the Mickey D,s Then you won’t even have to spend
$70 and not worry
He locks down our economy and people are in food lines. That per person cost is feeding a family of 4 Sums up the problem with our politicians (red and blue). It’s all about them
I literally laughed out loud during the entire read. Happy Thanksgiving!
Do you count dinners for charities? If so, $250 per person but minimum two people so $500 per night. I can be suckered into good causes. Also, it is always nice to meet new and interesting people that attend these events. They are not normal for me to attend and since COVID I have not even heard of one, which is positive. However, using your governor as an example, I am sure there are many dinners still occurring.
Not at all! More charitable dinners the better. It is the patron who I think is getting the best deal due to the food, networking, entertainment and camaraderie.
He’s dining with lobbyists so you know he didn’t pay a dime! Love politicians – the double standards and hypocrisy is mind boggling.
Hi Sam!
Now that I live in Europe and college costs are so much lower than in the US maybe I’ll start spending more money on Michelin Star restaurants! So happy I over prepared for kids future that will now benefit my taste buds. :).
That is why a big percentage of USA students & Also a very nice looking percentage come from out of the Country too use a USA collage