[patio11]

$25 for lunch, $80++ for dinner. (I don't know much about restaraunt pricing in the US, but I think I get the reason that almost every Tokyo place does this. You pay for your own lunch, every day. Dinner, however, is generally paid for by someone else -- coworker/client/company/boyfriend/etc. Accordingly, restaurants plan for a bit of price insensitivity there, where lunch is a bloodbath of every store trying to capture additional custom at ~1,000 yen.)

[archagon]

I have the highest respect for sushi, and good sushi is some of the most delicious food I've ever eaten. At the same time, it's hard for me to justify the cost. Why does it cost $25 to loosely prepare a small amount of raw fish?! There is so much incredible food that I can get for $10 a pop, and it actually involves cooking. And for $25, I can get a full meal at a fancy sit-down restaurant. What accounts for the crazy price differential? Just the price of fish? Why?

Sure, there's people like Jiro, but it just ends up reminding me of the xkcd "photo conoisseur" comic: https://xkcd.com/915/

[ics]

The cost of decent sushi is:

- The owner going to the market every morning to select what he thinks are the best fish and then haggle for them - Bringing it back, holding it until a customer orders without letting it spoil - When ready, preparing it extremely quickly so that it doesn't lose its flavor at room temperature and so that nobody gets sick - The apprenticeship of the owner's employees (or his past apprenticeship if you'd rather)

[patio11]

You can get perfectly serviceable sushi for $10, even in Tokyo, at a neighborhood joint for lunch. This is not that kind of establishment. Similarly, one can easily pay $1, $10, or $50 for a hamburger, here or in your town. COGS is not the primary driver of the price difference.

[rangibaby]

There are sushi chains that offer two pieces for ¥108. I would much rather spend the ¥2500 to go to the shop mentioned in the article. It's like saying you can't justify the cost of a gourmet burger when McDonald's has a dollar menu.

[archagon]

Right, but they're universally awful. You only start getting sushi that tastes like it should around the $25 mark. I'm just curious what accounts for the fairly extreme price difference, especially given that most of the actual flavor in sushi comes from the fish itself. Is it the price of the fish? Respect for one's craft? Tradition?

I'd love to eat good sushi more often, but again, it's hard to justify that kind of price for such a quick and small meal, given the other things you can find in that price range. I've mostly relegated it to occasional celebrations at this point. It's a splurge.

(Reading back on it, I realize my initial post came off as too aggressively negative. I'm not venting. I actually really am curious about what goes into the price of sushi, and whether it's priced appropriately based on the skills and ingredients involved, or if it's instead treated and (over)priced as a luxury gourmet food like foie gras.)

[m_mueller]

I think it simply boils down to labour cost plus cost for the more expensive seafood:

* Sushi chefs need to be highly trained to make good Sushi, ~5 years. => Can't just pay them the basic 800 yen/hour, it's rather going to start at ~3000 yen.

* You need a few helping hands besides the chef. Fish, egg and even the rice is relatively labour intensive. Remember, it's not just plain rice, it's rice cooked with traditional methods to exactly the right point, mixed with vinaigre with an assistant venting by hand to give it a drier surface.

* Good Sushi needs to be prepared right before consumption, so the Sushi chef will spend at least a few minutes for each portion.

Adding all this up propably comes out at around 5-10 bucks labour cost for a decent portion of Sushi. Add to this the fish, the rent and some markup and you're at your $25. Nothing remarkable really, it's the same for most other high quality foods in large cities.

[archagon]

> Sushi chefs need to be highly trained to make good Sushi, ~5 years.

I just remembered an excellent book I read about an American sushi school, called "The Story of Sushi", where each student was made to learn to filet dozens of different kinds of fish with precision. So I can see why training to be the best of the best would take a long time. But how much of this experience is really necessary to make a standard, delicious nigiri platter? Most people don't go for the exotic options; they go for tuna, salmon, eel, etc. Do most sushi chefs even filet their own fish?

> Remember, it's not just plain rice, it's rice cooked with traditional methods to exactly the right point, mixed with vinaigre with an assistant venting by hand to give it a drier surface.

True, but how much of this detail is really necessary for the flavor, as opposed to fussiness and pride in the craft? In other words, in a blind test, would most people be able to tell the difference between quickly-made sushi rice and sushi rice made "exactly right"?

> Nothing remarkable really, it's the same for most other high quality foods in large cities.

I have to disagree! What other gourmet "fast-ish" food, suitable for lunch, costs $25 in a major city? In all the cities I've been to, most of the famous local fare is in the $10-$15 range at most. I've eaten some of the best food in the world for $10 a pop, easy. (Franklin's BBQ is a good example: hours of grueling work, $10 for half a pound of the best brisket in the world.)

GRANTED: I am speaking from a Californian perspective, so none of this may even apply. I am sure you can get some great $10 sushi in Tokyo and that $25 is reasonable for a more gourmet option, but here, you really have to go $25 and higher for sushi to taste good.

[solarmist]

> But how much of this experience is really necessary to make a standard, delicious nigiri platter?

That's exactly like ask why you should hire an engineer that has a degree vs someone who's gone though a coding bootcamp. If you're only doing standard things in a standard way then it's fine (this is by the numbers cooking, which most kitchens/restaurants prepare), so not every line cook needs to be a chef. They just need one in charge of the menu. Sushi is very close to the source ingredient, so for great sushi you do need every person that deals with the fish to be a full chef.

From everything I'd read and seen over the years. Yes, the good ones ($25+ a meal) do filet their own fish.

Also, food cost is a much bigger part of sushi because it's raw. Even a few hours fresher or few minutes less at room temperature makes a big difference, whereas cooked foods are much less sensitive to that kind of fluctuation.

> Franklin's BBQ is a good example: hours of grueling work, $10 for half a pound of the best brisket in the world.

The problem is that high quality sushi isn't by the numbers, but brisket is. You need to adapt quality sushi from day to day and fish to fish. Where brisket as long as you have good enough base ingredients you'll get an excellent brisket. It's more like a high end steak. You don't add many ingredients so even if you're the best chef in the world you can't make up for a mediocre steak.

[m_mueller]

I'm not exactly sure what your argument is. Sushi is local to Japanese culture, and just as you thought, Japan has some pretty decent Sushi for ~10$ (1000 yen), that already beats 99% of Sushi in foreign countries. I wouldn't call it gourmet, but it's prepared by a chef who knows what he's doing. That it costs more in California, where you don't have Tokyo's crazy Tsukiji wholesale fish market that allows them to have the world's best and freshest fish for reasonable prices every morning for 7 days a week, and where the job market for skilled Sushi chefs is much more a seller's market, doesn't surprise me.

[ctvo]

You already acknowledge that sushi is a commodity item you can get anywhere, at various price points, but it tastes better when you pay more.

Why is it so confusing to you that quality food costs more? Yes ingredients matter (more so in sushi than most food), yes it requires a lot of skill to prepare. Not only that, the type of sushi restaurant cited in the article, the chef serves the customer directly as he prepares the food. Surely you can see why that'd cost more?

[rangibaby]

A lot of effort goes into the perfect piece of sushi.

I was staying with friends in Shinjuku and one who was a chef at a hotel regularly got up at 4-5am to get to Tsukiji fish market in time to get a good fish.

Then there's the rice. Cooking it for just the right amount of time, not squishing any grains, etc.

There are a lot of different variables, and you're trusting the person to get them perfect as opposed to "good enough" in exchange for a bit more money.

I can't see where your confusion is going from but hopefully this cleared things up a little.

[mjklin]

Interesting. In China there are often "restaurant skirmishes" when the bill comes over who will pay it. That is, the person who pays the bill gets the face. They can get quite intense. Does this happen in Japan as well?

[rangibaby]

No, in Japan it is more hierarchal e.g. your boss will pay for everyone if you go out for lunch together. Amongst friends it is common to just split the bill.

[ghaff]

Lunches tend to be less food than dinner, but that aside, lunches tend to be cheaper than dinner in the US as well--presumably because people tend to be more price sensitive at lunch. I'm not sure I can do a good job of articulating the reasons. It's partly as you say. I think it's also partly because the lunch specials in Chinatown or the sushi lunch are competing against sandwiches and other similar luncheon fare to a degree that they aren't for dinner.