The $200 Dinner That's Somehow Worth It

The restaurant is called Hearthstone, it occupies a converted firehouse in a neighbourhood of Providence, Rhode Island, that most food critics could not have found on a map three years ago, and dinner for two, with wine, will cost you roughly $400. The waiting list is four months long. On the night I visited, every seat was taken by eight o'clock, and the conversation at every table — as reliably as if it had been scripted — eventually turned to the same question: how did we end up here, and is it worth it?

The chef, Mateo Reyes, is thirty-four years old and has the calm, deliberate manner of someone who has thought carefully about what he is doing and is at peace with the conclusions. The tasting menu is fourteen courses, takes roughly three hours to serve, and changes entirely every six weeks. On the night I ate, it opened with a single raw scallop on a warm stone, dressed with nothing but brown butter and shaved black truffle, and closed with a frozen custard made from roasted hay that tasted like autumn had been distilled into a spoon. In between, there were courses that made me laugh (a perfect grilled cheese, elevated to absurdity with high-end ingredients), courses that made me think (a bitter greens salad paired with an obscure natural wine that somehow unlocked both), and one — a slow-cooked short rib that had been braised for 72 hours — that made me briefly close my eyes and forget I was supposed to be taking notes.

The economics of a restaurant like Hearthstone are punishing. Reyes employs fourteen people to serve thirty-two covers a night, five nights a week. His food costs run to 40% of revenue — well above the 28-30% that industry wisdom prescribes — because he insists on ingredients that are, by any commercial standard, irrational: hand-harvested sea salt, heritage-breed pork from a single farm, mushrooms foraged that morning by a man named Gerald who drives them down from Vermont in a cooler. "I know it doesn't make business sense," Reyes said, with something between a smile and a wince. "But the food wouldn't be the same without it, and if the food isn't the same, there's no reason for any of this."

The rise of the expensive tasting menu is one of the defining trends of the American restaurant industry over the past decade, and it provokes strong reactions. Critics — both professional and civilian — argue that the format is exclusionary, self-indulgent, and increasingly disconnected from the pleasures of simply eating well. The counterargument, made by chefs like Reyes and a loyal clientele that books months in advance, is that a great tasting menu offers something no other dining format can: a composed, sequential experience that tells a story, much as a concert or a play does, and that justifies its price by the same logic.

The comparison to performing arts is not incidental. A Broadway ticket for two, with drinks, costs roughly the same as dinner at Hearthstone, and no one calls that an unreasonable price for three hours of entertainment. The difference, of course, is that a play can be performed hundreds of times; a tasting menu is prepared fresh for each table, by a team of skilled professionals whose labour cannot be amortised over repeat performances. "A restaurant is the least efficient business model in the creative economy," said food-industry analyst Rachel Yoon. "You are building something from scratch, every single night, and then it is gone."

The clientele at Hearthstone is not what you might expect. There are the predictable well-off couples celebrating anniversaries, but there are also younger diners — late twenties, early thirties — for whom a meal like this is an event they have saved for, the way an earlier generation might have saved for a concert or a trip. "I don't eat out much," said one woman at the next table, who told me she was a public-school teacher from Boston. "But twice a year, I do something like this, and I think about it for months afterward. That's worth it to me."

Whether it is "worth it" is, of course, entirely subjective, and the honest answer is that no meal needs to cost this much. You can eat beautifully in Providence for a quarter of the price. The pleasure of Hearthstone is not strictly gastronomic — it is the pleasure of being in the hands of someone who has thought about every detail, from the weight of the cutlery to the temperature of the bread, and who has made a thousand small decisions that you will never notice but that collectively produce an evening you will not forget.

As I left, full and slightly dazed, I passed the kitchen window and saw Reyes and his team already breaking down the night's service and beginning to prep for tomorrow's. The firehouse was quiet. The tables were being reset. In fourteen hours, it would all happen again — the same intensity, the same care, the same irrational commitment to something most people would find easier to do cheaply. I walked to my car thinking about the frozen hay custard, and about Gerald and his cooler full of mushrooms, and about the particular kind of stubbornness it takes to build something this beautiful and this fragile, night after night. It was, I decided, somehow worth it.