Per Se raised its tasting menu to $425 per person in January 2025. The longer "evolution" menu hit $925. A recent critic's notebook in the Times described the food as "pasty," "bland," and "gloppy." The words were damning. The price was dizzying. A $1,200 dinner for two is what you will easily spend after wagyu supplements and a bottle of Champagne at Per Se. That is a mortgage payment in some cities. That is three months of groceries. And the food, according to the people paid to eat it professionally, did not justify any of it.
This is where we are in 2026.
Average tasting menus now cost $350 to $500 per person, yet waitlists remain long. The numbers look like confidence. They are not. They are the last gasp of an audience that has not yet done the math, or has done it and decided to believe that price signals quality. It does not. Price signals rent, labor, PR, and a certain kind of ambition that stopped being about flavor a long time ago.
The Machine Is Breaking
Noma closed. Le Gavroche closed after 56 years. Aphotic in San Francisco lasted less than two years with a Michelin star before the doors locked. Contra in New York folded after a decade. Tetsuya's in Sydney simply went dark. These are not small neighborhood spots. These are the temples. The places that defined what serious eating looked like for a generation of cooks and diners. They are gone.
Over 40% of restaurants with Michelin stars closed between 2000 and 2019. That statistic predates the current inflationary wave. It predates the labor crisis. It predates the moment when average food costs and wages for restaurant workers rose by 30% since 2019, according to the National Restaurant Association's 2025 State of the Restaurant Industry Report. Stack those numbers on top of each other and the conclusion is obvious: the traditional tasting menu model was already fragile. Now it is something closer to structurally unsound.
Labor costs now eat 30% to 35% of revenue across the industry. Full-service restaurants with the highest labor costs hit 36.5% in 2024. Fine dining operations run even higher, often pushing 35% to 40%. The chef who wants to pay their team fairly, source ingredients honestly, and charge a price that reflects actual cost has two options: price themselves into a niche clientele that shrinks every year, or find a different model entirely.
And there is a third option that nobody in the fine dining world wants to say out loud: the format itself might be the problem.
What You Are Actually Paying For
The tasting menu sold a specific promise. Twelve courses, a narrative arc, ingredients you cannot find at a farmers market, technique that took a decade to master. Sometimes that promise was kept. Often, particularly at the legacy rooms now charging four figures, it stopped being kept years ago and nobody noticed because the room was still beautiful and the sommelier still remembered your name.
Among consumers who said dining out "wasn't worth the money," most were disappointed in food quality and portion size following a recent visit. That tracks. I have sat through $400 tasting menus where every course felt like a thesis statement rather than a dish. I have had a single bowl of hand-pulled noodles for $14 in Flushing that was more technically precise, more emotionally resonant, and more memorable two years later than anything from a six-course at a restaurant with a publicist.
The format is not the failure. The inflation of expectation around the format is.
The restaurant industry is splitting: casual dining for the middle class is shrinking, while premium dining for elites expands. That bifurcation is not neutral. It means the chefs who care most, who trained in serious kitchens and have something to say, are being forced to choose between serving a wealthy clientele or closing. The middle ground, where ambition and accessibility overlapped, is getting thinner.
Where the Money Is Actually Worth Spending
There is still a case for the tasting menu. Just not the $925 one.
In Denver, chef Miles Odell runs a seafood-heavy kaiseki menu at his West Highland bagel shop for a dozen or so guests at $175 per person, every Thursday through Sunday. In New York, a critically acclaimed chef serves a 13-course omakase for $75 per person at a countertop spot inside Chelsea's Olly Olly Market. In Brooklyn, Cami Jetta of Dinner Party opened in 2021 charging $42 for a four-course tasting menu and has since restructured to $65 for three courses and $115 for five. Still under the price of a single course supplement at the rooms everyone has heard of.
These are the move. Not because they are cheap. Because the chef is still in the room. Still cooking the thing they are trying to say. James Beard Foundation–recognized chefs are pointing to affordable luxury tasting menus as one of the top food and beverage trends for 2026. That phrasing is a little precious but the instinct is correct. The format works when the price does not require the diner to perform enjoying it.
Over half of respondents, 54%, are willing to pay a premium for a one-of-a-kind dining experience in 2026. That number should be encouraging for chefs. It means the appetite is still there. People still want to be surprised and moved and fed something they could not have made at home. They just no longer believe that a four-digit price tag is the reliable signal that the experience will deliver.
They are right not to believe it. The signal broke. The restaurants that understand this, that are building tasting menus around specificity and craft rather than ceremony and expense, are the ones worth your Friday night. Go find them before they figure out they could charge twice as much and still fill seats. If you know, you know.
