Am I Getting Priced Out of My Favorite Hobby?

There's a specific kind of denial that happens when a check lands on the table and it's worse than you expected.

It starts with some basic math. You do a quick, slightly panicked inventory in your head: cocktails, entrées, that one thing you ordered because it sounded interesting, the bottle you maybe shouldn't have committed to. Then comes the rationalizing: it was a special night, we ordered a lot, this place is genuinely great, it's fine. You tap the card, and you walk out into the night feeling approximately okay about all of it.

The meal that prompted this piece, a weekday dinner at Beity in Chicago's West Loop, certainly elicited the first response. I must have added up all the numbers on the check twice, then did another pass separating the cocktails from the food, each time doing some rough math in my head with the additional fees to determine that the number I was seeing was, in fact, the total amount of the meal. There wasn't any rationalization though; I just sent an image of the bill to three or four different group chats and said (basically) 'something is fucking wrong here, no?'

We popped in for dinner - a legitimate Tuesday-evening, nothing-fancy, she-had-a-work-thing-until-5-nearby kind of dinner - at a restaurant I'd been meaning to get to, at prices I expected to be above average. It's Lebanese-inspired, Fulton Market, the kind of place I'd describe to someone as "not cheap but worth it." Two people. No wine. A number of cocktails, a few dishes, a dessert. The check was $493.

Before we carry on, I must say that I'm writing this because I genuinely cannot figure out why dinner costs this much, and "everything's just expensive now" wasn't settling down my thoughts.

My gut told me this wasn't just inflation. It told me the gap between what I remembered paying and what I'm paying now is wider than a normal passage of time would explain. It's the kind of thing that's easy to dismiss as nostalgia: you just forgot what it cost, it was always expensive, you're romanticizing a pre-pandemic world that didn't actually exist. So I went looking for the answers.

Here's ~what they say.

National restaurant price inflation peaked at 8.8% year-over-year in March 2023, according to the National Restaurant Association - the fastest increase in more than two decades. Full-service restaurants specifically hit 9.0% during that same stretch. Since then, it's moderated: we're looking at roughly 3.6% year-over-year as of spring 2026. That sounds better. The issue is that it's compounding on top of those prior peaks. Menu prices have risen approximately 31% in total since February 2020, per Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

So yes, prices are up. But that still doesn't explain a dinner that feels 25-30% more expensive than my internal benchmark would predict. Because my benchmark isn't pre-pandemic. It's, I don't know, two years ago. Three. And that math still doesn't work.

Turns out, it's not supposed to. At least not in Chicago.

There's a version of this story that's just "American restaurants are expensive now." That version is true and boring. The more interesting version is the one where Chicago has done something genuinely specific to itself that accelerates and amplifies all of the above.

It starts with something called the One Fair Wage ordinance, passed by the Chicago City Council in 2023. The intent was to phase out the city's "tip credit" - the mechanism that allowed restaurants to pay tipped workers a subminimum wage under the assumption that tips would cover the rest - entirely by 2028. The tipped minimum wage was scheduled to climb in stages from $9.48 to the full minimum wage of $16.60. On July 1, 2025, it jumped to $12.62. It was heading to $14.30 this July before the city council voted to freeze the phase-out in the spring of 2026, after an industry meltdown.

And there was a meltdown. The Illinois Restaurant Association reported that 496 Chicago restaurants closed in the first half of 2025 alone. Labor costs across the industry have gone up 35% since the pandemic. Product costs are up 33%. The city has lost 2,100 restaurant jobs in the past year and sits roughly 10,000 jobs below pre-pandemic employment levels, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

I want to be careful here, because this is where the discussion gets politically uncomfortable, and I don't think it needs to be. I am not arguing that restaurant workers shouldn't make a living wage. They absolutely should, and frankly, the model in which a cook can barely pay rent in the city where they work is the model that was broken, not the one trying to fix it.

I think workers - front of house and back of house both - should be paid a fair wage, full stop. If a restaurant can only survive by paying its kitchen staff poverty wages and hoping customers subsidize the front of house through tips, then I'm not sure that restaurant deserves to survive. In all of this, it is a thought that is a bit scary to consider, because I love these places and I want them to exist. But I don't want them to exist that way. What I'm struggling with is the part where fixing that problem seems to have mostly accelerated the death of the exact restaurants I'm mourning, while the ones with enough corporate infrastructure to absorb it kept right on opening. That's not an argument against paying people fairly. It's an argument that something else in this system is badly broken.

The wave of closures hit independent, mid-tier restaurants hardest. The neighborhood spots. The places charging $18 for a pasta in Edgewater or $14 for tacos in Little Village. Not Oriole. Not a BOKA concept. Those places adjusted and survived. The places that couldn't absorb the shock, couldn't negotiate better lease terms, or couldn't cross-subsidize losses from a more profitable concept next door are the ones that have gone dark. Proxi, the Bib Gourmand-rated restaurant on Randolph that had been quietly excellent for almost a decade, closed at the end of 2025. If limited to one example, that's the tier I'm generally talking about.

Back to my Beity receipt.

The subtotal was $376.98. Then came a 20% service charge ($73.20). Then a 3% Employee Wellbeing fee ($10.98). Then Chicago's restaurant tax, which - if you're eating in the West Loop, Fulton Market, or River North - runs approximately 11.75%, a stacked combination of Illinois state sales tax, Cook County home rule tax, Chicago municipal tax, and a Metro Pier and Exposition Authority food and beverage surcharge that applies specifically to the primary entertainment corridors. Why not?

The result is a multiplier applied to food prices that were already high. A restaurant moving a $28 dish to $32 isn't just moving four dollars. By the time you've run the full stack, that's a different number entirely. And because Illinois law treats mandatory service charges as taxable gross revenue - the same as food and drink - the restaurant is paying city taxes on the 20% they're already collecting to cover their labor costs. Which I can imagine is the kind of thing that frustrates a restaurant owner quite a bit.

One wrinkle worth noting: in the world that existed before all this, servers at high-end restaurants on big check averages were often clearing decent money in tips - the compensation model was skewed, but it worked for them. The shift to a flat wage funded by a house-controlled service charge has, in a number of documented cases, actually left some front-of-house staff making less take-home pay than before. So you're paying 30% more, they're potentially taking home less, and the house is (sometimes) barely keeping the lights on. Nobody won this.

Now the shitty part, mostly for me.

I am not someone who balks at spending real money on a great meal. I have a Michelin tasting menu or two on my record that I will defend without hesitation, and I genuinely believe great food is worth paying for. But I'm also not operating on an expense account, and I don't have the appetite for a $500 dinner that didn't feel like a $500 dinner. I occupy a very specific tier: I want food-first restaurants that are already on the expensive side of reasonable, and I want to feel like the price is connected to what's on the plate.

That tier used to exist in a very real way in Chicago. You paid $90-120 per person at dinner, maybe more, and you got something genuinely special - the kind of place where a passionate independent chef was doing something interesting without charging you for the Instagram-friendly chandelier or the 3,000-square-foot atrium. That's the sweet spot. And it is, by my estimation, the fastest-disappearing segment of the market, and I really don't love what is replacing it.

The places that can afford to survive in West Loop real estate right now are the ones backed by economies of scale. Groups like BOKA, Hogsalt, and Lettuce Entertain You keep opening because they have centralized buying power, shared administrative overhead, and the ability to let one highly profitable concept absorb the temporary margin squeeze of a more ambitious one. They can negotiate tenant improvement allowances from developers, meaning the landlord subsidizes the multi-million-dollar build-out just to get a notable name in the building. An independent chef cannot do any of that.

These groups have quite a few restaurants that I love and appreciate. What they tend to open, how they tend to open it, or where they tend to open it does not necessarily bother me. What does is that it continually falls into the same kind of restaurant that they have already iterated on. There is just something a bit "unpure" about stripping real newcomers of the same opportunities, leaving us with 6 different-but-the-same versions of a steakhouse, or a flashy, Instagram-inspired pizza joint, or fusion concepts made for large, diverse Friday and Saturday night crowds - all concepts that I can and do appreciate in the right dose.

And increasingly, many concepts aren't really a restaurant at all - they're bars that happen to serve food, because that's where the real math works.

Lyra is a good example of what I mean. Great-looking room, Greek-inspired menu, Fulton Market corner location. And on Friday and Saturday nights starting at 10:30, they officially transform into what their own website calls a "euphoric Greek-inspired supper club" with a live DJ, musicians, sparklers, and guests dancing. Which, hey, get after it folks. But that tells you something about where the revenue actually lives in a place like that - and it's not in the food. The bar program, the bottle service energy, the vibe. The $42 wagyu shawarma is covering the marble countertop.

I'm not begrudging anyone for figuring out how to survive. But the progression here is worth naming out loud, because it has a specific direction. First you lose the independent chef who can't make the rent work. Then the restaurant groups move in with the supper club energy and the $25 cocktails subsidizing the kitchen. And then - and this is the part that anyone with a soul should hate - you get Raising Cane's.

Not long ago, Little Goat Diner, Stephanie Izard's place on Randolph, left Fulton Market after a decade. The space sat vacant for about two years. In November 2025, Raising Cane's - the chicken fingers chain, the one with four items on the menu - opened in that exact footprint at 820 West Randolph. According to Crain's and real estate firm JLL, Raising Cane's leased the space at nearly $100 per square foot, which set a record for the corridor and, per the experts quoted, immediately reset rent expectations across Fulton Market. So, every landlord on that strip now knows a national fast food chain will pay record rents for a prime corner. The floor just keeps moving, and it is moving against every independent operator trying to compete for that real estate.

That is the final form of this problem. It's not just restaurant groups with big buildouts. It's that a Raising Cane's can cycle 300 customers through an 8,500 square foot space in a night and generate revenue per square foot that no food-first restaurant - independent or otherwise - can touch. The economics of the space no longer favor the kind of restaurant I'm talking about. They favor volume, and volume is not what you get from a chef who spent three years developing a menu.

I'm also watching Velvet Tacos go into other corners on that same strip, and I'm watching what used to be - or at least was headed toward - a corridor defined by chefs taking creative risks slowly become a dining district that serves people in town for a convention and companies taking clients out on expense accounts. The people building these things aren't building them for me. They know I'm sitting out more often. They don't care, because the expense-account customer doesn't feel the same friction I do when the check lands.

And the independently owned restaurant that used to serve the people like me - the ones who care deeply about what's on the plate and are willing to pay well for it, but aren't made of money - that restaurant is having an extremely bad time right now, or it has already closed.

I asked this question expecting a satisfying answer, but I'm not sure one exists.

The structural solutions are obvious and mostly politically impossible. Commercial zoning protections that stop national chains from simply outbidding independent operators for prime corners. Tax reform on how mandatory service charges are treated - because right now, Illinois law taxes them as gross revenue the same way it taxes food and drink, which means the money a restaurant collects to cover its labor costs is itself subject to an 11.75% hit before it gets anywhere near a paycheck. Fix that, and you immediately reduce the stacking problem without changing a single menu price. Streamlining the city's permitting and licensing process, which currently takes independent operators six to twelve months and enough bureaucratic friction that a corporate group with a full legal and administrative staff has a massive structural advantage before either restaurant flips on a burner for the first time.

None of those are coming quickly.

The more immediate reality is probably just that the market is going to speak. If the people who care most about food - the ones who used to be the reliable, enthusiastic core audience for exactly these kinds of places - stop going because the price-to-value calculation no longer works for them, the revenue disappears. The expense account crowd and the high-net-worth tourists don't fully replace it, because they tend toward brand recognition over food-first discovery. And then the room that cost $5 million to build struggles to fill, and the whole thing collapses. (That or I am just wrong and shitty little food bloggers don't move the needle.)

There is a version of this where the reckoning drives creative restaurants back into neighborhoods. Into Pilsen, into Logan Square, into Bridgeport, into places where the rent hasn't been completely broken by proximity to convention hotels and Fulton Market foot traffic. That version has actually always produced great food. The problem is that it also means the slow, slow decline of a dining corridor that was, for a minute, one of the better ones in the country; and that the people who helped build its reputation are now the ones being priced out of participating in it.

I admit that this is largely a personal problem. But I can't shake the fear that the same forces hit West Town next, or Logan, or wherever the next wave of good independent restaurants is quietly becoming something worth protecting. My city - one I grew up near and have lived in for most of my adult life - has a real chance of becoming something I don't recognize, or at least something that isn't particularly interested in appeasing people like me.

I still love this hobby. I'm obviously not done with it. But I am paying much closer attention to who's getting my money, and why, and whether the price I'm being asked to pay has anything to do with the food. Increasingly, the answer to that last one is "not really."

One last thing, because it feels dishonest not to say it: I am a guy who likes going out to dinner. That's the full extent of my expertise here. I've never run a restaurant, never managed a payroll, never tried to negotiate a lease on Randolph Street or waited six months for a city permit. Everything in this piece comes from my wallet, my receipts, and what I could piece together from people who actually know what they're talking about. If I've gotten something wrong, or missed something important, it would not be the first time I've had a strong opinion about something I only partially understand. But this one felt worth writing down.

Sources: National Restaurant Association menu price data and inflation figures (restaurant.org); Illinois Restaurant Association / Sam Toia statements on closures and labor costs via The Center Square and WTTW (March-May 2026); Bureau of Labor Statistics food-away-from-home CPI data; Illinois Department of Revenue on mandatory service charge taxability; Civic Federation of Chicago on MPEA/restaurant tax rates; Crain's Chicago Business on Raising Cane's Fulton Market lease; Block Club Chicago on Raising Cane's / Little Goat space and rent expectations (January 2026).