The truth is a decent restaurant has almost no margin on the main course food. The money is made on selling wine, cocktails and to an extent on starters and deserts.

You're paying a premium for food that is expensive to produce. Good restaurants buy the highest quality foods and this cuts deeply into the margin.

So yes, buying high quality food and cooking it at home will cost about what a restaurant charges you. You simply can not have it both ways. Either you want high quality food and will pay for it or you're buying low quality food at a premium with a nice brand on it or you're just buying cheap food which is of poor quality.

Are you saying that the main course price doesn't cover anything except the cost of the ingredients? No salaries, rent, utilities, marketing, supplies or maintenance?

I believe what they meant was that the price of the meal brings them to break-even (ingredients, staff, rent, etc) and their profit is made via alcohol and meal add-ons (appetizers, deserts). I don't know enough about the restaurant business to know if it's true, but it sounds plausible.

Right, but debaserab2's complaint was that the ingredients alone bought at WF cost the same as a full meal at the restaurant (which includes all that other stuff).

Wholesale vs retail, probably. Plus any volume discount (buying an entire restaurant's worth of food at once instead of just one cart's worth).

I buy non-organic vegetables and meat from my grocery store at a significantly lower price than whole foods and to be honest I don't notice a quality difference.