Humble? Look at the menu. The cheapest glass of wine is $12. $13 cocktails, $20+ small plates, $15 cheese board for one. It’s not a vegetarian restaurant, either.

I know this isn’t New York Expensive but it’s not working class food, either.

Restaurant prices are based on the cost of real estate. Cheaper places assume more tables per square foot and more turns per table. Prices are based on average spend per cover.

$12 glasses of wine seems more than reasonable for NYC, especially since natural wine often comes in at a higher cost than mass produced wine.

> it’s not working class food

Seems exactly like simple working-class food to me - preserved fish and vegetables, pickled eggs, pies, breads.

If a pickled egg if your idea of fancy then I'm perplexed.

Homemade pickles and preserves are undoubtedly fancy these days. They were only working-class foods when the working-class had to make them to have food throughout the year. Which was admittedly most of history, but the present is not the past.

Expensive and fancy are two different things. You're right, though, those prices look steep to me.

Why are you looking to businesses to initiate change? Rally for state regulation.

Setting aside the philosophical question around whether government should be compelling businesses to make these sort of changes, change has to come at all levels, from personal to organizational to government, and businesses can implement change with much more immediacy than government can.

E.g., McDonald's shifting to cage-free hens for egg purchases. Regardless of the reasons, that was expected to have a huge impact on egg farming.

> government should be compelling businesses to make these sort of changes

That's exactly what governments do all the time. Every regulation on food safety, or pollution standards, etc. came from them. Because left to their own devices most businesses would settle on the same "maximize profits regardless of consequences" path.

P.S. Well you can "ask/demand" anything. But with no authority the process would be painfully slow, if even moving at all. Voting with the wallet works only when we have many good alternatives, which we usually don't.

I agree, but that's orthogonal to the question of whether we should ask/demand businesses to do better.

This doesn't fall under philosophy. Businesses have financial incentives to not make environmentally friendly changes. They do have some marketing incentives to change, but that has proven itself solvable via greenwashing. If you wait for a for-profit organization to become socially aware, when their financial incentives are not aligned, you'll be waiting a long time.

Does the state have any expertise in how to reduce food supply waste? Not sure why you’d task them over people who know the problem intimately.

The state doesn't have to tell you how, just to mandate it. See pollution standards where the point isn't to come up with a technical solution but with a measurable expectation.