Restaurant prices have been creeping up in San Antonio.
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In May, my bill at a new downtown hotel restaurant hit almost $1,000 for a party of four after the tip. It was the single biggest bill I’ve been handed in 10 years as the restaurant critic for the San Antonio Express-News.
I’m not sure why it triggered something in me, but it did. I’ve paid that and more at restaurants in Malibu, New York, London and Tokyo. My friend and fellow restaurant critic Matthew Odam at the Austin American-Statesman called it “child’s play in this overpriced city (Austin).”
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This was Oak & Amber, the lobby steakhouse at The Monarch San Antonio, newly risen at Hemisfair like the shiny monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” And I was one of the apes shaking my club, wondering why it was there. And who was it for? Sure as hell not San Antonio, not in this pre-Project Marvel space-time continuum.
And it’s not like we went crazy: A single seafood tower as an appetizer. Four entrees, including a cheeseburger. Two down-list bottles of wine, two desserts. And we didn’t even get into the more serious big-ticket things: caviar, foie gras, Lobster Thermidor, a $235 porterhouse steak.
Things have gotten out of hand. The restaurant price creep has come for San Antonio. I know times are tough (they always are), but it’s time to come back down to Earth, where your customers live.
HIGH STAKES: Oak & Amber review
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Oak & Amber is the new restaurant on the lobby floor of The Monarch San Antonio hotel, which opened in March at Hemisfair. The menu includes a Royale platter from the cold seafood bar that includes oysters, clams, lobster, shrimp, scallop ceviche, tuna tartare and smoked trout roe.
Mike Sutter/San Antonio Express-News
It feels counterintuitive for me to lodge a price complaint. I’ve held nothing but contempt for people who howl when a cheese enchilada plate dares to cost more than $5.99. Like cheap Mexican food is some kind of sacred right. Or how about 99 cents? Some of my most popular stories online reported 99-cent enchilada specials when Tia’s Taco Hut rolled out its new locations.
Somewhere in the middle, somewhere between 99 cents and a thousand dollars, too many restaurants have lost their sense of value. I’m not talking about price. Price and value are two different things. Price is what we pay; value is how we feel about what we pay. I’ve paid $599 and felt like I got away with something. I’ve paid $5.99 and felt like going full Karen.
Value is my sacred space, the space where I’ll defend any restaurant at any price if I walk out feeling not just full, but fulfilled. Feeling like I got my money’s worth, and more.
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I get it. Restaurants live in a world where something vital to their supply chain is in full meltdown all the time. If it’s not tomatoes, it’s eggs. Or avocados, or limes, or beef.
As of June, the year-over-year Consumer Price Index shows tomatoes up 19.5%, ground beef up 12.4%, steaks up 11.4% and heaven help us, coffee up 12.2%. For reference, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the inflation rate at 3.5%.
The good news? Eggs are down 27.9%. That’s cold comfort to businesses and their customers paying 27.3% more for gas.
As the Express-News restaurant critic, my own per-ticket dinner expense has risen about 37% in five years, with close to 12% of that increase coming in the past year alone. The Express-News believes in real restaurant criticism, and so it believes in an expense account. No free rides, no friends-and-family discounts. Accounting departments just love this kind of spike.
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RANT: Food writing’s worst word
Within that number lies moments of grace, of respect for that sacred value space. Beef got so expensive last year that Adam Lampinstein at The Hayden couldn’t offer chicken-fried steak at what he thought was a reasonable price. So he switched to pork schnitzel. It’s just as good, and schnitzel opens the door for sauerkraut and mustard to go with that chicken-fried gravy.
At Max’s Sister, the new restaurant from veteran San Antonio chef Andrew Weissman, a tasting menu took me through courses of gazpacho, oysters, scallops, caviar, calamari, roasted duck, venison, rib-eye steak, a small dessert and a big dessert. In the low light, I thought the menu said $180, and I was feeling alright about it. But I was wrong. It was $130, a righteous value for the food and the experience that will carry San Antonians back to the bright-eyed days of Weissman’s Le Rêve, where similar tasting menus from 17 years ago cost just $30 less.
Sugar Factory on the River Walk features $41 cocktails.
Mike Sutter/Staff
But I’ve had that same sacred space rolled over like a tractor pull. At Oak & Amber, where a $240 seafood tower reminded me that seafood towers are the strip-club bottle service of wannabe steakhouses. At Sugar Factory on the River Walk, with its $41 celebrity-tested cocktails. At Chart House, spinning on its woozy axis atop the Tower of the Americas, with a $100 banquet-ready steak-and-lobster combo.
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And the Ace of Steaks, with its $100 gold-foil burger with a bottle-service sparker stuck in the top. That one’s gone now. I didn’t kill it, by the way. I just diagnosed the late stages of a terminal illness.
Some of my favorite restaurants have seen their share of price bumps over the years. The difference? They kept it within the norms of the industry. And they’re worth it.
At 2M Smokehouse, brisket was $20 a pound when they opened in 2016, then $26 in 2022, and now $32 a pound. Bliss in Southtown does what it does best: It keeps a steady head while everybody else is losing theirs. In 2016, its signature duck and foie gras was $35. Then $39 in 2020, and now $46 in 2026. Mixtli’s multicourse Mexican tasting menu was $85 when they started in a boxcar by Olmos Park in 2013, then $110 in 2019. Now, after a move to Southtown and a Michelin star, it’s $170.
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And if you think that’s all big talk from an expense-account critic, let me offer Garcia’s Mexican Food and Oblate Cafe and the eight other places my colleague Paul Stephen ranked among the Top 10 cheese enchiladas for real value and a real sense of San Antonio place.