wow you eat out a lottt

OMG, this is awesome. Thanks so much for doing this!

It is a great reference, thanks.

At the high end, the per-head results depend a lot on what kind on wine you get. Easy at the Angus Barn, for example, to spend more on wine than on food.

How in the heck do you spend almost 10 bucks a person at Costco? You must be really hungry!

Thank You! This is great. A few surprises: The pizza & burger places were more expensive then I would have thought.

it would be helpful to separate them into lunch and dinner lists. but, great tool! thanks.

Pretty interesting stuff. We are trained to assume that the typical fast food places (Wendys, Sonic, etc.) are much cheaper when in fact there are alternatives for maybe a dollar more where you can get much healther and less processed food.

Great idea, I see a lot of potential for this as a standalone site rather than just a tab on gogo. Map mashup, customer feedback, categorization, so much more, so little time. Any thoughts/plans?

Also, any details on the typical table/order? How many people, appetizers, entrees, deserts, drinks?

Did I miss something, or have you not eaten at Poole’s Diner? Hard to believe it’s not on this list.

Wow – interesting! Do you use Shoeboxed, Mint, or any others to access this info quickly or just DIY spreadsheets? I’m curious as to what this would look like for Nick and myself!

shoeboxed is great-they are based in durham too

Cents, Good point! For some reason Poole’s is the restaurant equivalent of Superchunk. For some reason something ALWAYS comes up or there is a problem when I try to go. So, Poole’s, J Betski’s, and BuKu are surprisingly the three I haven’t tried that I want to try. To be honest, the number of slots in the dining budget for these types of restaurants has been scant in the last year and a half.

Joe, great ideas! I might work on some of those in the near future. As far as a typical event, usually for lower half of that list involves my wife and my daughter, sans alcohol an sans dessert. For the upper half we usually will get a drink or two each, my wife might get dessert, but I rarely ever do. More than half of the time we are with at least one other couple, but that’s moot since this is a per-head list. To me the error in this list resides in the upper half. Magnolia Grill and Mo’s Diner are not significantly more expensive than Bloomsbury Bistro. However our typical behavior in these restaurants is what is reflected here. So apparently we tend to splurge at some restaurants and not at others. Wine is the BIG, expensive wildcard here.

Lisa, I manually enter all of my receipts into Quicken, then reconcile vs. the downloaded version from the bank. I had Q spit out our “Dining” category (from this undisclosed time period) to a tab-delimited file, then put it Excel and manually recalled the number of diners for each transaction in order to satisfy the per-head calculation. Then ran an average calc on each restaurant. I have that output in a Google Spreadsheet and can now go edit it on the go, so it will be a dynamic list.

Shoeboxed looks pretty interesting, but with Evernote, I’m not sure why anyone would spend the money on Shoeboxed. For the receipts I want to keep, anyway, I’ll just use my ScanSnapS510, which is my most favorite piece of hardware since I got my first DVR.

Hey Dana, I am still waiting to hear what you ate at Costco that cost you almost 10 bucks a person. It’s keeping me up at night thinking about it.

Haha, John! These are great questions, and that is definitely a head-scratcher. When I look back at this period, I see 4 transactions: $14.77, $9.94, $11.14, $22.05. I really only recall the first two clearly. The first was my little girl and I eating pizza. I think we had 3 slices between us and drinks, maybe dessert. The second was just me, I believe, trying to eat two slices with a Coke. This is some bad pizza, BTW. The other two were in ’07, adn I don’t remember them. It is quite possible that the 22.05 is a premade dinner (pizza or pasta) with salad – I only divided it by 2, but that’s probably low. It probably fed about 5 meals worth. So there probably is some error in the $9.87 number, but I really don’t want to go try it again and test the number. That Caesar salad is OK, but the rest of that stuff is inedible!

I will say that the Magnolia Grill number is skewed, and I really want to go back there to bring the avg down! As you can see, the font is small, and we really have only gone once in the period of data I used. It was a birthday meal and we got a reasonable bottle of wine as well as desserts, both aberrations from our normal behavior.

Hey Dana, The chicken bake at Costco is pretty yummy. I dare not ask how much fat is in it since it’s a baked pastry filled with chicken and some sort of creamy sauce. It’s probably a day’s worth of fat grams. I think it runs about 3 bucks or so. Add a berry sundae and a fountain drink + tax, it’s a huge gut filling meal for under $6. Of course, the old stand-by is the $1.50 foot long dog+soda. For under ten bucks, you can feed a family of 6 with those meals.

Thanks for sharing your process! I’m definitely going to spend some time looking at this soon for myself. Nick swears we spend a fortune going out to eat several times a week, but there was an interesting post on another local food/restaurant blog about how it may not be so much different actually. He and I are such incompatible eaters, that I think we really get more value in dining out anyhow… just need the data to backup my argument

The thing I like about Shoeboxed is it gets rid of the paper trail for me… the cost is definitely a breaking point for some people, but the value of time for a lot of users is what sells them on it (not even having to do the scanning). The thought of a service like this became more and more useful when I picked up a $6 lunch for Nick one day and it magically became $36 with the bank. It took 3 months to dispute because I couldn’t find the receipt (which would have been a snap with Shoeboxed). For some reason, the folks at bank really thought anyone could eat $36 worth of Taco Bell for lunch. Or, how my wine fridge magically stopped working, and Haier wants to see an original receipt to fix it. Blah, blah, blah

HAha. $36 worth of Taco Bell sounds like a world of HURT! I know what you mean about having the image of those receipts. I generally enter them in Quicken and throw them in the can for my shredder and keep everything reconciled in the meantime. Quarterly I’ll pull out the shredder motor and shred all of the papers. I scan receipts that may be important, but not that many. I always worry that I’ll need some receipt going in the shredder.

I definitely think it costs less to make meals at home. I have a system for that, too. We will make a recipe, timing the amount of prep time. On one side of an index card we put the name of the entire meal and the total cost of ingredients and actual prep time (circled). On the back goes the shopping list for the meal. They are all kept in a little file box in the pantry. The idea is to pull out the little box to plan the week’s meals. I think the whole thing would work just as well in Evernote, to be honest, though.

Point is, we can make things from Magnolia Grill and Bloomsbury Bistro-type restaurants for ~$15-$20 a head (food only). Avoiding ridiculous alcohol markups, and you really do end up saving dinero. No it isn’t as adventurous as trying something that requires the skill of an expert. Yes, there are other variables like time, effort, the dining experience, etc, but we’re only discussing the cost variable here, right

I just looked at Shoeboxed for a while, and I think I like my system better. IF I wanted to, I could throw those receipts through my $420 scanner and it would maybe take 10 minutes for a whole month?? Comparing to the $20/mo plan the scanner pays for itself in 2 yrs, plus there is the added bonus of keeping my info private, archiving on my terms, not worrying about the long-term viability of the data storage company, and not worrying about a set number of articles per month. (BTW this scanner scans both sides at a 3s/pg rate, saving them in jpg or pdf formats. Pretty neat!

Thank you so much for doing this. I hope when you get a chance you can add some ratings too.

Costco should be no cost as they serve so much food free just walking the aisles.

Dana check out Savoy in the Greystone Shopping Center on Lead Mine at Sawmill. It’s awesome and they give you muffins for breakfast the next morning … how cool is that? So when you figure your averages be sure to divide by 2 (dinner and breakfast) ha ha