Much has been made of the recent hype and frothiness in Silicon Valley, what with splashy startup launch parties in San Francisco and Business Week doing its best rendition of journalists gone wild (a.k.a. "Kevin Rose: the easiest $60M I never had."). At a dinner party I attended this week, I met an exec from Black Angus who reported that business in the company's Valley locations have seen a noticeable uptick in recent months. That got me thinking, if you wanted to create a foodie measure of economic health, what would it be? When people are feeling flush, they eat steak (with apologies to my non beef-eating readers). For example, the day that the aforementioned Business Week article hit the stands, Kevin Rose bought steak dinner for everyone at Digg, realizing too late that he doesn't even have enough money to buy a couch. Thus was born the steak-o-meter. This is the type of economic metric that you just can't get from the Economist, folks!
I bounced the idea off of the guys at TechDirt over lunch, and Grier Graham offered up an anecdote about a b-school classmate who lives in a New Jersey suburb where you cannot swing a cat without hitting an investment banker. In this town, a high-end steakhouse just opened, and it's already impossible to get a reservation; his friend had mentioned it as a sign of the frothiness of the banking market. I would add that when said bankers are finished with a hard day's work in NYC, they can stop by Tom Colicchio's Craft restaurant to tuck into a roasted 30-day dry-aged cote du boeuf -- for $125 a plate. Score that one a 10 on the steak-o-meter!
$125 for a decent meal at the Craft sound a lot better deal to me than this sandwich for $140 :-)
http://www.zoliblog.com/blog/_archives/2006/4/11/1878938.html
Posted by: Zoli Erdos | August 17, 2006 at 11:46 AM
I bet it's not bad... but the best steak to be had anywhere is at Peter Luger's in Brooklyn.
Posted by: David | August 21, 2006 at 06:48 PM