It‘s not just you — your restaurant bill is looking heftier than usual.
Grocery costs in the Boston area have edged slightly downward from where they were this time last year, according to the most recent Consumer Price Index data. But you probably wouldn’t know it if you’ve gone out to eat recently.
Food away from home, a category that includes restaurants, bars, and other public establishments, was up 6 percent year-over-year in Greater Boston as of March, the most recent price data available. That‘s still below the recent peak of nearly 10 percent, which it reached in September 2022. But it‘s a metric that has been trending upward since last fall — a worrying sign for diners and eateries alike.
Step into one restaurant in the North End, for example, and a $33 bowl of rigatoni is up $5 over the past two years. For meat eaters, a rack of lamb, which sold for $58 in 2022, has skyrocketed by $20. Looking for seafood instead? Even the clam chowder at one oyster bar is $15 today, a $2 markup since 2022.
Allison Feeney, 35, paid nearly $4 apiece for her oysters last week, a far cry from the buck-a-shuck promotions of years past. She said her meal — though “fantastic”— was “definitely more expensive than it should be.”
“The dining experience is a central and integral part of my life and something I love to do, so I’m happy to make the investment,” she said. “But sometimes it’s a little bit of a sticker shock.”
The North End may be known for its ritzy eateries, but it’s merely a microcosm of the whole region, where the cost of eating away from home has outpaced the national average.
Restaurants said it’s not that they’re making more money; quite the opposite, they point to rising prices as a reflection of the high cost of buying food, paying staff, and keeping their doors open.
“It’s a really frightening time,” said Jen Ziskin, executive director of Massachusetts Restaurants United, a trade group for independent eateries. “We’re trying to figure out, how can we do this differently? How can we run our businesses differently? Because the numbers used to work, and they’re just not working anymore.”
The steady increase comes amid rising labor costs and supply chain instabilities. Last month, Fitch Ratings lowered its outlook for the US restaurant industry from “normal” to “deteriorating.”
Nationwide, menu prices at full-service restaurants were up 4.3 percent over the past 12 months, according to April CPI data. Limited-service prices climbed 3.4 percent.
That hasn’t stopped people from eating out. Last week, North End restaurants were bustling with tourists and families marking graduation season and enjoying the summer weather. But even with the festive air, some diners couldn’t shake the notion their wallets were lighter than after celebrations past.
“Even [at] the lower, middle-tier ones where you just go in and pick up something, it’s gotten really expensive,” said Brad Davis, 56, celebrating his daughter’s graduation from MIT.
The rising cost of eating out is in part fueled by the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s wide-ranging tariffs on foreign imports. Though most of those tariffs have been put on pause, they have restaurateurs worrying about what will happen to the price of French cheese and Mexican tomatoes.
“Businesses that sell stereos or carpets, if they’re buying from a different country, they might be able to hold on to that product until this all gets figured out,” said Will Gilson, executive chef and culinary director of the Cambridge Street Hospitality Group. “Because it‘s nonperishable, it can sit in a warehouse. ... But with restaurants, we can’t stockpile meat or produce or fish — these are things that we are ordering almost every day."
Because restaurants are limited in what they can do to insulate themselves from tariffs — even those that haven’t actually taken effect yet — they have to look at what they can control: the bill.
If restaurants have to pay more for their inventory — not just food items, but also items such as paper goods and to-go boxes — that’s “not going to make my rent cheaper, it’s not going to make labor cheaper,” Gilson said.
The choice for many restaurateurs is to either absorb the losses or pass the increases on to the consumer. That, Gilson stressed, is a last resort for any restaurant. Owners like himself are well aware of the consequences.
“Every time you raise your menu prices, we see people order less, spend less, and dine less,” he said. “People oftentimes eat with their eyes first: looking at a menu and deciding if it’s a place they want to go to, and if they can afford to get as many of the things on the menu as they want.”
That much is borne out by the data: a James Beard survey last year found that independent restaurants that raised prices by more than 15 percent reported fewer customers and, correspondingly, a decline in profits.
The same survey found that 91 percent of respondents raised menu prices at some point last year, a jump from 81 percent in 2023.
Some restaurants have turned to alternative ways of recouping their margins. Sometimes, that means cutting back on portion sizes or meal offerings.
If the price of beef goes up, Gilson said, he might lower the price of a strip steak from $50 to $40 — but serve it “a la carte,” with fries and asparagus as separate add-ons rather than sides.
That’s changed the way that diners are looking at their meals.
“Things that are add-ons, like, truffles, no,” said Feeney. “I kind of think the upsell on that is not worth it.”
Less often, that means a surcharge on all items using a particular ingredient. That‘s what Gilson said he did with egg-based dishes earlier this year after egg prices skyrocketed because of a bird flu epidemic affecting chicken flocks across the country. He acknowledged, though, that for the duration of the surcharge, “we didn’t sell as many egg sandwiches.”
That method can’t work with everything. If the wholesale price of poultry had been as affected by bird flu as the price of eggs, he mused, he would have had to make a difficult decision.
“We serve an amazing chicken here; we pay top dollar for it; it spends 24 hours in brine,” he said. “But I can’t compete with the grocery store selling it as a loss leader at 10 bucks.”
That means that some dishes have to go by the wayside.
“I remember [early] in my career bringing in wild European turbot,” said chef Chris Coombs. “That was a fish that was pricey then, but you could probably get it on the plate for $40 or $50. Now, I think I’d probably have to serve it at 120 bucks, 130 bucks. So it comes down to what people are willing to pay for their food.”
Coombs, who runs Deuxave, Boston Chops, and Bosse, among other restaurants, said price increases are gradually hollowing out the local dining scene.
“It‘s prohibitive for anyone who makes less than $200,000 a year to be able to go out to dinner regularly in the city of Boston,” Coombs said. “All the people who make $125-to-$150,000 a year, that used to be able to go out three or four nights a week, now they can only afford to go out one night a week.”
As prices go up, more and more diners are “trading down,” he said, opting for cheaper, fast casual options rather than mid-tier sit-down restaurants.
“People are finding other ways to still spend what they’re comfortable spending,” he said. “Whether it‘s drinking less alcohol, getting cocktails instead of wine, getting one appetizer instead of two.”
That’s not to say that everyone is tightening their budget. There’s still a reliable group of diners who are “flush with cash, and they don’t care what anything costs,” according to Coombs.
“But I can tell you for certain, there’s a finite number of those people,” he added.
Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports.