People's appetites could not be compared on the same day.
From a very early age, Su Bai had cared deeply about the quality of his food.
Even when he did not have much spare cash, after evening self-study in high school, he would go home and use the ingredients in the fridge to whip up a late-night snack for himself.
At the end of the day, cooking for yourself was often very cheap, and once you did it often enough, it did not take much time either.
Of course, taste was another matter. Some dishes were very simple to make, while others were pure labor-intensive work. Those were the ones better ordered when eating out.
People who loved cooking often did not merely stare at ingredient quality when dining out and calculate whether a dish was reasonably priced. They also factored in the labor.
Compared with dishes whose prices were propped up by ingredients despite having relatively simple preparation, people who loved cooking generally preferred ordering "labor-intensive dishes."
Su Bai did not reject restaurants with high markups, as long as the food was truly good and the service was up to par. The problem was that some internet-famous restaurants were genuinely awful. A pretty exterior alone was not enough.
Take the "XX regional cuisine taverns" that had become popular everywhere these past two years. Su Bai had a terrible impression of that type of restaurant.
At most, they only vaguely resembled the cuisines they claimed to serve. As for the essence of those cuisines, they had not learned a thing.
There were even plenty of mismatched, bastardized "second-generation creations."
The textbook example was those Yunnan-Guizhou-Sichuan taverns. They were absolutely terrible, not even worth one hair of some roadside eatery in Yunnan, Guizhou, or Sichuan.
Su Bai wondered whether that gym-owning