Why is squid expensive in restaurants?
Before I get into it, I'd never bothered to check until now but it appears that calamari is Italian for squid, but defined as the "culinary name when squid is prepared as food". It gets used on menus because it sounds "nicer".
Something that's always gotten my goat has been the fact that calamari in restaurants is treated the same as prawns when it comes to pricing. You pay $15 (or something) for a "salt and pepper calamari" dish and end up with 6 pieces of calamari - WTF Mate?
Here's the skinny - I live near the Sydney Fish Market so eat a reasonable amount of seafood. Calamari costs about $7/kg in "squid tubes", with about 3 or 4 squid tubes (about $5-6 worth) you can make a big bowl of salt and pepper calamari. In my recipe for Salt and Pepper Squid I used (from distant memory) 1 or 2 squid tubes and ended up with way more than you'd get in a restaurant. So the average serving of Salt and Pepper Calamari in a restaurant probably has 50c to a dollar worth of squid in it.
Now to compare, green (ie. uncooked) prawns run to about $20/kg for medium sized ones, so it's slightly more understandable that restaurants are a bit more stingy with them. Even so, you sometimes get 6 prawns for $15 with a few veggies and a sauce, which is probably about $3 worth of prawn.
.. and all this is with retail prices, restaurants are probably getting it a whole lot cheaper wholesale.
I don't mind paying $15 for Salt & Pepper Calamari - just give me a decent amount of squid in it!!
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