The Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio

After flicking through the wine list at Cafe Gray on Friday night, I’ve come up with what I’m calling the Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio, or RPR. The formula is simple:

RPR=W/E

W is what you might call the quarter-median wine price: take the red wines only (to make things a bit more manageable) and find the price of the wine such that 25% of the wines on the list are cheaper, and 75% of the wines on the list are more expensive.

E is simply the average price of a main course.

At the Mermaid Inn, in the East Village, the average entree is $21; its red wines range from $28 to $74, with the quarter-median wine costing $34. (Three wines are cheaper; nine wines are more expensive.) So the RPR is 1.6.

At Cafe Gray, the average entree is $37. The wine list on the website doesn’t have prices, but I can tell you that the red wines range from $60 to $5,100, and my gut feeling is that the quarter-median price is somewhere around $175. In which case the RPR would be 4.7.

If you point me to restaurant wine lists online,. It should be interesting to see where the typical restaurant lies.

Update: Thanks, Eater! Here’s some more datapoints:

Landmarc: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $42/ Average Entree Price $25 = 1.68 ratio

Balthazar: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $55/ Average Entree Price: $24 = 2.29 ratio

Frankies Spuntino: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $30/ Average Entree Price: $15 = 2.0 ratio

Fiamma: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $110/ Average Entree Price: $35 (estimate) = 3.14 ratio

Le Cirque: Quarter-Median Wine Price: $204 / Average Entree Price $49 = 4.16 ratio