THE price of dining as a couple in one of the capital’s top restaurants has broken through the £100 barrier for a standard menu.

To have dinner in a Michelin one-star restaurant in London, without service or wine, costs an average of £105.50. That compares with New York at £89.66 and Paris at £88.70.

The cost analysis, conducted by The Sunday Times and endorsed as a fair comparison by the creators of Harden’s restaurant guide, has stirred criticism that British restaurants are catering excessively for those with an expense account.

According to Elizabeth Carter, editor of the Which? Good Food Guide, unwary diners are at risk of nasty surprises. In the space of the past fortnight she has been charged £22 for a single portion of in-season mackerel and £50 for some truffle shavings on a bowl of pasta.

The one-star Michelin restaurants sampled in London were: the River Cafe, co-owned by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, where a main course of lamb costs £27; Tom Aikens’s eponymous restaurant in Chelsea, with a set price of £65; Gordon Ramsay’s Maze, where foie gras costs £14; and Chez Bruce in south London, which costs £47.50 a head for the four-course set-price menu.

The average cost of a meal for two was £105.50. The cheapest bottle of wine came out at £16 and service is 12.5%, pushing the total price of a meal for two to £134.36.

With such prices it may not be surprising that, according to the Zagat Survey of restaurants, Londoners eat out less frequently than in more reasonably priced cities: 2½ times per week, compared with 2.9 for Parisians and 3.3 for New Yorkers. Tokyo dwellers eat out every other day.

Among the 16 most expensive restaurants in London, the average cost of a meal has risen by 6.1% over the past year, far beyond the rate of inflation. The price has risen by 47.9% since 2000.

Anthony Demetre, chef and co-owner of Arbutus in Soho, also a Michelin one-star restaurant, where a similar meal costs £33.80, said that high prices made his “blood boil”.

“I think London is a huge rip-off. What’s so surprising is that Londoners fall for it. Even I, a huge foodie who has been in the restaurant business for 25 years, am loath to spend £100-£150 just for a meal,” he said.

“Some restaurants justify their prices by blaming increasing rents and food costs going up, but I think that’s a smokescreen. There’s too much added snob value with chefs who wouldn’t dream of putting cheap cuts on the menu. At Arbutus our ethos is to resurrect all the forgotten pieces of meat we remember from childhood.”

AA Gill, the Sunday Times restaurant critic, said the London restaurant scene was no longer about food. “The London scene is more about fashion, there’s a lot more snobbery involved, it is more to do with how difficult it can be to get a table,” he said.

“In London there are a lot of people who have disposable incomes, [but] more important than that, there are an enormous number of people who eat out that don’t pick up the bill. When I eat I notice most people around me, including myself, are not paying for their dinner.”

In New York, Richard Coraine, chief of operations at Gramercy Tavern, just off Broad-way, said the rise of the celebrity chef had inflated prices in Britain. “For us, and most places in New York, we have never been chef-personality driven, we have always been chef-cook driven. For us you never have to wonder if the chef is in the kitchen, he’s always in the kitchen,” he said.

“When you charge £100 for a meal the margin for error has to be zero.” He also warned of the dangers of becoming reliant on customers with expense accounts: “When the market goes down, your customers will start to disappear and you’ll be left with an empty restaurant.”

Ossie Gray, manager at the River Cafe, defended his prices: “The restaurant-going public are ultimately the judges and our customers clearly approve. Our prices reflect the quality of ingredients that go into our food.”

Bruce Poole, chef and co-founder of Chez Bruce, said: “Our justifications for the prices are obvious – the rents here are horrendous, staff costs are high, our ingredients are expensive. I’m comfortable charging what we charge. If I didn’t we’d never make any money.” A spokesman for Tom Aikens admitted that most of its clientele were entertaining for business. He added: “When there are dips and dives in the market, the top end restaurants suffer a down-turn. It can be a tough business.”

Tim Zagat, co-founder of the Zagat Survey, said: “I suspect as soon as a recession bites you’ll be seeing prices drop.”

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