The shooter went into the bar targeting his ex-wife, who was wounded but survived, local media including the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register reported, citing law enforcement sources. She had been a regular at the bar and its weekly $8 spaghetti night, they said.
Pasta and red sauce are ridiculously cheap, especially in large quantities. Imagine buying the sauce for $5 in a massive can, the pasta for $0.25/pound dry, and then some garlic bread which is like $1 per loaf. Add it all up and you’re likely paying roughly $2.25 a person for the food that you’re selling for $8, plus you can move liquor, wine, and beer which have even higher markups. Heck, add in the cost of labor for the kitchen staff, and the markup on the spaghetti is probably only 75-100%. As for quality, it’s probably decent, because spaghetti, marinara sauce, and garlic bread are all easy to nail and somewhat difficult to mess up.
That’s exactly what people mean when they say $8 pasta is going to suck. There are a lot of people who find a $5 massive can of marinara inedible. It’s not only entirely possible to fuck up marinara. Rap’s, which is pretty good for a jarred sauce, goes from $10-15 for a jar.
Same thing with the pasta. There’s a world of difference between freshly made pasta, refrigerated pasta, and dry box pasta. There’s again differences by brand and price within those tiers.
And as someone who loves for bread, we’re not even going to address the kind of mushy grocery store loaf you can get for $1.
It’s not that the meal is easy to nail, it’s that you like very cheap Italian food. That’s not a dig - I grew up eating it and it’s a comfort food for me. If I pay $1.50 for a taco, I know I’m not getting a $26 for a plate of 3 kind of taco. I’m fine with that, because I love cheap tacos.
$8 pasta is about community connection, not quality.
Absolutely! And biker bars are about community, not craft cocktails. It doesn’t mean that Natty Light doesn’t suck, it just means that that’s not the selling point.
I’m not objecting to someone eating $8 pasta. I’m just saying that I agree that, as pasta, it’s going to suck. I am all for living the experience of having an $8 spaghetti dinner with Satan’s Helpers.
I think you got me wrong. I’m not saying it’s great, but there’s a lot you can do with restaurant components to start with, and economy of scale makes things like freshly baked bread very possible for $1 a loaf. Turning that into garlic bread is adding butter and garlic, both aren’t exactly pricey. It doesn’t require training at the Culinary Institute of America to make good garlic bread for pretty cheap. Restaurants and bars get weekly if not daily deliveries, loading up on bread one day a week seems very simple to plan into the delivery schedule.
The rest of the meal is similar. It’s not hard to doctor up canned tomatoes which are $5 for 102 oz. I make pasta sauce from scratch all the time, it’s really easy, and even fresh herbs aren’t all that expensive. Shoot, fresh basil from Trader Joes is like $3 for enough to make gallons of sauce. Extrapolate from there.