As Costs Keep Rising, Restaurateurs Find Creative Ways to Cope

At Maple Garden, a Shanghai-style restaurant in Flushing, Queens, rice is no longer served automatically with every meal.

At Good Enough to Eat, a brunch spot on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, diners will have to pay $2 extra for the walnut and raisin topping that used to come with the cinnamon swirl French toast.

At the Catch, a year-old Barbadian restaurant in St. Albans, Queens, Vicki Cutting is hoping her customers will not notice that the portions of pudding and souse, a traditional dish, are slightly smaller than they were a few months ago.

All across New York City, cooks, chefs and restaurateurs are struggling to cope with soaring costs of many of their basic ingredients, including flour, eggs, rice and cooking oil. “Everything is going up at once” is a universal complaint among them, so they are devising all sorts of strategies to avoid having to pass the brunt of the price increases on to their customers.  Read full story