Worth the Weight?

There’s at least one restaurant in this city with a unique way of pricing its menu items. By weight.

Le Commensal, on Bay St., just this side of hospital row, has a vast and healthful selection from which diners may choose. There’s eggplant in ginger sauce, Portuguese bean stew, chicory and pear salad. There’s trifle, chocolate mousse cake, even maple syrup pie.

Yum, right? Worth every dime of their fee? Well, that kind of hangs in the balance.

Patrons of this establishment must weigh each dish’s potential for pleasure against its price tag. Quite literally.

Every purchase at this cafeteria-style eatery must be trotted up to the cashier who dutifully drops it onto a scale—and rings up your bill accordingly.

It’s a nifty little concept, this food-by-weight thing, but it ain’t for everybody. How much your dinner weighs, after all, bears no immediately apparent relation to how much it’s worth. A plate stacked high with matsutake ’shrooms, for example, or a heaping bowl of wobbly Beluga eggs, would net you a deal under these circumstances. But I’d steer clear of the dumplings and the bouillion. They’re real heavies.