Restaurant quality is real and it’s because high end restaurants usually buy the best produce at wholesale and pay for stuff a grocery store can’t. For example they get much better blackberries in top restaurants because they need to be handled extremely gently when ripe: a grocery store can’t put that stuff out on shelves or it would get destroyed.
At the very high end, restaurants also get a quality edge by creatively using excessive labor — in other words using ingredients that are very hard to source, and doing things to food that are so tedious or complicated that nobody would try them at home.
One of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, Noma in Copenhagen, is closing soon. Their menu costs about $800 per person, but even at that price the business barely turns a profit and runs largely on unpaid interns who put in the endless hours of manual labor so they could have the famous restaurant on their CV:
Plus, restaurants can practice the same recipe again and again for months or years on end. It would be pretty damning if they wouldn't be better than home cooks after that much repetition.
