Pay What You Want: Austin Restaurant Defies Inflation Trend

At L’Oca d’Oro, an Italian restaurant in Austin’s Mueller neighborhood, Tuesday nights come with an unusual offer: diners decide what to pay for their food. The promotion, launched in December 2025, is a direct response to a grim reality facing the restaurant industry — more Americans are staying home, and dining out has become a luxury many can no longer afford.

According to NPR, which featured the restaurant as part of its “What’s Eating America” series, co-owners Adam Orman and Fiore Tedesco III launched “Pay What You Will Tuesdays” after grappling with the effects of disruptive tariffs, rising food costs, labor shortages, and their own increasing menu prices.

How It Works

Every Tuesday evening, guests at L’Oca d’Oro order from the regular à la carte menu and write in the amount they wish to pay for food. Drinks remain at full price, and a mandatory 20% service charge — which funds living wages, benefits, and paid time off for staff — is applied to the chosen total. The restaurant typically makes about $70 less than full menu price on food during these nights, but has seen an average increase in traffic and overall revenue on Tuesdays since the promotion began. On one occasion, they actually made $12 more than full price.

Most Tuesday diners pay about two-thirds of their actual food bill, according to Orman. A few pay far less, while many pay approximately what they owe — and some customers pay full price or more to help subsidize others.

Why This Matters

The experiment reflects a broader shift in American consumer behavior. A YouGov report from October 2025 found that 37% of U.S. diners said they were dining out less often than a year earlier, while only 8% said they were going out more. Rising menu prices and a desire to save money were the top reasons.

Meanwhile, the restaurant industry has undergone a fundamental transformation. According to data from the National Restaurant Association, nearly three out of every four meals served by U.S. restaurants in 2025 were takeout orders. The sit-down dining experience — once a routine part of American life — is increasingly becoming an exception rather than the norm.

Voices from the Table

For customers like Zayed Al-Hamad, who uses rental assistance to afford his apartment, the promotion has been transformative. “My family in general, we don’t always have the most money to spend,” he told NPR. “But I figured this is an opportunity to actually experience something a little better without having to shell out $150 for the four of us.”

Armand Daniels, an actor and brand ambassador who visited with his partner for a belated Valentine’s date, said: “Things are a little bit tight. Jobs are harder and harder to find.”

Co-owner Adam Orman sees the promotion as a matter of principle. “Getting drive-thru is not going out. Sitting down, being treated with hospitality, being a guest is a thing that everybody should be experiencing regularly, because it feels good,” he said. “This is a way of making sure that that is accessible for everyone.”

Chef and co-owner Fiore Tedesco III acknowledged the counterintuitive nature of the strategy. “There’s a way in which it seems like we should raise prices right now because everything’s more expensive, [that] we should lean that way,” he said. But he chose a different path: “I feel really confident and I feel lighter and more loving and more full and more generous in practicing the spirit of leaning that other way, of saying, no, the lesson here is this is for everybody.”

More Than a Meal

Princeton University anthropology professor Hanna Garth, who researches food access, notes that restaurants serve as vital “third spaces” — places outside home and work where people interact socially. When dining out becomes inaccessible, those incidental social connections are lost. “Those connections, even though they’re teeny-tiny connections that seem like they don’t matter that much, they’re a really really big deal for making us feel like we belong to a community,” Garth said.

The pay-what-you-will model — a concept NPR’s Planet Money explored back in 2019 with Panera’s non-profit cafes — is not new, but its application during an inflationary period carries fresh significance.

What’s Next

L’Oca d’Oro is considering expanding the pay-what-you-will concept over the summer as they introduce new menu items. The restaurant also maintains a GoFundMe campaign to allow people to subsidize meals for those who cannot pay full price. Whether other restaurants will follow suit remains an open question, but for one night a week in Austin, the answer to “what’s for dinner?” is whatever you can afford.

As Al-Hamad put it: “As I continue to get to live in this city, I hope I’m able to support these businesses more and more, and hopefully I can be part of the reason why they’re actually able to afford to do these things.”