What Are People Really Paying For at Iconic Businesses?

At first glance, iconic businesses look irrational. A pastrami sandwich at Katz’s Delicatessen in New York City’s Lower East Side, a Jewish deli founded in 1888, priced close to $30. A seat at Sukiyabashi Jiro in the Ginza district of Tokyo, where a short sushi meal can cost tens of thousands of yen. A crab omelette at Jay Fai in Bangkok’s Old Town, cooked over street-side flames and priced higher than many fine-dining menus. An all-you-can-eat ritual at The Carnivore Restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya, operating since 1980, where the ceremony matters as much as the food. In a world optimised for delivery, comparison, and speed, these places should struggle. Instead, they endure.

The mistake is assuming the product is the point.

At iconic businesses, customers are rarely paying just for food or service. They are paying to participate in a shared cultural reference. The transaction functions as proof. You were there. You experienced it. You can now tell the story. That is why price behaves differently. At Katz’s Delicatessen in New York City, the sandwich is not competing with nearby lunch spots. It is competing with memory and reputation. The price filters out casual consumption and reframes the purchase as an event.

Longevity is the first hidden asset. When a business has survived for decades, sometimes more than a century, customers stop interrogating value in the usual way. The logic becomes circular but powerful: it must be worth it, because it has lasted. Time compresses trust. This applies whether it is Katz’s in Manhattan, Café de Flore in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood of Paris, or Antico Caffè Greco on Via dei Condotti in central Rome, founded in 1760. Age itself becomes brand capital that cannot be manufactured or accelerated.

Friction plays a central role. Long queues, narrow menus, brusque service, cash-only rules, fixed locations. From an efficiency perspective, these are weaknesses. From a systems perspective, they are defences. Friction limits throughput, preserves scarcity, and prevents the experience from becoming interchangeable. If Katz’s in New York removed queues or Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo doubled seat turnover, revenue might rise briefly, but meaning would erode. These businesses optimise for continuity, not scale.

Taste still matters, but it is rarely sufficient. Many places cook well. Very few become institutions. The durable differentiator is consistency. Iconic businesses resist constant optimisation because optimisation introduces variation. Variation undermines memory. Sameness, repeated over decades, turns a product into a reference point. This is why menus at Peter Luger Steak House in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, operating since 1887, change slowly, if at all. The absence of novelty becomes the promise.

Asia shows how this logic works across price points. At Sukiyabashi Jiro in Ginza, Tokyo, scarcity is formal, expensive, and tightly controlled. In contrast, Tim Ho Wan in the Sham Shui Po district of Hong Kong originally built its reputation as a low-cost dim sum shop before global expansion diluted the original signal. One sold exclusivity. The other sold legitimacy through repetition. Different prices, same underlying system.

Africa adds another dimension. Iconic venues often function as social infrastructure. The Carnivore in Nairobi, Kenya is not simply a restaurant; it is where visitors are taken to understand the city. The value lies in ritual: open-fire cooking, tableside carving, shared pacing. Across African cities, long-standing institutions survive not because they are cheapest or trend-driven, but because they anchor identity and collective memory.

Tourism distorts the economics but also sustains them. Locals often say iconic places are “no longer for us.” That is partly true. Visitors pay prices locals won’t pay weekly, subsidising preservation. The business becomes a destination rather than a utility. Without tourism, many icons would either modernise beyond recognition or disappear.

Contrast this with modern fame-driven icons such as Salt Bae, whose gold-leaf steaks are served at Nusr-Et Steakhouse in downtown Dubai. Here, the product is explicit spectacle. The price buys visibility, virality, and proximity to a personality. It works while attention lasts, but it relies on constant relevance rather than accumulated trust. This is attention capital, not longevity capital.

That contrast exposes the system. Traditional iconic businesses monetise time. Modern viral icons monetise exposure. One compounds slowly and defensively. The other spikes quickly and decays unless continuously refreshed.

Attempts to replicate iconic status usually fail because the core asset is not the recipe, the décor, or the price point. It is accumulated meaning tied to place. Chains can copy surfaces but not memory. This is why “authenticity at scale” often collapses into theatre. Iconicity does not franchise cleanly.

There is also a darker edge. Once demand is protected by reputation, some institutions drift from stewardship into extraction. Prices rise faster than quality. Customers still pay, but resentment grows. Icon status can shield behaviour that would not survive in a competitive market.

What makes true iconic businesses resilient to digital disruption is irreducibility. They sell presence. You cannot deliver being at Katz’s in New York, Café de Flore in Paris, or Antico Caffè Greco in Rome through an app. Convenience is the wrong axis of competition. In a world of abundance, they win by being singular.

So when someone pays $30 for a sandwich, they are not buying lunch. They are buying a story, a reference point, and a small claim on something that feels larger than the transaction itself.

The product matters.

But what people are really paying for is participation in a moment that cannot be replicated.