Nah you got everything right, upscale restaurants typically have higher margins and higher labor costs. Even at the restaurants that do actually get higher quality ingredients, they usually make up for this by serving smaller portions.The area where they squeeze the most out of you is alcohol. Get served 2 shots of pinnacle or McCormick's in a drink and pay $10 for each one.

There are 2 types of restaurants, ones that exist just to make people happy and ones that exist to make money. The ones that exist to make money are pretty much always doing fine. Petit bougois usually end up making some terrible deal with an investor and making it everyone else's problem instead of their own