I find the non-alcoholic pairings prices even more difficult to swallow than the alcohol with a lot of the tasting menus that offer such a thing. They've dropped the price now but at a time one restaurant not far from us were £225 for the food, £175 for the wine or £125 for the non-alcoholic.

Given we are supposed to be talking about "top restaurants", and taking that in the context of the rest of this site, then wouldn't personally say that, in London at least, all the menus are not the same. If you go down several rungs then possibly more so assuming you are sticking within a certain cuisine. At the same time, I wouldn't necessarily go to a good steakhouse and except something revolutionary on the plate but more high quality and some small twists (our previous favourite but didnt make it through Covid did a horseradish/mustard blend thing that was great with the fantastic meat they sold).

There are certainly different strategies for the restaurant trade and certainly some will make their money off the drinks (alcoholic or otherwise) rather than the food event to the extent the food is a loss leader. Obviously depending on what price point you're aiming at you may decide to invest less in the food to reduce prices further or still offer good food at a sensible price and load the drinks. There are some upper good restaurants doing good quality fare at prices that people are surprised at because they're known for being fancy but you get absolutely hammered on the drinks. Obviously some use this to their advantage as per the previous trend to got to the all you can eat buffets (some of which are reasonably high end) and just abuse the food and only drink tap water (which in the UK cannot be directly charged for if a venue serves alcohol and no one bothers with the 20p notional charge for the glass/ice)