Not that I always could or would care to go to the effort for a fancy meal, but in general it's going to be a lot cheaper to prepare most meals at home. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
Of course it'll be cheaper to make most meals yourself. Especially since the imagined price doesn't tend to include rent, kitchen labor, service staff labor, or depreciating costs of kitchen appliances, which all go into the price of restaurant meals.
I'm living in a house anyway. I'm not paying myself. Appliances last decades. It would cost me money to drive to a restaurant. With rare exceptions (e.g. high end kitchen you don't use much and eating out really cheaply) there's no world where the costs of preparing meals at home are higher than eating out every meal.
The point is that many people expect them to be priced similarly because they think of the ingredients as the main costs (because those are the only costs they actually see when cooking for themselves), which they are not.
When going to a restaurant you should include transport costs and time wasted with transport and waiting. Cooking at home can be an efficient pipeline where you have full control of inputs while saving money and time. I was frustrated because I wanted to pay for convenience but in my case I found it to be non-convenient.
