"Market price" on a seafood menu means the dish is priced according to the current wholesale cost of that seafood, not a fixed number the restaurant printed once and left alone. It shows up most often next to lobster, crab legs, and other seafood whose supply cost genuinely moves week to week, sometimes more.
It can feel like a restaurant is being cagey when a menu shows "MP" or "market price" instead of a dollar figure. Usually it's closer to the opposite: pricing that number correctly and keeping it accurate would mean reprinting the menu constantly, which nobody actually does.
Why seafood cost moves more than other menu items
Most restaurant ingredients, chicken, beef, produce, come from farmed or cultivated sources with relatively steady, predictable supply chains. Certain seafood doesn't work that way. Wild-caught lobster, crab, and some specialty fish are subject to catch size, season, weather, and fuel costs for the boats bringing them in, all of which shift the wholesale price more often and more sharply than a typical grocery ingredient does.
When the cost a restaurant pays for a pound of crab or lobster can meaningfully change from one week to the next, a fixed menu price becomes a bet on the wrong direction eventually paying off. Market pricing removes that bet by tying the menu price directly to current cost instead.
What restaurants gain from market pricing
The practical reason restaurants use market pricing instead of a fixed number comes down to margin protection and printing cost. Reprinting a physical menu every time a wholesale seafood price shifts isn't realistic, so a restaurant either has to eat the difference when costs rise, pad the price heavily to cover future swings, or price the item at whatever it currently costs and update it as needed. Market pricing is the third option, and it's the one that keeps the price closest to what the ingredient is actually costing the restaurant right now.
This isn't unique to any one restaurant or chain. It's a standard, longstanding convention across the restaurant industry, most visible at seafood-focused menus simply because seafood is where wild-caught sourcing and price volatility show up most often.
Why it can still feel uncomfortable as a diner
Not seeing a number in advance is a reasonable thing to be wary of, and it's a fair critique of market pricing as a practice, not a sign that something's being hidden. The honest answer is that a market-priced dish's cost genuinely isn't fixed at the moment the menu was printed, which is the entire reason it's labeled that way instead of given a number.
The straightforward way to handle it is to ask. Requesting the current price for a market-priced item before ordering is a completely normal question at any restaurant that lists one, and a server should be able to answer it without hesitation. If a restaurant can't or won't tell you the price before you order, that's a more legitimate concern than the market-price label itself.
What tends to be market-priced, and what usually isn't
Lobster, whether whole or in certain preparations, and crab legs are the most common market-priced items on a seafood menu, since both are frequently wild-caught and more exposed to supply swings than farmed seafood. Certain whole-fish or specialty preparations sold by weight can also show up this way, particularly when the portion size itself varies from plate to plate.
Shrimp, most finfish fillets, and other seafood sourced through more stable supply chains are far more likely to carry a fixed price, since their wholesale cost tends to move less dramatically and less often. This is part of why a seafood menu can have market-priced lobster right next to a fixed-price shrimp dish on the same page: it reflects real differences in how each ingredient is sourced, not an inconsistent pricing policy.
How market price actually gets set
Market price isn't calculated arbitrarily, it's generally based on what the restaurant is currently paying its supplier for that ingredient, plus the restaurant's standard markup applied the same way it would be to any other dish. A restaurant paying more for crab this week than last week passes some or all of that increase along, and a restaurant paying less does the same in reverse, at least in principle. In practice, prices tend to move up more readily than they move down, since restaurants are generally slower to lower a price than to raise one, but the underlying mechanism, tying the menu price to current wholesale cost, is the same either direction.
This is also why market price can vary from one location of the same restaurant to another. Supply and transportation costs aren't identical everywhere, and a location closer to where seafood is landed may see smaller swings than one further inland, where transportation adds a bigger, more variable share of the total cost.
The difference between market price and a special or limited-time price
It's worth separating market pricing from two other things it sometimes gets confused with. A limited-time promotional price, common for seasonal seafood offers, is a set price the restaurant has chosen to offer for a defined period, not one that moves with wholesale cost day to day. A market-priced item, by contrast, doesn't have that kind of fixed window; its price is simply whatever the current cost calculation produces on a given day or week.
Daily or weekly specials are a related but distinct category too. A special might feature a market-priced item specifically because that's when its cost happens to be favorable, which is one reason certain seafood specials appear more often during particular seasons: it's not just about freshness or availability, it's often about the ingredient being less expensive to source at that time of year.
Why lobster in particular gets this treatment so often
Lobster is one of the most consistently market-priced items on seafood menus nationally, and the reasons come down to how the industry is structured. Lobster is still overwhelmingly a wild-caught product, harvested seasonally and subject to weather, fuel costs for the boats bringing it in, and total catch volume in a given season, all of which shift faster and more unpredictably than farmed proteins do. A cold snap, a strong or weak season, or a shift in export demand can move wholesale lobster prices noticeably within weeks, which is a pace fixed menu pricing simply isn't built to track.
Crab shares many of the same dynamics, which is part of why the two so often appear market-priced side by side on the same menu, while a farmed or more consistently sourced item nearby carries a fixed number without needing the same flexibility.
What this looks like on an actual seafood menu
Crab Your Way, a full pound of crab legs prepared to order, is a real example of the kind of dish that's commonly priced this way rather than carrying a fixed number, since it's priced against current crab availability and cost. A whole live lobster is another common example, priced by weight and current market cost rather than a flat menu price, since the animal itself varies in size from order to order.
By contrast, Endless Shrimp and most individually plated shrimp and fish entrees on the same menu carry fixed prices, since shrimp and most finfish are sourced more predictably than wild lobster or crab. Seeing both pricing styles on the same menu isn't a mixed message: it's the menu reflecting real differences in how each ingredient actually gets to the kitchen.
How to plan a budget around a market-priced meal
If cost matters to you going into a meal, treating a market-priced item as an unknown rather than skipping it entirely is usually the more useful approach. Calling ahead, checking the restaurant's website, or simply asking when you sit down all work, and none of them are unusual requests for a market-priced dish specifically.
It's also reasonable to set a mental ceiling before you ask. If a server quotes a market price above what you'd planned to spend, ordering something else on the same menu isn't an awkward moment, it's exactly the kind of decision market pricing is designed to let you make with real information instead of guessing. A restaurant that lists a dish at market price expects some diners to ask the number and decide from there, rather than everyone ordering it sight unseen regardless of cost.
Comparing a market-priced item's typical range over time, if you're a regular at a particular restaurant, can also help set expectations. Lobster and crab prices tend to follow a seasonal pattern more than a completely random one, generally higher around certain holidays and demand spikes, and somewhat lower during the peak of a strong catch season. That pattern isn't something a menu will state outright, but it's part of why the same market-priced dish can genuinely cost noticeably different amounts depending on when you happen to order it.
The short version
Market price isn't a trick or a way to avoid commitment, it's a direct pass-through of what the restaurant is currently paying for that specific seafood, most often lobster or crab, where wild-caught supply genuinely swings enough to justify it. If the number matters to your budget before you order, just ask. It's the expected question at any restaurant that lists a market-priced dish, not an awkward one, and asking it upfront is the simplest way to avoid a surprise on the bill later.