Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?

The place that your analogy falls is that electric companies are private companies operating legal electricity monopolies where much of the infrastructure in question is placed on right of ways across public and private land not controlled by the operator.

Sounds like you have a problem with the state, not the chef.

>Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?

You're dishonestly compressing a spectrum of regulation down into a binary to advance your point.

There's a spectrum of regulation from black market tamales to the power company. The restaurant is like 45% of the way there. There's a lot of things that they, their landlord, etc, etc, are all but forced to do in certain ways (because of the financial impossibility of proving that any other way is fine) that effectively set cost floors.