As the price of food continues to rise, restaurants are seeking inventive ways to pad out smaller portions and keep profit margins up. This was the topic du jour at the recent Atlantic City Restaurant Gala, and the Washington Post has an article outlining ingredient-slimming tips given to restaurant owners. Some of them seem downright shady:
Lots of restaurants are buying smaller plates to make the reduced servings look just as large, or lighter silverware so that even if there are fewer bites per serving, each bite feels heavier than usual on the fork. A la carte portions of high-priced dishes—steaks, for example—are getting pared back and surrounded by low-cost starches and vegetables.
Lighter silverware? Are they counting on the “dumb but rich” diner contingent? Paris Hilton, beware. The accompanying video shows how to make a 75-cent slice of cake look like it’s worth six dollars: Shove it to the side and decorate the plate by spreading out a nickel’s worth of prettily patterned sauce.
Other trompe l’oeil tactics mentioned in the piece: Tearranging the menu so that prices are less obvious (one expert recommends spelling out the numbers), and skewering shrimp before boiling them so they don’t curl up as much.
I’m sympathetic with the plight of restaurants, but I think I agree with Boston resident Nina Braun, who tells the Boston Globe that, if she notices a restaurant cutting back on portions or quality, she plans to stay away. When there’s a fork in the road, I’ll take the normal weight one, please, even if I have to pay more.
If food and fuel prices are rising and a restaurant must address it, but has huge portions, I just don’t get why it would be preferable to raise prices than to cut those portion sizes, given that, in the immortal words of Peg Bracken, “People are too fat anyway”.
I think restaurants should be serving smaller portions for patron’s health as well as their own bottom line. Now this next comment may or may not apply to so-called “better” establishments, but many restaurants have for too long served too-huge portions of mainly crap food to begin with. (Why do you think they can afford to load so much of it on your plate the way they do? Think about that economic reality for a minute, and about the accompanying logical conclusions you can make about prep methods. Can you say “assembly line?”)
As for less meat and more veg, well, welcome to the 21st century, where we know more about health and nutrition. Do you WANT to live past 60 years of age?
Soups and sauces made with bases. Giant pots of cheap mass-farmed vegetables, using monocropping, pesticides, herbicides, and GMO techniques, boiled, stewed, and otherwise “held” until they haven’t an ounce per pound of their original nutritional value. Pasta boiled hours in advance and “refreshed” in boiling water just before serving – yummy, I mean, gummy. Ugh.
As for meat and fish and other such items, folks, go LOOK in the restaurant kitchen before you eat there. I mean, really LOOK. An old boyfriend used to work at a well-known and respected NYC eatery and said if people could see the fish room there nobody would ever eat fish in a restaurant ever again. (shudder.)
I rarely eat in restaurants, and when I do, I feel glad to be a vegetarian.
To digress only slightly, I’ve recently heard about a trend for cities to post health inspection report scores in big yellow numbers by the doors of restaurants. I applaud this idea, and think every city and town should do it. Along with photographs of violations, including mold, dirt, and vermin. Maybe even photomicrographs of the nastier forms of bacteria they find, along with discussions of the ills they can cause in the human body.
While I realize that I am personally responsible for simply eating an appropriate portion, regardless of how much I am served…I must admit I feel a slight bit of relief at the idea of restaurants giving me less, honestly. Even for the same price. I haven’t ever seen an actual “palm-sized” portion (i.e., actual one-serving size)of a protein served at a restaurant. Guilt over wasted money and resources combined with the excitement of eating out usually results in my “not wasting” the food by finishing it…which just wastes it by being extra calories IN my body as opposed to OUTSIDE it. And of course, I can doggy bag, but oftentimes you’re eating something that won’t keep, yada yada yada. Anyway, point it, the trend of smaller portions doesn’t bother me so much.
I do have to wonder, though, about anyone going to all the trouble and expense of replacing silverware and plates in order to address rising food costs. Something about that just seems ridiculous.
are we just on our way to soylent green?
“are we just on our way to soylent green?”
I’m not seeing the point of this comment. Could you please explain what you mean?
Thanks!
Smaller portions won’t hurt anybody. I read somewhere that North Americans spend a smaller proportion of their budget on food than anybody else in the world. This is of course partially due to the affluence of our society, but also reflects the core value of “quantity over quality” and use of (inferior?) mass produced ingredients hinted at by some previous posters. A case in point is the infamous gallon of Vlasic pickles from Wal-Mart, where a customer could get far more pickles than anybody would ever need for less than 3 bucks.
Big giggle here. Soylent Green refers to a really old movie about an earth that is over populated. Real food is difficult to find and people eat this soylent green stuff…turns out they’re made of dead people. Nice,right?
Having said this, there has to be quality for me to spend my bucks anywhere.
I’ve been to too many restaurants where they charge a lot for two to three bites. What’s that, you know?
I appreciate being quoted from my Boston Globe article, thanks! Now what I meant had nothing to do with me being gluttenious and more with the fact that I am frustrated over the decline in quality (not quantity) at Boston area restaurants over the past few months. My money is as valuable as theirs, and gas & food prices effect us all. Boston restaurant owners please maintain your quality esp. with the increase in price otherwise your restaurant will be known as subpar and this image will be hard to shake in the ever changng Boston restaurant landscape. Only the good remain. And there are some really good restaurants in Boston to choose from.