Would you like to see restaurants offer small portions?

Cafe Society
101

The fad for super-high-end restaurants - not just plain high-end restaurants - to tweeze out their meticulously prepared imaginative and utterly original super-scrumptious foods is waning. Only a few chefs could produce an experience like this.

I remember feeling distinct pain there each time I paid the check.

I also remember a stunned awareness that I’d do it again. I had had no idea anything could taste as good as the simple combination of a langoustine and a basil leaf inside a see-through wrapper of fried brik pastry, or the far more complex glass of sea urchin suspended in lobster jelly under a quarter-inch of cauliflower cream that was like an insanely luxurious Jell-O salad.

In addition, many of these restaurants serve tasting menus. As with the one I described above, the object is not to wallow in the valley of an entree but to hop from peak to peak with one fresh new taste with every forkful. It’s utterly different from eating at a Denny’s or even a fancy steakhouse.

The pleasures there go beyond the exquisite tastes. Pride in being able to pay for a $25,000 dessert is, um, priceless, and small portions make more room for $100,000 bottles of wine. So is the understanding that the experience is not for you plebes. It’s like trying to compare a splash park with a white sand beach at a private island.

102

Speaking as one who has enjoyed a few meals at Michelin starred restaurants, this is a gross exaggeration. The serving of fois gras is likely to be nearly as large as a ping pong ball, and the entree will be larger than that. There are a lot of courses, and you won’t go away hungry. The whole thing can be had for a few hundred dollars per person. (Currently $425 at the French laundry, and that includes wine, tax, and tip. It costs extra if you want to sit in the garden, or eat the truffles instead of the fish, or book a private room.) And the meal will last at least 3 hours. You should compare it to a Broadway show, not to Denny’s.

103

I don’t care about visibly wasting food, nor do I have a problem with eating leftovers - but lots of the time leftovers won’t work for me. I might be away and staying in a hotel that doesn’t have a fridge or microwave, or maybe it does, but I’m going to be going to a restaurant for dinner the next day for whatever reason * or I’m going home but I don’t want to eat the same thing for the next three meals. Which means I’m going to end up throwing some food away, and I’d really rather not pay for a 8 or 12 oz steak when I can’t even finish a 6 oz one.

* Usually because we have plans the next day that mean returning to the hotel to eat my leftovers isn’t possible

104

Cool, thanks.

105

Sure. And steak (and most seafood) costs enough that you really are paying a dollar or two more for 12oz than for 6oz. That big pile of pasta costs the restaurant nothing, though, compared to the cost of serving it to you.

And just because of the shape of cattle, you really can’t get small versions of some cuts. A ribeye is large, and if you cut it very thin you can’t seer it without overcooking it. And unless there are a lot of people willing to buy a funny-looking “half a ribeye steak”, you can’t really sell any of them.

Steak tips and filet can be served in smaller portions, though.

106

I agree that only a minority of chefs can produce the kinds of dishes described, and I also agree that tasting menus are generally the way to go for really fine dining.

But I disagree that the kinds of extravagance you describe (“$25,000 dessert”) are even remotely necessary to achieve culinary nirvana. As I mentioned elsewhere, top-tier Japanese restaurants are excellent at achieving great omakase (tasting menus) with fantastic presentation, and it’s not limited to sushi or the traditional concept of sashimi. When we ordered the sashimi omakase at arguably the best sushi restaurant in Toronto, it featured a wide variety of dishes, some of them hot, not all of them seafood, but all delicious and beautifully presented.

No, it wasn’t cheap, but certainly not many thousands. At the time, only a couple of years ago, it was a little over $500 for a dinner for two, but sadly, today that runs well over $1,000 for the same dinner – like, well over – but still not truly ridiculous.

And it’s not just Japanese. I’ve experienced some great tasting menus at various cost tiers, and loved them all. Another style beloved by me is the prix fixe menu, most notably a fairly upscale restaurant at one of our big local wineries, featuring many courses and a wine for each one matched by the sommelier. Always a great experience!

By contrast, I was once a dinner guest at Lutece in New York City, a French restaurant that’s no longer in existence, but at that time arguably the best restaurant in North America. The VP of our company was trying to close a deal with a big New York bank and took one of its VPs to dinner at Lutece, and as tech consultant I came along.

The New Yorker guy knew the chef personally, who came out and assured us that we need not bother with menus, as he would take good care of us. He created what he called a “pre-appetizer”, which was followed by an appetizer, and then then rest of the courses.

I have no idea what the total cost was but considering the venue, the fact that we had a fine bottle of wine with every course, and the recollection that Chateau D’Yquem was the wine with dessert, I suspect that the tab was astronomical. My opinion? A very nice meal, certainly, but I would genuinely prefer a great omakase, or even a prix fixe on a good day at my favourite winery restaurant.

107

Fwiw, i think that’s why a lot of places have a “seniors menu”. They can sell smaller portions of items that can be readily prepared in smaller portions, and charge less. You used to sometimes see liver and onions on the senior menu, for instance. A cheaper protein that can be portioned smaller and cooked appropriately can be sold for less than the ribeye.

108

I will often split an order of fries with one or more people. I don’t want to eat 4 potatoes’ worth of fries.

109

IMO the economics of smaller portions don’t work. To achieve equal profitability the e.g. 4oz half-sirloin with half baked potato & a few green beans would have to sell for 90% of the price of the 8oz full sirloin with a full baked potato and a few more beans.

Only people who are doctrinally unwilling to leave uneaten food or folks too poor to pay that last 10% would buy the smaller portion. Everybody else would buy the large one and bring home leftovers. Whether they’re later eaten or not. The big one feels like a bargain; the small one feels like a rip-off.

Having said that …
Living as I do in South Florida we have many, many, many restaurants that offer a senior menu. 10-15% off the price for a 1/2 to 2/3rds sized meal. But only offered from 4pm to 6pm, when the restaurant would otherwise be nearly vacant anyway. Then the wrinklies all leave at 6pm and they sell full-sized full-priced meals to everyone else.


I’m with @puzzlegal that restaurant wastage is not my problem. The whole industry is so vastly inefficient that whether I eat all, some, or none of what hits my plate doesn’t matter a bit.

As a matter of waistline control I’ve adopted the mantra: “The chef decides how much to put on my plate. I decide how much to take off my plate.”

If I’m out with GF, we’ll often split an entree if we both want the same thing. If we want different things, or just want some variety, we get two different entrees and leave half (or sometimes more) of each behind.

We also often split a first course salad because salads have become absolutely huge too. But what gets me is if we order a salad to share and the kitchen splits it (the usual case), we each get something about 2/3rds the size of their single salad. IOW, we wanted to avoid excess, and so they compensated by giving us 1/3rd more than if we just had one unsplit salad and both forked out of the same bowl.

110

I don’t think you should assume that a person who wants a 4 or 6 oz filet rather than an 8 or 11 oz filet also wants a half potato and a half order of green beans. Because in restaurants where they do offer various sizes of the protein ( 6 oz steak vs 8 oz, 2,3 or 4 pieces of fried chicken, half or full rack of ribs, etc) , they don’t cut the sides in half and I’ve never seen anyone ask for half-orders of sides. So what I usually end up with ordering the smaller protein is I get the 6 oz steak instead of the 8 oz, two full sized sides and I pay 10-15% less than the price of the larger steak.

111

You can get french fries at McDonald’s in multiple sizes.

But i suppose the reason they don’t sell half a baked potato is that the savings on that might be negative. That is, the time to cut it in half probably costs more than half a potato. The restaurant actually saves a little money giving you less meat.

Fwiw, i usually eat all the meat and veggies, and often leave half or more of the starch on my plate. It never occurred to me to ask for less potato, though.

112

The New York Times conveniently did a dual review of the French Laundry and Per Se. An avalanche of tiny courses over four hours sounds worse than Broadway although not as expensive. I didn’t see any “golf-ball” size foie gras though.

The site TravelsforStars.com does course by course pictures of the world’s best restaurants in their reviews, include the two above. Oddly, they don’t do reviews of what some other site called the most “expensive” restaurants in the world, except for French Laundry. Oooh, food fight.

Those pictures can be considered either confirmation or refutation of @Guest-starring_Id’s “All Junior Meals” crack. I’d say, size doesn’t matter, junior.

BTW, the prix fixe price of the five-course, two-hour tasting meal I described is $68.

113

I had the golf ball of foie gras at a different fancy restaurant that did 15 course meals. The dish was foie gras with fig, and there were two items on the plate: a fig stuffed with foie gras, and a piece of foie gras stuffed with a piece of fig. It was a cute presentation. That place, sadly, has closed, but it was about $150 per person for a spectacular and varied meal.

I enjoy food, and having lots of small tasty things brought to me, including some that are not on the menu at all and are very small, but surprising, is a really fun way to spend the evening.

114

That sounds incredibly cheap for that kind of meal. Are you giving that figure to claim it’s a lot? Your link is paywalled so I can’t read what that meal is supposed to contain.

115

Just the opposite. I wanted to show that out here in fly-over territory, high-end food can be had for affordable prices without the incredible pretension.

Atlas Eats is just a local favorite. F.L.X. Table, a short drive away in Geneva, has a national reputation, and still offers five-course prix fixe meals for under $100.

Do they compare to French Laundry? No idea.

Bulk can be food. Rochester is nationally known for the garbage plate, after all. Eat till you puke for under $15.

A good tasting menu tries to make every taste good, something to savor in one’s mouth rather than propel to the belly. It is not necessarily superior eating, à chacun son goût and all that, and I wouldn’t want to have one three times a day. A place for everything and everything in its place.

116

I read that article carefully. I’m still not sure what are the essential and optional ingredients of a Rochester garbage plate.

Unless the point is simply a heaping helping of sober-up food. Which is certainly a worthwhile goal.

117

Reminds me of a Ziggy cartoon - he’s standing in front of an angry cook, saying “But I don’t want all I can eat!!”

118

Earlier I mentioned how much I enjoy tasting menus, but like everything else, it can be taken to ridiculous extremes. The term is also a bit of a misnomer as there usually isn’t a “menu” involved, except possibly a choice of differently priced tiers.

I would describe a prix fixe five-course meal as simply a prix fixe dinner. A tasting menu should have at least a dozen items, or preferably 15 more. It’s supposed to be a culinary adventure, but if the individual portions are small, it’s not gluttony.

My favourite tasting menus are usually Japanese omakase, but one of the most creative ones I recently experienced was the one I mentioned before that was held at a private gathering at a pub linked to a small craft brewery, which pub happened to have really great food.

I don’t know if it was the organizer’s idea or the pub’s idea, but it was a great idea. The pub had quite a nice selection of diverse items, and the idea was to create miniature versions of all their menu items for which miniaturization was feasible, and have waiters circulating among the guests bringing one at a time to everyone. That even included their awesome burger – where they got miniature burger buns and how they managed to grill the patties so perfectly I’ll never know – but it was all delicious!

But $68 for a five-course dinner? You can easily rack up more than that at McDonald’s for a family of four!

119

The restaurant calls it a tasting menu, so I do. The pictures of the endless courses at the top-end restaurants make me think of them as buffets rather than meals.

The price is truly phenomenal; I’ve paid much more for a steak.

120

The ur garbage plate.

Nick Tahou Hots’s best known dish is the Garbage Plate, which consists of a selection of home fries, macaroni salad, baked beans and French fries topped with meats of the customer’s choice. The dish can be garnished with mustard, chopped onions, ketchup[2] and the venue’s signature hot sauce, and is served with bread and butter.[3] The Garbage Plate is typically mixed together by the diner before being eaten.[4]

NIck Tahou created the dish as two hamburger patties with a selection of side dishes.[2] Alex Tahou made the original plate with hot dogs, home fries, cold beans and two pieces of Italian bread and butter. It was known as hots and potatoes.[5]

But now, God knows
Anything goes