Eat Out Eat Well

eating in a restaurant

10 Tips For Eating Well In A Restaurant

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Eat Out Eat Well1. Prep before you go so you know what’s on the menu

  • Research the menu ahead of time either online or in person
  • Choose a restaurant with an accommodating menu
  • Learn the approximate calorie count of the dishes you order a lot
  • Decide, before you go, what you’ll order and stick to your decision

 2. Create your personal cheat sheet of red light and green light foods

  • Understand what words and descriptions should raise red flags
  • Recognize the value of broiled versus crispy – the trouble with stir-fry – and the true meaning of country-style
  • Learn the best types of foods to choose in ethnic restaurants

3.  What’s your plan?

  • Will you have an appetizer or are you going to trade that for dessert? Will you have bread or a second glass of wine?
  • Do your dinner companions always order a multi-course meal and expect you to do the same?
  • What pitfalls might you face and how will you deal with them?

4. Pick – or ask for – a table in a quiet spot

  • People who sit in the more distracting parts of restaurants (by a window, bar, or in front of a TV) eat more. A lot of swirling activity and noise makes it easy to lose track of how much you’re putting into your mouth.

5. Don’t be seduced by mouth-watering descriptions

  • Be particularly aware of descriptions that use sensory terms like “velvety” cheesecake or nostalgic ones like “Grandma’s” lasagna
  • Words that evoke taste, texture, or that appeal to emotions increase sales and influence the way you think the food tastes.

6.  Be the first  — or last — to order

  • If you’ve decided to order grilled fish, when your friend orders a cheeseburger you might have second thoughts. To avoid temptation, order first. If you can’t, close your menu and commit to your choice.
  • Order last if you’re asking for a lot of changes. After everyone else has ordered they’re not interested in listening to your requests. You might get better attention from the waiter with no other questions after yours.

7. Ask for what you want (nicely) – and avoid too many substitutions at peak times for the restaurant

  • Ask for what you want … nicely
  • Don’t expect your changes to be accommodated during very busy times
  • Before ordering, ask questions like:
    • How is it dish prepared; can it be grilled instead of fried?
    • What are the sides with the meal; can I have a vegetable instead of pasta/rice/potato?
    • Is it a big portion; can I get it in an appetizer size?

8. Choose meals that are served close to their original state

  • Can you picture what your food was before it landed on your plate?
  • Avoid food smothered in sauce, cheese, or butter
  • Ask for sauces/dressings on the side so you are in control of the amount and can see what’s underneath

9.  Be mindful of portion sizes and be aware of what’s on your fork and going into your mouth

  • Overeating happens because of portion size, who you’re with, where you are, how things look, plate size, aroma, and distractions
  • It’s easy to keep putting food in your mouth when it’s right in front of you – especially if you’re tired, bored, angry, or really starving.
  • If you don’t like it, don’t eat it out of habit or courtesy

10.  Have your own personal bag of tricks – and be ready to use them

  • Sometimes a little white lie about why you’re not eating something is perfectly acceptable
  • If you ask for substitutions or order off the menu, use explanations like  “I need to eat heart healthy” or “I have a severe allergy”
  • Give the food you don’t want to finish to someone else at the table
  • If all else fails, after you’ve eaten what you want, make your food inedible by “accidentally” dumping salt or spilling water on it.

 

Menu Descriptions That Make Your Mouth Water

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Have you ever been ready to order your usual meal when something on the menu seems to reach out and grab you? Those long tentacles aren’t a fluke, but a product of creative phrasing and mouth-watering  words. Bacon and eggs can turn into a “fluffy omelette made with farm fresh eggs, leafy spinach, and crisp applewood smoked bacon.”

Putting a dish with a really mouth-watering description — like the fluffy omelette — next to something that’s described in plain jane language — like bacon and eggs with hash browns – can make the omelette sound all the more appealing and a very attractive menu choice.

Menu Language

Menu language is an art unto itself. Descriptive menu labels, especially the ones that yank your nostalgia strings or offer clear explanations, might entice you to order something exotic or strange. For instance, you might take a leap and order branzino if you know it’s European sea bass or chanterelle if you know it’s a mushroom.

Artful adjectives, like “handcrafted, slow-cooked, or old-time flavor” can sway your choice and leave you more satisfied at the end of the meal. So can “crispy” rather than “fried” or “poached” instead of “boiled.”

For example, how could you not try the “Best Lemon Tart I Ever Had,” the next to the last selection shown above? The description grabs you and makes you feel as though you’d be a fool to pass it up. Once you taste it, If it proves to be as good as its description, it’s almost  guaranteed that a customer will order it again and again – and that the restaurant make a lot of money from selling their signature lemon tart.

Tip: Descriptive menu labels, especially those that evoke nostalgia, yank your chain – and can boost sales by as much as 27%.

Familiar Items Vs. Special Or Unique

As a general rule, restaurants leave familiar items alone. Roast beef is roast beef and a fancy description might be annoying. But elaborating on something special or unusual — like locally grown arugula with fresh garden herbs — makes a dish more intriguing and you won’t think you’re being ripped off for a bed of lettuce.

Restaurants can steer you toward high profit margin choices by making some descriptions more appealing than others. There’s a continuum of appeal — having everything sound equally delicious isn’t much different than having everything sound equally bland.

Tip: A menu can make you feel like you’d be crazy to pass up an item with a mouth-watering description by toning down the descriptions of competing choices. The competition still might be good — it just doesn’t sound as great as the dish the restaurant wants you to order.

 

Do you eat out?  This is the sixth article in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.

Please share if you know anyone who wants to Eat Out and Eat Well!

On A Restaurant Menu, Position Is Everything

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Pity the poor chicken cutlet stuck in the middle of the pack! Where a menu item is positioned could be the difference between running out of it at that meal or having it reappear as hash or soup the next day.

People tend to remember the top two items and the one at the bottom of a list. So, the chef or restaurateur will make sure that certain dishes are not randomly placed in those spots. You’ll most likely find the highest profit items at the top and bottom of the menu sections because they sell 25% better than items in the middle.

Tip: Where a menu item is positioned in a list could shout “order me” or “I’m just a complacent placeholder.”

High Profit Margin And Signature Dishes

The high profile real estate on a menu is usually occupied by high-margin items – the ones that make the most money for the restaurant – or the restaurant’s signature dishes, the specialty dishes they can knock out of the park – and are the one’s that keep you coming back for more. Price and cost-margin don’t play major roles with signature dishes because the restaurant is sure they’re so good that you’ll keep coming back and spending money.

High-profit margin items are the dishes that are profitable — like pasta. Even if pasta comes with fancy sauce, meat, or seafood, unless it’s served with something like truffles, it’s usually inexpensive to make. That doesn’t mean it’s not good – it just means that it costs less money to make it so the restaurant ends up making more money on it than on some other menu items that contain ingredients that are more costly or are much more labor intensive to make.

Tip: High profile real estate is probably filled by high-margin items – the ones that make the most money – or signature dishes, specialty dishes that keep you coming back for more.

 

Do you eat out?  This is the fifth article in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.

Please share if you know anyone who wants to Eat Out and Eat Well!

What Kind Of Restaurant Is This?

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You can tell a lot from a restaurant’s menu – not just what you can get to eat, but some other things, too.  It would be kind of weird to have spaghetti and meatballs on the cover of a pancake house restaurant – and it would be kind of gross to have grease stains and tomato sauce on a rumpled sheet of paper that lists the restaurant’s specials.

A Menu Is A Defacto Business Card

A menu acts as the restaurant’s business card and can quickly give you some ideas about its inner workings. A dirty menu might imply a dirty kitchen; a clean and neat menu creates a different impression. Even though the main purpose is to tell you what’s to eat, a secondary objective is to make you forget about money so you make your food and drink selections without thinking about the price.

The way the menu looks should be in sync with the restaurant’s concept and image — the décor, service, food quality, and price range — and give you an idea about what kind of eating experience is in store. A six or eight page plastic coated menu, the kind usually found in diners, doesn’t convey the same dining experience as the two page leather bound menu found in an upscale restaurant.

Tip:

A menu’s design should be in sync with the restaurant’s concept and image — the décor, service, food quality, and price range — and give you an idea about the overall dining experience you can expect.

Disorganized menus might mean a kitchen without a plan. A menu with a huge number of offerings (unless it’s a place like a diner with a big turnover) makes you wonder how fresh the food is – and how it’s being repackaged into different kinds of offerings.  A dirty menu is like a dirty bathroom and should make you  think about the cleanliness of the kitchen and the people working in it!

What are your thoughts?

Do you eat out?  This is the third article in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.

Is What You Order In A Restaurant Really Your Choice?

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Have you ever walked into a restaurant absolutely certain that you know what you want to eat? Then the waiter hands you the menu and asks if you want to hear the specials. All of a sudden your “I’m absolutely certain that this is what I’m going to order” has taken a back seat to the pasta special. Why?

Remember Paul Simon’s song, “Mother and Child Reunion”? According to Simon he “was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It’s chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one.”

Putting aside the popularity of the song, who would think to describe chicken and eggs as a Mother and Child Reunion?

Is What You Order Really Your Choice?

Smart restaurant owners and chefs use creative phrasing and mouthwatering descriptions to describe their food.  They’re using menu psychology to suggestively sell from their menu pages. They use design, placement, and words to direct your attention to key items on their menus so it’s more likely that you’ll notice, remember, and order what they’ve pointed you toward.

Sometimes they highlight their signature dishes, but mostly they want to get you to focus on their high profit margin items — the ones that make them the most money. They aren’t always the most expensive, but they are the most profitable.

There’s nothing wrong with ordering something that’s going to make money for a restaurant, but wouldn’t you like to feel that the selection is purely your choice rather than the restaurant’s?

Menus Target Both Your Stomach And Your Mind

A menu is targeted not just at your stomach, but also to your mind.

Gallup once reported that most people spend an average of 109 seconds reading a menu — a pretty short amount of time. Even if people take longer to really read it — after all, some menus are like encyclopedias — a menu’s design means more than a nice layout. It requires psychology and marketing, too.

It’s in the restaurant’s best interest to really pay attention to its menu – a redesign can improve sales by an average of 2 to 10% — which could mean a significant boost in income.

So, a descriptive phrase like “Mother and Child Reunion” is just one of many ways to influence your choice. The messages are often subliminal, but where menu items are placed, how graphics are used, the way the food and drink choices are described, and even the use of dollar signs — all send you directional signals.

The bottom line is that restaurants hope that their menus — a magical brew of prices; superlative or descriptive words; and varying fonts, sizes, and colors — will play with your brain cells and nudge you toward making the choices they would like you to make.

Do you eat out?  This is the second article in a series of consecutive posts about decoding restaurant menus. Keep checking back for more information that might help you with your restaurant choices.