Below are four non-recession reasons why my family now visits casual-dining restaurants about half as often as it did only three years ago.
Our circumstances have changed. The children are getting older, meaning the oldest is off to a good four-year university next month — and that has affected our thinking about discretionary spending for many months now, as have high gasoline prices.
The parents are getting older, with smaller appetites and less affinity for on-premise alcoholic beverages, which somewhat negates the draw of the big portions and in-house bars of some casual-dining chains.
California’s menu disclosure law, adopted in advance of federal menu labeling requirements, opens eyes. Of about 55 items on the take-out menu of a casual-dining chain restaurant in my neighborhood, only six meet the criteria for a third-party organization’s “healthy dining” designation.
Put together from the statistical averages for calories, fat and saturated fat across the major menu categories of that same chain, and assuming that all appetizers and desserts are shared, a hypothetical average meal there has 2,358 calories and 130 grams of total fat, including 49.3 grams of saturated fat. That fat level is nearly two times — and the saturated fat intake 2 1/2 times — the government’s full-day recommendations for a 2,000-calorie diet.
Granted, those are averages, so some meals will compare favorably and others worse.
Specialty-food markets make fun eating easier. Compare the hypothetical restaurant meal above to the one I threw together in 15 minutes with foods from a Trader Joe’s market and some items in my refrigerator. It featured an appetizer of wild mushroom and black truffle flatbread, salad of red-leaf lettuce and yogurt Caesar dressing, entrée of butternut squash risotto with turkey Bolognese sauce, and a dessert of Key lime pie frozen yogurt with milk chocolate toffee bar pieces.
That meal — not as large as the restaurant offering, but nonetheless satisfying — had 977 calories and 41 grams of total fat, including 18.4 grams of saturated fat. It cost $5.91, or about one-third of my typical spend at a casual-dining restaurant.
Some casual-dining restaurants’ operational failures or lack of imagination are keeping us away. On Father’s Day my family planned a “take-out” potluck involving favorite dishes from multiple restaurants. The pièce de résistance was to be a double order of crab fettuccine from a casual-dining chain, but we wound up eating gourmet frozen convenience food. Employees of the seafood restaurant informed me when I phoned that, because of the rush, no take-out orders were being filled. They might as well have just said, “Sorry, we couldn’t properly staff for what is traditionally one of the busiest nights of the year, or figure out a way to accommodate you for a special meal, so take your $40 elsewhere.”
None of the above will keep my family away entirely from casual-dining venues, as eating out can be a special occasion, and some concepts are more successful than others at helping us put such concerns or options aside. Still, they are examples of real issues for some consumers and, as such, may provide insights to help operators shape future traffic-building initiatives.
Contact Alan J. Liddle at alan.liddle@penton.com.
