Big Chain Restaurants' New Small Portions

By Joel Stein

It's the big gulp theory. The basic laws of restaurant economics state that meals keep getting bigger because food is cheap and fixed overhead--staff, rent, equipment--is the same no matter how much is piled on your plate. So giant servings are a win-win: you pay a little extra for a lot more food, and the restaurant makes extra profit. It's the same rule that created tubs of movie popcorn, venti-size coffee cups and Burger King's Meat'normous Omelet Sandwich. It's why no restaurant will ever give you a reasonably sized stack of pancakes.

So it's surprising that T.G.I. Friday's and the Cheesecake Factory have begun offering small-portion options. When Ruby Tuesday tried to position itself as the healthy chain restaurant by cutting back on serving sizes and printing nutritional info on its menus in 2004, customers hated it so much, the small sizes were dropped within five months.

Suspecting that I too would resent smaller portions, I decided to try them out. I made sure I was really hungry--not eating for at least six hours and working out right before I went. My wife and I ordered the cedar-seared salmon pasta and half a rack of baby back ribs from Friday's "Right Portion, Right Price" menu. Unlike Ruby Tuesday, Friday's and Cheesecake Factory are cutting prices along with meal size, so each dish was a few dollars cheaper than the larger entrees. Though the protein was two-thirds the size of that in a normal Friday's meal, the side dishes were the same size as always. We were already planning on ordering some potato skins. To our surprise, however, when we finished, we were full, but not stuffed. And we ordered dessert and drinks--which is just what the financially ailing Friday's hopes you'll do, since it makes a higher profit on these items. We ate a little more than half of the big, goopy brownie sundae and instantly achieved that disgusting, bloated feeling I remembered loving Friday's for.

Overall business is good at the Cheesecake Factory, but, like Friday's, its reasons for offering smaller portions have little to do with health. While 80% of Cheesecake Factory customers happily take home leftovers, at lunchtime those 80% feel like dorks for using the office refrigerator. So until 5 p.m., you can now order some dishes "lunch size." Although lunch size here seems to be the amount of food Shaq might eat to rev up for a game. The meat loaf came with the same mountain of gravied mashed potatoes and silo of corn as the normal size but with two pieces of meat loaf instead of three. And our weight-management salad was undentable. I went at it for almost an hour but eventually gave up and went back to the mashed potatoes.

The smaller portions, it turned out, were plenty of food. But it's going to be hard to order them. Just as it's hard not to pay 10 more cents to go up a size for a Big Gulp. We live in a Costco big-box world, and to get me to think and eat small, you have to make your smaller offerings Prius cool. Instead of cutting the prices a few bucks, these places need to include a free beer.