Is the Entrée Finally Leaving Restaurant Menus for Good?

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When I go out for a nice-ish dinner these days, I’m not entirely sure how to go about ordering it. If my prerequisite salad now costs $20, what else can I reasonably order to feel satisfied without the queasy feeling that I’ve cut into my monthly rent budget? What size is a so-called main? How much will my companions, half of whom take GLP-1s, want to eat?

With a few exceptions, the dish that tends to suffer in this new reality is the one that used to be the reason Americans loved going out to dinner. I’m talking about the big, beautiful entrée.

The main course, or final boss, has traditionally taken the form of a pasta heap big enough for three (for one) or a hulking slab of protein with a couple sides. It’s Dinner, the kind that will reliably fill you up tonight and maybe again tomorrow when you reheat the leftovers.

The small-plates phenomenon, which started with a wave of tapas restaurants in the late 1990s and early 2000s and is now into its third decade, punched some holes in this oversized fantasy. But lately other factors are threatening, too: rising operating costs, soaring ingredient and fuel prices, and a growing cultural backlash against industrially farmed, “cheap” food that’s reshaping the conversation around what constitutes a good value. Meanwhile, some 11 percent of the U.S. self-injects appetite suppressants.

When we do order entrées, many of us don’t want to tackle them alone. “Can we split the burger and fries?” is a request servers are hearing more and more often, as they watch their tip percentages dwindle. Are we falling out of love with the entrée, or was our fondness for it perhaps overstated in the first place?

“Gone is the American supersize meal,” Jenn Crovato, the chef and owner of 1310 Kitchen & Bar in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, declared to me. “I think that’s kind of in the past.”

Apps > Mains?

Unless you’re at a steakhouse, it’s increasingly hard to distinguish entrées or mains, which are sometimes disguised as “Plates.” On the menu at the Tusk Bar in New York City, a $24 green leaf salad with green goddess dressing counts as a Plate, alongside a $32 burger and $39 steak frites. I’m fairly certain eight curried mussels with a side of rice for $22 at Chicago’s hot new Thai joint Taan is a small plate, not a main—even if the dish sits near the $49 whole deep-fried sea bass on the menu.

Our relationship to the entrée is increasingly taking on the fraught, awkward feel of a couple who can’t seem to get on the same page about being exclusive versus dating around. Two friends in New York recently lamented that restaurant mains keep disappointing them.

“Most menus have too many dishes, and then the mains end up being throwaway,” one told me.

“I’d rather share a bunch of apps than eat a $75 lamb chop,” said another.

When I issued a social media poll gauging diners’ relationship with the entrée, half of the dozen respondents said they’re often most excited about appetizers. Some of this has to do with the shaky perceived value proposition of ordering a $90 steak outside of a very special occasion, even if we end up spending the equivalent on shareables. (More varied bang for the buck, right?) Love for appetizers also makes sense from a flavormaxxing standpoint; small dishes pack a bigger flavor punch because, well, they’re small, and built with the aim of getting a little of everything in each bite.

Turns out, some chefs prefer apps, too.

“I think the entrée was sort of a harder sell for a while and continues to be because the appetizer section is more interesting,” said Yoshi Yamada, chef and co-owner with Zeeshan Shah of Superkhana International, a modern Indian restaurant in Chicago. “Not having to put an enormous chunk of protein on there changes everything. You can use more ingredients, spend more time on sauces, and work more creatively, since the price isn’t so high.”

Superkhana doesn’t really serve entrées. Dishes—which top out at around $31—break out by snacky Chaats, Seasonal, Naan, and Calzones + Pizza.

“We have deep Indian roots,” Yamada said, pointing to the South Asian thali as a foundational influence. The word literally translates to “tray” in Hindi but also describes the food: many small portions of varied dishes arranged together. The joy lies in building each bite just how we like it.

It’s a way of eating most Americans have grown well used to after decades of dining out on multicultural shareables. So why do we cling to the idea that the “traditional” meal is due for a comeback?

What Is “Normal”?

“Every year since 2019, I’ve read one of those trend prediction articles in December saying, ‘This is the year of no more shared plates! It’s back to ‘normal’ dining,’ ” said B.J. Lieberman, the chef and owner of Metsi’s Wood Fired Italian Cuisine in Columbus, Ohio. “I feel like this has always been a point of contention where we’re yo-yoing between traditional and composed dishes meant to share.”

What is “normal,” anyway? From the Roman times to the Middle Ages, when daylight shaped eating patterns, people ate their main meal in the middle of the day and called it dinner, according to reporting by the BBC. (Indeed, the 2012 piece noted that for some in the U.K., “ ‘lunch’ still means ‘dinner’ and vice versa.” How confusing.) The richer our dinner-ing predecessors were, the more oversized and extravagant their spreads, which were followed by a more modest evening meal. Then came artificial lighting and shifts in working habits and hours, and dinner started getting eaten later and later. By the early 19^th century, dinner had largely become an evening affair, when people returned home after work for a square meal centered around some large slab of meat. They presumably kept enjoying this construct until the tapa-fication of menus in major markets threatened to drive the entrée to extinction.

That’s right: We’ve been here before.

“The entrée, long the undisputed centerpiece of an American restaurant meal, is dead,” wrote Kim Severson in a December 2007 New York Times piece. Among the culprits were the then-upstart snack menu, with its ominous, two-bite polpettine and deviled eggs; meanwhile, conniving crudo, salumi and cheese boards, and nefariously clever salads all elbowed out a shrinking entrée section. Influential chefs like Tom Colicchio and the not-yet-canceled Mario Batali proclaimed that American diners were sick of taking 17 whole bites of the same protein, that this entrée-sized ball and chain was far too boring. Instead, trendy spots were featuring lamb and veal several ways—a buffet of fried, braised, and grilled personalities on one plate to tempt our jaded tastebuds.

As Severson’s story similarly pointed out, Americans have always loved trying a little of a lot. See: the buffet, cafeterias, grocery-store samples, and build-your-own salad bars—more recently reincarnated into the fast-casual slop bowl or wrap that we can customize to within an inch of its life.

The broader sense was that diners at that time were dating around on the menu without wanting to commit to the entrée, owing to factors like the increasingly global pantry (new tastes!) and the growing cohort of adventurous eaters with newly disposable income wanting to experience as much as possible. (What if a better small plate comes along?)

Times writer Frank Bruni retorted soon after with a piece in defense of the entrée. He lamented that a “too-long sequence or too-broad collection of too-small plates is like being tickled and tickled and never flat-out hugged. It keeps you alert and leaves you impressed, but it … doesn’t necessarily leave you feeling fed.”

Permission to Spurn the Entrée?

Nowadays, the factors threatening the entrée are graver, particularly as so many consumers and operators feel financially pinched. A summer 2026 survey by KPMG found that 67 percent of Americans were eating at home more often than dining out. Among those who are cooking more at home, 76 percent blamed budget constraints. Add to that the 37-odd million eating far less than they once did because of GLP-1s, and what’s a restaurant facing rising costs at every turn to do?

At 1310 Kitchen, requests to split or shrink entrées have lately reached new, sometimes silly heights (Real examples: “Can I get half of the grilled strip steak?” “Can I get a cheeseburger, half well done, half medium?” “Can we get the tomato bisque soup and grilled cheese split for two?”) So Crovato took a cue from the steakhouse model and started selling protein-centric entrées, such as grilled branzino and porchetta, as standalone items, with sides like mac and blue cheese available for an upcharge. Unfortunately, the prevailingly less-hungry, penny-pinching customer often doesn’t order sides.

Meanwhile, in Columbus, Ohio, where “dinner” at a restaurant still necessitates entrées big enough for “a big man to have leftovers,” Lieberman decided to structure Metsi’s menu more traditionally, by appetizers, pastas, wood-fired mains, and sides. Being an Italian American joint—a perennial favorite among Americans—diners probably know what they’re getting.

“We wanted to create a permission structure to dine in any which way you want so we don’t feel the need to chase trends,” he said. After all, pasta is pasta.

And yet, I can’t let go of his use of “permission.” Maybe it’s all that nebulous, constantly changing language surrounding plate sizes, but we’ve lost the plot about what’s what on dinner menus. The confusion feels all the more acute at a time when one person’s small bite is increasingly another’s main, when the supersize entrée feels absurd, even outdated. Is the problem less about the entrée per se, and more about menu design?

“I think the reason the appetizer-entrée construct has existed for so long is that it’s very clear and easy, and in a world full of decision fatigue, you don’t have to decide much,” Yamada said. “There are some complications when you don’t have that structure. I’m always thinking about how we can present it better and make it more intuitive for our guests.”

Mildly confusing or not, I’ll take the thrilling uncertainty of building a meal out of a smattering of vaguely sized dishes with mouthwatering descriptors any day. It’s a more exciting path to dinner, and not the kind that requires 17 bites of the same thing, plus leftovers, to leave me feeling sated. Then again, it’s taken us 20-odd years to admit that most of us love to eat this way. Maybe we just need another 20 to figure out what to comfortably call it.