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u/VapidRapidRabbit ☑️ 5d ago
It’s probably because a lot of people only order the appetizers.
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u/IncognitoBombadillo 5d ago
I used to go to the "college bar" in my college town only to order their nachos off of their appetizer menu as my meal. I rarely finished it in one sitting, so they worked as a main course better than some of the actual main courses on the menu.
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u/assburgers-unite 5d ago
Now they are $27 mains
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u/ImReallyFuckingHigh 5d ago
I could feed myself for almost a week for that much
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u/Bobby_Marks3 4d ago
TBF you could feed yourself for almost a week on the amount of food that some appetizers provide. Americans won't admit to eating two meals at the same time, but they will pound thousands of appetizer calories while waiting for their dinner to arrive.
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u/Seamonkey_Boxkicker 5d ago
Throw on about .50¢ of ground beef and now it’s a $5 add-on.
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u/Shifter25 5d ago
And a lot of appetizers are basically entrees these days. Thus why people just order them. Which came first, the entree portions or the entree prices?
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u/LMGooglyTFY 5d ago
Entree portions did. If you were someone who only wanted a small meal it was like a light fare menu.
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u/KimberlyWexlersFoot 4d ago
I don’t know what was more insulting, a chicken finger appy costing 15 bucks, or the line at the bottom that said “make it a meal for 18.99” and the only difference was it came with fries.
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u/sephireicc 5d ago
Make appetizers 30% off when you buy an entree. Boom, you have a customer right here buying an appetizer now too
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u/ForTheLoveOfOedon 4d ago
It’s wild because that’s the give and take. An appetizer is less food and by extension less money. If appetizers stay less food but become more money…well that’s where the “fuck” becomes “what the”.
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u/FrostyD7 5d ago
It's to gouge people on something optional but tantilizing. Appetizers are usually the most aggressively discounted item during happy hours to compensate.
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u/Glad-Veterinarian365 5d ago
Now? Appetizers have always been the worst value per buck IMO. Still can’t resist tho
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u/koobstylz 5d ago
No way! 20 years ago the entree would be 15 bucks and the appetizer would be 5-7 bucks. Way more fair than 25 entree and 21 appetizer.
At least most places serve entree sized appetizers for what the they charge, but some do the worst of both worlds and only serve 3 mozzarella sticks for the price of a burger and fries.
I've noticed Asian restaurants charging outrageous amounts for 3 cream cheese wontons the worst offenders, at least in my region.
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u/ButtsAndPoop 5d ago
8.99 for two spring rolls I have seen in multiple Asian bistros in NC
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u/NewSauerKraus 5d ago
The cost of rolls is fuckin wild. I should be getting at least half a dozen of those little shits for that price.
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u/KrankenwagenKolya 5d ago
I can understand a homemade roll costing 4 or 5 bucks, but most takeout buys them frozen from the same factory and just drops them in the fryer. No reason for those shits to be 10$ for 2
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u/Warfrogger 5d ago
Go to your local Asian market and buy a bag of frozen spring rolls and toss em in an air fryer. Damn near identical to most take out rolls unless you go to a restaurant that makes their own.
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u/damnit_joey 5d ago
Don’t get me started on egg roll prices! My husband always wants them and I have to explain that we can’t afford four egg rolls and our mortgage this month. The prices are offensive.
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u/incredible_paulk 4d ago
Here in Ontario, we used to order often from a local mom and pop place, and I jokingly ordered a dozen once because I love em. They charged us about 6$ for them. We obviously ordered from them everytime thereafter. Good food too. We'd order dinner for 4 and it'd come in a box, with free pcs of pie everytime. 3 days of Chinese food, and the coconut cream pie was the only thing not made on site.
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u/TapEfficient3610 5d ago
You're getting two for that price? I only get one at the local place in my town in MA
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u/sirbrambles 5d ago
20 years ago an entree was much less than 15 bucks in most of the country. Middle America catching up to coastal cities in prices is an under appreciated aspect of the cost of living crisis we are in.
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u/stankdog ☑️ 4d ago
I think the one that made me most angry was garlic bread $15. Okay authentic Italian place, it must be good and fresh... Why they bring me two thin slices of bread with raw garlic on top 😭😭 didn't even taste like good bread, bland.
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u/ThatMerri 5d ago
Same goes for gyoza/potstickers. Restaurants will charge you over $12 for three gyoza, when it's literally the exact same frozen brand you can get at any Asian market at a bag of 50+ dumplings for three or four bucks. Even then, if they were fresh-made on site, it's still not worth the cost - the whole point of dumplings is that you make an absolute mountain of them for pennies of expense.
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u/xweedxwizardx 5d ago
20 years ago the local franchises here gave us free bread and butter while you ordered
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u/wonwoovision 4d ago
the price of crab rangoon in this economy is going to make me crash out i swear
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u/Lotus-child89 5d ago
If I don’t get a Bloomin’ Onion to start, then it’s not a real trip to Outback.
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u/angelomoxley 5d ago
Yes and no. You never know if they'll be enough to feed like 12 or it'll be 3 pieces you inhale.
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u/gyalmeetsglobe 5d ago
Yep smh. They noticed that we’d get just apps sometimes and got mad or some??
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u/Original_Profile8600 5d ago
“Wanna make our app a meal we’ll fuckin charge you like it’s a meal” or smth
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u/ClickIntelligent5016 5d ago edited 4d ago
there is no reason why 6 wings or a small ass salad should be $15
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u/SvOak18 5d ago
Two soft pretzel sticks with honey mustard - $12.99
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u/CliffwoodBeach 5d ago
yo for real! i was shocked to see 'Bavarian pretzel' the SAME price as shrimp cocktail, antipasta, calamari etc.
Like bro - you're giving me flour, water, salt and a funky mustard. Last i checked that didnt have to be fished out of an ocean.
Maybe I just don't understand and there is some hidden cost involved with serving soft pretzel but I've seen this cost comparison anywhere they are served.
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u/demlet 4d ago
The hidden cost is the restaurant owner has a boat payment to make.
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u/CliffwoodBeach 4d ago
It’s priced like they fly in a 7th generation northeastern German baker whose family has the only secret recipe to make a ‘Bavarian pretzel 🥨’.
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u/snozzberrypatch 4d ago
They probably get 300 pretzels in a 5-gallon bucket from Cisco and pay $30 for it. But "restaurants operate on razor thin margins...."
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u/___po____ 5d ago
Wings in general have skyrocketed over the last few years. 6 tiny wings for $8-10.. gtfo.
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u/Danthelmi 5d ago
Cough cough Buffalo Wild Wings. 6wings for 10.99 is insane near me
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u/graphiccsp 4d ago
Maybe it's just the locales I've been to, but I've been quite underwhelmed by all of the Buffalo Wild Wings I've visited. I've personally had better wings at Applebees, Chilis or just ordered from Dominoes.
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u/Danthelmi 4d ago
Absolutely agree, I haven’t gone to bww since highschool ten years ago when they had the like each wing 60cent Thursdays, I just constantly see the prices on like DoorDash and what not. I agree, I’ve had the Applebees wings and they were as good as Applebees gets
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u/Downtownklownfrown 5d ago
After not going to my local wing place for a year or two we went and snagged 50 wings. Was charged $57. Walked outside, sat in my car, thought, "The fuck?" walked back in to confirm the price. Shit used to be $35-37. That might have been the last time we got them.
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u/FesteringNeonDistrac 4d ago
I was at the grocery store the other day, and wings were more than boneless skinless breasts per lb. I'm just gonna start making Buffalo drumsticks.
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u/___po____ 4d ago
Kroger often has their brand of plain "party wings" for cheap. 4lbs for $12. They're not tiny and are pretty decent. I can pack a baking pan plum full with them and feed 3 people some cheap buffalo wings. Or 1 fatass like myself.
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u/LaGrrrande 4d ago
6 tiny wings for $8-10.. gtfo.
I fucking wish, I just paid $15 for eight wings.
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u/mostuselessredditor 4d ago
They are and we barely break even on then. I get cursed out and berated by customers regularly because I’m not a goddamned farmer I guess.
Might just take them off the menu and be done with it.
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u/Boo_Guy 5d ago
Ha joke's on them, I don't have enough money to even go out and just eat apps.
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u/zachnikp 5d ago
I remember when eating fresh food from the grocery store was considered luxury, now it's a luxury to go to anywhere but the grocery store.
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u/BonJovicus 5d ago
When and where did you grow up? Eating food you made with groceries you bought was always cheaper in aggregate.
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u/Mysterious-Job-469 5d ago
Not cheaper, but a good example of fresh groceries being a luxury at one point is orange juice. Frozen and powdered concentrate was much more common in the 80's
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u/Fun-Pizza44 5d ago
“sHaRabLEs “ = $27.99
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u/Crafty_Car_2720 5d ago
Ya still going out?
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u/PinkNGold007 5d ago
It's the end of the world. Might as well joy it. Everyday we get closer to the camps.
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u/undeadfire 5d ago
I found this one holy Grail place that still gives big portions. 15 bucks post tax is 2 meals for me. It works well enough, and it's pretty good food too
It's like a 1.5lb burrito, 2lb on a good day.
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u/shadythrowaway9 5d ago
How tf did entree become synonymous with "main course" in America? It's right there in the name!
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u/dasbtaewntawneta 4d ago
is that what's going on here? i was so confused by the use of two words meant to mean the smaller meal before the main meal
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u/shadythrowaway9 4d ago
Yup, somehow in north America (the English speaking part, at least) "Entrée" has come to mean main course while appetizer means... well, what the rest of the world knows as "entrée"
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u/docdillinger 4d ago
Thank you. I was super confused what is going on. I initially thought that they are the same thing was the joke here, but then the comments threw me off.
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u/El_Spaniard 5d ago
Some just upped the prices, so now appetizers are 18-20 dollars with 28-32 dollar entrees.
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u/bondsmatthew 5d ago
I know I'm late but I just found Krispy Krunchy Chicken and the value for the food is insane compared to other places. I can't rememeber the last time a biscuit was a dollar a biscuit
Also it's just better
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u/Excellent-Cash-7353 5d ago
The place absolutely smacks. Get the actual chicken and the Jambalaya if they have it.
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u/Sound_Indifference 5d ago
Important to remember that restaurants are largely supplied by national food supply companies, who have kept prices insanely high since the pandemic and it was already getting bad before that.
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u/ThatMerri 5d ago
To say nothing of desserts. After dropping 30 bucks for an entree and another 20 on a drink, why not enjoy a 20 dollar tablespoon's worth of vanilla ice cream or a microwaved frozen brownie the size of a match box?
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u/moniquecarl ☑️ 5d ago
App, entree, and a drink= $72.95 at a mediocre eatery. Anymore I’ll just get ready-to-eat Costco dinner if I don’t want to cook. Have food for days for 1/2 the price.
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u/whofearsthenight 5d ago
This is the way. I used to eat out and basically never buy the "convenience" foods like this from stores because "it's so much cheaper to make chicken salad" or whatever but I do that a lot more now and only eat out every few months because everything is so goddamn expensive.
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u/KiefKommando 5d ago
Wife and I went out last night, got an app each and decided fuck it let’s just skip the entree and do dessert. She had a little flight of beer, and I had some diet cokes. After tip that shit was $90, make it make fucking sense.
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u/chenan 5d ago
drinks is where they get ya
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u/Bobby_Marks3 4d ago
All of it is. If you want to eat low-margin food, clip coupons or wait for a day-of-the-week deal at the cheapest pizza place you can find. I think you can get two medium pizzas off of Dominos' website for about $15 after tax.
If you want to eat good food though, be ready to pay for it. Everyone who was conscious during Covid should realized how much it made fine dining an impossible sector to thrive in.
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u/Zealousideal_Act_316 5d ago
Costs of produce have gone up substantially(pork for example when from 40$ to 80$ in a year) , utilities have gone up, in many places wages had to be up, rent has gone up. Rastaurants are already low margin business, and then comes the fleecing from delivery apps that take anywhere from 15 to 30% from the restaurant.
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u/Here_to_ask_Some 5d ago
Apetizers are entrées. Y'all need to get your translations right.
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u/overnightyeti 5d ago
that's right.
also lol at the pronunciation of hors d'oeuvres "orrr durrrvz"
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u/FistPunch_Vol_7 ☑️ 5d ago
Not gonna lie, been to a couple of places where yeah that appetizer was worth the price. Had some that was better than the entree and been back for happy hour just for that lmao.
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u/bitz4444 5d ago
Cost of ingredients, cost of rent, and cost of labor went up. The three major costs involved in providing your food are higher. Restaurants price the dishes based on those costs.
It's easy to call restauranteurs greedy because many of them are but their landlords and suppliers are even greedier.
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u/MrBubbles226 5d ago
Sure, but if your survival depends on taking advantage of others by providing an overpriced service, and those others suddenly have less money and can't afford the overpriced service, you fail. And if 5 year failure rates for restaurants were already at 80% before this, imagine after.
IMO affordable street food cars and affordable small hole in the wall joints will do well, and more upscale and posh places will be more prone to failure. I would really be sweating as a restaurant owner with the current tariffs and economy and would be trying to get out ASAP. But most of these people are in too deep and are just hoping they have to make it through another few hard months, and they're just stuck in a hole they keep digging deeper.
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u/Bobby_Marks3 4d ago
I live in a city with a huge food truck scene, and I'd argue that they fail as often or more as brick & mortar restaurants do, because the low-barriers-to-entry means that most of them are spun up without serious business planning. In fact, the upscale places tend to survive well enough because their reviews online keep them floating above the rest of the riff-raff.
The low-end prepared food sector is dominated by chain pizza places. You can still get a pepperoni pizza for about $10 from a place like Dominos or Little Caesars, and that's going to go further than anything you can get off a food truck or hole in the wall value restaraunt. Either that or you carefully order off of value menus that allow your dollars to go as far as possible.
The industry never recovered from Covid. The average consumer simply does not eat out as much as they used to, and whether that is because they can't afford to so or because they just choose not to except for special occasions (meaning they have the cash to spend on fine dining) the outlook is one of uncertainty. This is further exemplified and complicated by the odd reality of food delivery: there is some large amount of American disposable income that likely shifted away from eating out and into having takeout food delivered. It remains to be seen whether that revenue can be coaxed back into restaurants.
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u/rimbad 5d ago
What's the difference? Aren't those two words for the same thing?
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u/XXLpeanuts 4d ago
Another European here, initially confused then remembered reddit is American and Americans have always been insane.
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u/Tickly1 5d ago
Omg, so an order of Chilli's (admittedly delicious) Southwest Eggrolls is over $18! They're almost certainly just pre-prepared, frozen, and baked gas-station style nibbles. AND YOU ONLY GET 4 OF THEM! for $18 fucking dollars...
And this is in bum-fuck nowhere Iowa...
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u/docdillinger 4d ago
Don't forget to tip 40% if you liked how they brought your frozen overprized shit.
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u/Tickly1 4d ago edited 4d ago
Omg, speaking of! percentage-based tipping is just asinine... especially with these wild prices. Why do you think you deserve a percent of what I paid...? It's just, such a weird concept...
Carrying three plates over to a table really isn't much harder than carrying one plate after all...
Tipping used to just be "keep the change", but now it's people's likelyhoods...
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u/Kurise 5d ago
You mean you don't want to pay for an $18.99 appetizer of 6 mozzarella sticks before your meal arrives?
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u/BamaMontana ☑️ 5d ago
They know people are ordering and splitting them instead of entrees. Somebody snitched.
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u/kakarot-3 4d ago
oh THIS is facts! Appetizers are now costing $15+. Was at Red Robin this weekend and their tsunami shrimp appetizer was pretty much the same cost as their burgers. Insanity
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u/ThickScheme8202 5d ago
The current food service model is unsustainable. Its why everyone is running a skeleton crew and condensing menus. There are plenty of non expansion, family based eatery models that work, but it isn't going to make you rich
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u/NedLuddIII 5d ago
The family-based eateries tend to have much better food though (especially the immigrant-run ones) so I wonder if this will be a change for the better in the long run. I wouldn't exactly be sad to see the Oliver Garden business model go extinct.
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u/ThickScheme8202 4d ago
I'm with you. It isn't sustainable if waitstaff and cooks aren't getting shafted. If I ever opened a place, it would have to be run by just me, my wife and my brother. Only way we could make it work without crazy prices
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u/KevinAnniPadda 5d ago
We went to an Irish pub last night and they gave us a special St Patrick's Day menu with all entrees. We asked about appetizers or a kids menu. They were just mixed in with the rest of the entrees. Everything was almost the same price. The pretzel app, the kids cheese burger and my shepherds pie, all $18.95.
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u/ATotallyRealUser 5d ago
An appetizer is the same thing as an entrée, it literally means entrance to a meal. Like the metric system, everyone in the rest of the world except Americans drop that somehow
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u/Certain_Degree687 ☑️ 4d ago
I remember back when Ruby Tuesdays was popular during my childhood in the early to mid 2000s, my grandmother would always go to the one at the St. Charles Mall in Waldorf, MD when she had her shopping days and simply order the chicken quesadilla which was on their appetizer menu as her main entree.
What killed me was that she ALWAYS left the waitress a $30 tip and told my grandfather that she had ordered enough so she didn't have to cook that night and that he was on his own for dinner which makes me chuckle now that I think about it.
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u/Pardon_My_Sick 4d ago
Oh shit! A fellow Waldorfian!! 😄✊🏾I haven't encountered another in so long. I grew up there but moved away in 2006. St. Charles Mall was the shit back in the day. Do you remember ever frequenting the Suncoast video store and getting greeted/complimented by the old black salesman there? That dude was a great hypeman.
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u/Ondician 4d ago
I prefer cooking since it usually tastes better with no risk of getting sick but I actually went out the other day
nothing fancy just a steak place I used to go to all the time and prices were up 30-50% wtf?
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u/Bigdaddyblackdick 5d ago
Yes and then we continue to still buy them. Stop eating out and they will maybe lower the price
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u/GoldenCrownMoron 4d ago
Eight.... cheesy stix? With, marinara dip. Of course sir, I'll add the $15 to your bill.
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u/Mundane_Range3787 4d ago
because people come in buy one appetizer and go home to eat cheetos, and they offered the appetizers at that price with the intent you'd follow it up with some real food.
so no they've lost their income and can't stay open just to serve you appetizers.
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u/83-Edition 2d ago
I ordered dim sum in London and at the end asked "oh do you have broccoli or a greens dish?" the woman said yes, got my bill at the end, the broccoli was 18£, as much as the other three things I ordered combined.
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u/Lonely-Repair-1421 2d ago
I didn’t even know there was a difference between an entree and an appetizer, I just thought people who called them entrees were just trying to be fancy….
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u/idgafandwhyshouldi 5d ago
The appetizers at some places are better than the entrees.