Is the Entrée Dead?

Every hip menu today seems to have a section devoted to “small plates.” Some restaurants are even replacing the traditional three-course menu with a variety of appetizer-size dishes that can be ordered in any sequence or even all at once. But as any devotee of tapas or dim-sum knows, there is nothing new about small plates.

As for the current trend, I think it has more to do with economics than with culinary or social forces.

Ours is not the first generation to sneer at the entrée. The great chef Alain Chapel was the first to note the decline of the entrée (plat principal) in the introduction to his 1980 cookbook, La Cuisine C’est Beaucoup Plus Que Les Recettes. His was an aesthetic plea. A dinner of small plates would be the ruin of gastronomy, he argued. There would be not enough canvas for profundity, not enough time for a great wine to unfold its mysteries in the glass. 

Needless to say, Chapel did not win. Beginning in the late 1970’s, the tasting menu ascended to dominance in nearly all the great restaurants  of the world. The same reasons were given then that are offered now: the “smaller commitment” (or attention span) required of the patron, the rise of interest in Asian cuisines (and, more recently, regional American styles) and the concomitant wish to be creative and eclectic.

Today, the small plates movement is explained as a response to lifestyle changes. Customers are said to want more control over their choices; they want to “date their food before marrying it;” their palates are jaded; they crave variety and novelty; they are more aware of international cuisines and more adventurous. Chefs, it is suggested, are simply responding to those changes.

It’s true that Americans have changed. Culture has changed and the pace of life keeps accelerating. In cinema, for example, gone are the days when a movie director like David Lean could hold a shot seemingly forever, watching Peter O’Toole cross the desert on a camel. Today it seems that most directors get fidgety after a few seconds.

What is new in the small plates phenomenon is the unstructured format.  Tasting menus brought forth a series of dishes (and usually their accompanying wines) in symphonic structure: cold, then fish, then meats, then cheeses, then desserts. Champagne, white wines, red wines, dessert wines – adagio, allegro, crescendo, repeat.  The new approach is more youthful, casual, carefree, and fun. There’s a wide range of wines by the glass and creative cocktails.

This grazing style has moved out of the bars and lounges, where it was subordinate to drinking and socializing, and into the dining room, where it becomes the main event.

In 1975 restaurants generally allocated 10% of the public space to the bar/lounge and 90% to the dining room. In those days you made 10% profit in the bar and you made 10% profit in the dining room.  In the dining room you would do transactions in the “tens-of-dollars,” yielding “dollar-sized” profits. In the bar you did “dollar-sized” transactions yielding “dime-sized” profits. It made perfect economic sense to allocate only10% of the public area to the bar.

I recently read a 25-year report compiled from annual surveys of National Restaurant Association members. (I believe it was posted on starchefs.com.) What was shocking was that by 2000 the ratio had changed to approximately 75% bar/lounge and 25% dining room.

For a host of reasons, profit margins completely eroded in the dining room. The higher the quality of the restaurant, the more severe the erosion. The only thing left of high margin were cocktails, beer, and wines by the glass. Whether by intelligent design or by Darwinian survival of the fittest, restaurateurs adapted.

Some survived by adding a catering arm, a high margin business. Celebrity chefs were able leverage their names into deals with resorts, hotels, casinos, or office towers to subsidize the restaurant.  Many restaurateurs abandoned ownership altogether and signed management contracts.

For a while many very good chefs were able to hold down costs by using lesser-known products like veal cheeks and short ribs. But their success with these ingredients increased demand and caused the wholesale prices to skyrocket. There are very few high-quality bargains left. Most lower- and middle-quality restaurants adapted by shrinking the dining room and growing the bar.

For a chef today who isn’t a celebrity, who isn’t being subsidized by a hotel or casino, who therefore can’t sell his food at a loss, but who still wants to cook with very good materials, it is simply much easier to sell four plates for $12 each than one entrée for $48.  It is good marketing. Period.

The real question, perhaps, is not “Is the entrée dead?” but “Is the Dining Room Headed for Extinction?”

(If you’d like to read more about the small plates versus entrées question, look up Kim Severson’s excellent December 5 article in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/dining/05entr.html?_r=1&ref=dining&oref=slogin)

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