Why did menus used to be so much bigger and more varied? Now most places only have 3-4 appetizers and 5-6 entrees. Back at the day you could visit any howard johnsons and have steak, ham, lobster, clams, lasagna, and fricking rabbit along with 18 flavors of ice cream and pecan pie.
It's too expensive.
Some things aren't popular enough to stock.
It sucks for the one or two customers who really like that item, but you're just burning money on keeping it in stock.
Restaurants operate on razor thin margins.
This, and people used to be happier with frozen shit food, so it made it easier to have a big menu
food is shittier and frozen than ever.
There's just less of it now so restaurants can have huge stockpiles of it like they used to.
Shut up boomer, I'm sorry you live in the third world country known as America. At least in Europe we've got fresh food. Smaller Menus are better and the quality of food has only improved in the last few years. Stop being clouded by nostalgia
Why are you such a bitter and hateful person
It doesn't take much to find a place with menus like this. Diners, etc, where you can get a bunch of eclectic dishes because whenever an ingredient is about to go off, it just becomes tomorrow's soup of the day. Greek restaurants and other family run places also tend to have big expansive menus because they can write off stuff as a business loss and take it home at the end of the night for their extended family to cook with.
Howard johnson's? How to out yourself as a 50-year-old Boomer in one sentence or less
50 years old isn't boomer.
Boomer cope.
That's generation X. Generation X is between 41-56 years old
>boomer keeps on trying
you hate to see it
>Back at the day you could visit any howard johnsons and have steak, ham, lobster, clams, lasagna, and fricking rabbit
And it was all frozen, thrown in a microwave to thaw and poorly cooked because restaurants can't stock the amount of food needed to maintain such a large and varied menu while keeping ingredients fresh
The larger the menu the shittier the items will be, a smaller menu allows chefs to focus more on specific, signature dishes the restaurant is frequented for and perfect those fewer dishes
>Why did menus used to be so much bigger
But anon, that menu is so small you can't even read it, you silly goose.
Brown's Chicken still has a pretty big menu, but I think they are still dying.
Food and labor cost has only gotten more expensive. So smaller kitchens with more specific menus are cheaper.
Big menus also used to work as a means of giving the customer tons of choice on getting food that they otherwise would never be able to try. Today access to food is such that people prefer specific execution and novel presentation to simple breadth of selection.
I used to like long restaurant menus, but then I learned how the industry works better.
If a restaurant has a super long menu, it's more likely that either the staff can't practice the dishes well enough to make them well, or that they're going to be cutting corners somewhere, which reduces quality.
Do you really want 3 day old shrimps to be used in your shrimp wienertail?
>Shrimps
If the menu doesn’t change daily with maybe 2 offerings max, the restaurant you’re eating at is trash
hojo's had great spaghetti and meatballs
It's much easier to learn how to cook now so massive variety of things you wouldn't be able to eat otherwise makes less sense. Also diners still exist, any nice one will still have a menu like that