Is eating out at a restaurant for a weeknight dinner still a thing in this economy?
I recently had a quick breakfast at what I thought was a good restaurant; the kind of place with a two-hour wait on a Sunday morning. With tax and tip, my (very mediocre) eggs, toast and hash browns with a cappuccino came to no less than $25. I probably should have expected that, but still, I walked away not quite feeling like the food was worth the price. I was reminded of just how hard it’s become to have any meal, let alone a weeknight dinner out with family, at an affordable price.
My experience was not a unique one. At some point in the last few years, most of us have had a moment of shock when the bill comes to the table after a meal at a mid-tier restaurant. What you thought was a decently priced dinner ends up costing $50 per person, perhaps. And yet, every time that happens, it is still a little bit shocking.
The fact that menu prices have been on the rise in recent years is no new news. But those heightened prices haven’t been around long enough for us to forget the days when things felt much more reasonable. It’s causing our decision-making around dining out, especially for those family weeknight dinners, to change, and perhaps making us miss out on some of the joys that come with it.
The Truth About Eating Out for a Weeknight Dinner
Growing up in the 2000s, my family loved to eat out. My parents, brother and I would go out for dinner three or four times a week, excessive as that seems. And not to Olive Garden or McDonalds. We would go to a favorite local sushi restaurant. Or maybe the Thai place up the street, or a new American restaurant we liked for its elevated focus on fresh flavors. It was relatively healthy food, full-service, mid-priced. I remember vividly that dinner for four would usually come to less than $100.
These days, that dinner would probably push $200. And $200 for dinner on a random Wednesday night is suddenly a whole lot harder to justify. That change raises questions about what we lose out on when we substitute the weeknight dinner out for dinner in, and begs for an understanding of why we are needing to make that substitution at all.
The Eating Out Price Jump
As any good journalist does, I needed to see if my observation is backed up by fact, so I compared today’s menus to those from a few years ago at two representative restaurants: firstly, The Porch at Schenley. A mid-range restaurant centrally located in Pittsburgh, a mid-sized American city with a reputation for affordability, The Porch is a perfect example of the kind of place we would go for weeknight dinner after soccer practice. And at first glance, the price jump doesn’t seem extreme.
In 2018, the Porch Burger cost $16. Now, it costs $18. The veggie burger jumped from $9 to $13. The miso cod (now miso Chilean sea bass), from $23 to $28. And the pizza bianca, once $13, is now $16. An average $3 price bump on each dish doesn’t seem like it would make much of a difference. But the $60 for those four dishes now comes to $75. Think of the added tip and tax that comes with the $15 dollar difference, and suddenly it makes sense that restaurants feel more expensive. Because they are.
A couple of miles away in a residential area called Point Breeze, neighborhood bistro Point Brugge is another example of a similarly-tiered restaurant. Their prices rose more than The Porch’s between 2017 and now. Mac n’ cheese went from $9.50 to $15, and the chèvre chaud salad from $13 to $17. If the price difference is about $5 per dish, it is $20 more over four dishes, and you once again have to include tax and tip. Add drinks or appetizers and the divide grows even larger.
So, Why Are Restaurants so Expensive?
These changes have happened — and been tracked — on a national scale as well. According to the National Restaurant Association, menu prices rose 4.1% between June 2023 and June 2024, outpacing general consumer prices, which rose 3%.
Now, I have the consumer’s point of view covered on this weeknight dinner debacle. Since it would not be fair if we didn’t hear from the other side of the coin, I spoke to Ben Fileccia, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Engagement at the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association.
Fileccia has a two-pronged explanation for the price hike; even though many of us restaurant-goers whinge at seemingly overpriced food, it’s not as if they have suddenly gotten greedy and started pricing things higher just for the fun of it. Restaurants have always operated with a profit margin between 2 and 7%, Fileccia said. That hasn’t changed.
Inflation across most food categories has bitten into that margin. And restaurants have to deal with more than just the price of groceries: labor and utilities, too, cost more than ever before, plus food delivery apps can charge exorbitant fees.
But Fileccia says there is something else going on as well: restaurants are playing catch-up after keeping prices steady for many years pre-COVID.
“Probably for 20 years, salmon was on everybody’s menu for $18,” Fileccia said. “It was just the standard; salmon and chicken always around 18 bucks. And meanwhile, many restaurants were fearful of raising their prices even a little bit because of competition.”
The COVID Culprit
When COVID hit, as a pricing shock and a supply shock and all the other kinds of shocks you can think of, it was an opportunity for restaurants to finally raise those prices to what they “should” have been if they were to track with inflation.
So, what feels to consumers like a random and frustrating price hike is for restaurants a way to get back to the profit margin they should be able to operate with. These decisions are never random, Fileccia remind us.
“If [owners and managers] raise [prices] too high, it’s going to discourage guests from coming to dine there,” Fileccia said. “And if they don’t raise it enough, their profit margins will drop below something that’s going to keep them in business. … So it’s this real balancing act.”
Ramifications Abound
The logic of necessity, however, doesn’t change the fact that for many consumers, restaurants simply feel overpriced, and they often act accordingly.
Every time we choose to go out for dinner, it is a trade-off: how much are we willing to pay for the convenience of not doing dishes, thinking about what to make, and buying groceries? How much cheaper would it be to dine in?
The answer to that question — the price gap between eating in and dining out — has been growing. Grocery prices rose 1.1% in the same time period that restaurant prices rose 4.1%, which forces consumers to change their trade-off calculus.
“Restaurants are where you celebrate birthdays and engagements and celebrate life, and come together as a family and come together as friends.”
The $100 weeknight dinners three or four times a week that we had when I was growing up were certainly more expensive than eating at home would have been, but that decision was also a very purposeful one. Many of my friends with two working parents would have babysitters that would pick them up from school and make them dinner. My parents prioritized spending that money on dinners out, which allowed us to eat together every night as they didn’t have to spend time cooking — privileged as it is that it was even a choice they had the option to make. Some of my most formative memories are from those weeknight dinners out.
Fileccia spoke about the enduring place of restaurants as a venue for special occasions.
“Restaurants are where you celebrate birthdays and engagements and celebrate life, and come together as a family and come together as friends,” he said. “It’s always such a different and unique situation than dining at home.”
He’s entirely right. People will continue to go to out for special occasions. That, however, is not the ethos of weeknight dinners. Weeknight dinners are the laid-back, no-real-reason trips to a restaurant that might just be the casualty of menu price inflation.
Eating Out for Weeknight Dinner Persists… But With a Greater Cost
My mom, brother and I recently went out for a weeknight dinner. I had soup. My mom had salad. My brother had the smallest piece of salmon I’ve seen in my life — comically, on a large plate. We got one appetizer and a glass of wine. The food was all fine, but not great. The bill came, and the number printed on it was three digits.
My mom’s analysis? “Food’s…gotten smaller, less tasty and more overpriced.”
Inflation is hard on everyone. It’s not restaurants’ fault. But it’s also true that we know all of that, and still will not, for the foreseeable future, be going back to this once-common weeknight dinner spot.
“Fine” food would be fine for $20 each. But if dinner is going to cost $40 per person, the food had better be incredible. And if that’s not the case, we will probably be choosing to make dinner at home instead.
Story by Mitra Nourbahksh / Photo by Kelsey Chance
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