Does that serving of Chilean Sea Bass look smaller? Notice more pasta dishes in restaurants serving haute cuisine? It’s not just your imagination: restaurants are cutting 
back on pricey ingredients and portion sizes as food prices soar reports Juliet Chung from the WSJ (and a close friend!). Juliet’s article is a real eye-opener. Meat scraps that were once the makings of a meal for the kitchen staff are now being gussied up and served as appetizers. Cheap pasta dishes are gracing menus with more popularity (although pasta too is becoming more pricey, so much so that the Italians staged a boycott late last year).
The worst offender, though, is the vanishing portion size. Already, whenever I go to a chi-chi restaurant with the boyfriend, he growls at the Lilliputian-sized portions on the plate. We’ll eat a several-course meal, offer up the plastic card (and, the angel that he is, he more often than not foots the bill), and he’ll end up scrounging for something to eat when we get home. While munching on a bowl of cereal, he’ll decry that that’s the last time we’re eating at a restaurant with fancy food and that next time, we’ll end up dining on cheap burritos or Subway sandwiches.
And now chefs are further diminishing these already small portions? For the same price? I fear our days of eating out at chi-chi restaurants are limited…
