If you fill up on free appetizers, such as chips and salsa, you can order a smaller entree. Photo:
mnchilemomI am a
huge advocate for
preparing and eating meals at home.
It’s almost always drastically cheaper than eating out. You have fine
control over the quality and quantity of the ingredients. You can make
whatever you want and you’re not restricted by a menu. You don’t have to
wait to get seated. Eating at home just has a ton of benefits.
Still, there are times when eating out at a restaurant just makes
more sense. For example, if we choose to spend a day in the Des Moines
area, we often wind up more than an hour from home in the evening and,
with hungry children, it just makes more sense to eat out. We also
usually plan a meal at a restaurant roughly once a month in addition to
those relatively unexpected events.
Of course, with our family, that usually means that we’re feeding five people at a restaurant which can add up
really
quickly if you do it very often. Because of that, we have adopted a
whole suite of simple strategies to save money on eating out. Here are
15 things we do to reduce the impact of restaurant dining on our monthly budget.
1. Buy gift cards at retailers that discount them.
A gift card to a restaurant rarely has to be purchased at the face
value of the card. If you shop around, you can save 20%, 30%, or even
50% or more on gift cards for a restaurant.
For example, there’s a local pizza restaurant that makes gift cards
available online, selling $50 in certificates for $40. When we go to
that restaurant, our family usually eats for $30 or $35. So, if we buy
two of those bundles, we’ve spent $80 in total and can use those cards
to buy $100 worth of food at that restaurant – three visits, in other
words. We reduce the cost of an average visit by 20%, saving us about $7
per visit.
Where can you get such gift cards?
Restaurant.com is a great place to start. I’ve also had great experiences with
Cardpool.com. Another great strategy is to visit
a warehouse club – like Sam’s Club or Costco – as they often sell gift card bundles at a nice discount, as much as 25% off the face value.
We just keep these gift cards in our wallet or purse until an opportunity presents itself to eat there.
2. Choose a restaurant with free appetizers, then order a smaller entree.
Many restaurants offer free appetizers as an enticement to get people
in the door of their establishments. It’s a good business strategy,
mostly because customers often fail to take full advantage of it.
For example, at many Mexican restaurants, they serve a large batch of
salsa and chips as a free appetizer before the meal. At Red Lobster,
they give you an endless basket of cheddar bay biscuits before the meal.
I will often eat those free appetizers and slowly drink a couple of
large glasses of water and by the time my main meal arrives, I’m pretty
full.
This does require you to be
aware that you’ll be a lot less
hungry when your meal arrives at the table compared to when you order.
Restaurants often know this and that’s why they don’t bring out these
appetizers until after you order. That way, you’re sitting there hungry
and will often order more than you might want, then after the free
appetizers, you aren’t nearly as hungry and could have enjoyed a much
smaller meal.
In other words, when you’re ordering your meal at a restaurant with
free appetizers, keep those appetizers in mind. You might be
really
hungry when you order, but after eating a bunch of those appetizers
over the next twenty minutes, you likely won’t be as hungry. So, don’t
order the giant platter of food — instead stick with a smaller meal that
focuses in on just one or two things you really like.
3. Drink water as your beverage.
Restaurants charge a shockingly high price for beverages. A glass of
soda will cost you $3 or more. Order a beer or a glass of wine or a
mixed drink and you’ll be paying a
lot more.
The solution here is to simply request a glass of water as your
beverage and skip the other drinks. If you want an after-dinner drink,
go to another establishment with more reasonable prices – such as your
own home. I’ll often go home and have a bottle of homebrewed beer after a
restaurant meal.
Yes, sometimes a meal is made better by accompanying it with a
particular beverage. Many dishes pair incredibly well with a glass of
wine, for instance. That’s fine, but limit your beverage purchases to
what pairs well with the dish and stick to water when the meal isn’t
around.
Water also has the feature of keeping the palate clear so that you
can actually enjoy all of the flavors of your meal instead of having
your taste buds clouded with the sweet aftertastes of soda or the
flavors of other beverages brought to your table. I actually prefer that
as it makes the food taste better.
4. Check the coupon flyers and other sections in the Sunday newspaper.
Many restaurants – especially chain restaurants – offer coupons for
discounts in the Sunday paper, particularly in the coupon flyer section
found in the middle of the paper.
Darden Restaurants – owners of Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, and
several other restaurants (and until very recently owners of Red
Lobster) – frequently use the coupon flyers to distribute coupons for
their restaurants, often offering a discount for a pair of entrees.
Other chains use the flyers infrequently.
Sometimes, you’ll also find coupons in other sections for more local
restaurants. For instance, my wife and I recently found a coupon in a
Sunday newspaper for a nearby restaurant that we were completely unaware
of before seeing the coupon.
Restaurant coupons are very easy to use. You just include them with
your ticket when you send your payment back with the server. They
basically function as cash when used at a restaurant – except they’re
not really cash out of your pocket.
5. Utilize ‘kids eat free’ nights if you have a family.
Many restaurants that cater to families offer at least one “kids eat
free” night during the week. On that night, the restaurant usually
offers one children’s meal for free with the purchase of one adult meal.
Some places simply don’t charge for any children’s meals on those days,
though that’s fairly rare.
For us, if we go out as a family, that means that two children’s
meals are free. That can save us $10 or $15 on our ticket at the end of
the evening. If you plan most (if not all) of your restaurant meals
around this phenomenon, you can end up saving a ton of money.
There’s another big advantage to this for families. With three young
children, we are sometimes careful about what restaurants to take our
family to because, no matter how perfectly behaved children are, there
are times when they’re not so perfectly behaved. Children can have poor
emotional control and that can result in tears and outbursts and
disruptions of the meals of others. I don’t like that when I go to a
non-family restaurant, but when I go to a family restaurant, especially
on a “children eat free” night, I assume it will happen a time or two.
Thus, when I’m on the “parent” side of that equation, I don’t feel
nearly as apprehensive about going out to eat with my children.
(Thankfully, my children are now old enough that this is no longer a
significant issue; they’re almost always well-behaved in restaurants
now.)
6. Budget for your restaurant dining.
One of the best ways to curb spending on splurges is to simply budget
for it. Have a certain amount in your family budget that you set aside
for the pleasure of dining out each month. You might set aside enough
for two or three meals out at a nice restaurant, which might equate to
several meals at a lower-end restaurant.
For us, this directly saves money by putting a cap on our monthly
restaurant spending. It also encourages us to sometimes choose less
expensive restaurants that we enjoy, such as some of the family-owned
Mexican restaurants in the northern part of Des Moines (there are
several good ones in the northern suburbs).
Of course, having a family means that we can’t really go to the
high-end adult-focused restaurants all that often. The children wouldn’t
enjoy or appreciate the experience, so we generally save the nicer
restaurants for the occasional date night that Sarah and I share.
We can still splurge on an expensive restaurant, but that means that
we’ll probably be missing out on other opportunities to eat out during
that month. Budgeting like this gives
us the freedom to choose.
7. Pay attention to time-sensitive special deals.
Many restaurants offer specials that are triggered by the specific
day of the week and, even more often, the specific time of the day.
Some restaurants offer early bird specials for diners who come in
before 5 PM. Other restaurants offer discounted appetizers or drinks at
certain times or will offer a “final call” discount on buffet food
during the last fifteen minutes of a buffet lunch.
Be aware of these discounts in advance. If you go to a restaurant
that you like, take a look at their daily or weekly specials and note
the ones that are of particular interest to you, then make sure to go to
those restaurants when you’ll get those discounts.
I find it useful to actually note these discounts on my phone. Then, I
can look at that calendar when we’re planning on eating out and use it
as a helpful guide for picking a restaurant that will be selling us
discounted food that night. (I do this for “children eat free” nights,
too.)
8. Eat an appetizer as your main dish.
Many restaurants offer absurdly large appetizers at a pretty good
price. For instance, one restaurant near us has a bruschetta tray for
$6.99 that overloads the pieces of bread with all kinds of toppings,
leaving you with more toppings than bread. They’re delicious and
plentiful, enough that you could easily fill up on them.
So, why not fill up on them? Order an appetizer as your main course.
Usually, you’ll have a fairly small portion for a very good price if you
do this and, if you include appetizers in the meals you’re considering,
it usually expands your total options.
I find that ordering an appetizer is a great way to enforce portion
control and convince myself to eat slower, too. There’s usually more
than enough food in an appetizer to fill me up.
Appetizers are often split into smaller portions as well, so if
several people choose the “order an appetizer” strategy for their meal,
it’s easy to swap part of your appetizer meal for part of theirs, giving
you both more variety on your plate.
9. Buy (or split) a local coupon book or discount card.
Many local groups sell discount cards and coupon books that offer a
discount at a number of local businesses. Those businesses are usually
offering the discount as a way to support a local charity or cause.
If you eat locally and the restaurants you prefer support such a
program, these cards and/or coupon books can provide tremendous savings
over the course of a year. Our local high school sold discount cards
that offered percentage discounts at several different nearby
restaurants that, once you used it more than two or three times, saved
you money just from the restaurant discounts alone.
If you can’t afford the price – and sometimes the bigger coupon books
can be expensive – split the cost with a friend and take turns
selecting coupons from the book. For instance, if you buy a book with
100 coupons for $50 and split the cost with a friend, you can each spend
$25 and then take turns picking coupons out of the book so that you
each get half of the coupons.
10. Split an entree with another person in your party.
Many restaurants serve huge meals with enormous sides – far more than
a single person could or should eat. One of our favorite local
restaurants serves such a ludicrous amount of sides that I have
never been able to finish a full meal there.
One great strategy at a “big portion” restaurant is to simply split
an entree with a friend or loved one. Simply order a meal you both like,
request an extra plate, then divide up the meal among the two of you
when it arrives.
This allows you to eat a more reasonably-sized meal while cutting the
cost of the meal in half. I’ve split meals with my wife many times.
Another strategy is to order a single entree and a cheaper appetizer,
splitting the appetizer then splitting the entree. The cost reduction
isn’t quite as much, but it can still save you $10 or so.
11. Skip dessert and satisfy your sweet tooth at home.
Restaurants love to serve you an overpriced dessert at the end of the
meal and for people with a sweet tooth it can be really tempting. It’s a
good strategy to skip that dessert, however, and pick it up elsewhere.
If you’re eating a dessert at home, it’s going to be far cheaper
because you purchased the ingredients yourself at a grocery store.
Rather than eating a bowl of ice cream at a restaurant, our family will
often go home and make anyone who wants dessert a small bowl out of the
ice cream container we already bought at the store, which drives the
cost per bowl well below $1 and usually far, far cheaper than what the
restaurant charges.
You also have much more control over what you have for dessert
because, again, you’ll get to select what you have from the wide array
of items on sale at your local grocer that you already purchased and
have at home.
If you really want to eat a dessert at a restaurant, simply choose to
stop at a restaurant that focuses on dessert offerings. You’ll usually
not pay much more and the dessert quality and variety is much higher.
12. Follow your favorite restaurants on Facebook and Twitter.
Many restaurants utilize social media to talk directly to their
biggest fans and customers. Restaurants will often pass along special
discounts in order to encourage even more repeat business.
Thanks to social media, I’ve been able to enjoy several “buy one, get
one free” options on entrees at various restaurants in the area – some
of them chains and some of them strictly local. I’ve enjoyed free
appetizers and even free meals a couple of times.
All you have to do is have an account at the most popular social
sites – Facebook and Twitter – and then look up the names of restaurants
you enjoy and either “follow” or “like” them. When you’re thinking of
eating out, check out what those restaurants have posted recently. You
might just have a great bargain sitting there waiting for you.
Similarly, you can sign up for mailing lists at restaurants. Often,
they’ll have a drawing for free meals from their mailing list and
they’ll usually use it to send out coupons and discounts. I recommend
having a separate email address for emails from these lists. That way,
you can just check that email account before you dine and search your
email backlog for discounts.
13. Don’t assume the ‘special’ is a discounted meal.
Many restaurants offer daily “specials” that they write on a
chalkboard or some other form of posting near the front of the
restaurant. These are often experimental meals that they’re trying out
or else meals designed to use some sort of food excess in the kitchen.
In either case, people often believe that these “specials” are
available at a discounted price, but that’s often not true at all.
They’re often priced on par with other items or sometimes even a bit
higher.
If you’re considering ordering the posted special, ask for the price
of the special first and take that into account while ordering. Compare
that price quickly to other items on the menu and see how the special
really stacks up. Often, you’re better off ordering something else from
the menu.
14. Exercise portion control at the table.
When you’re served a big plate of food, you’ll almost always find
yourself starting to feel full, but you also have this big half-finished
plate still in front of you. It’s very tempting to keep nibbling away
at it, but this is
the key time to establish some portion control.
Stop eating. Put a napkin over your plate to block the temptation. As
soon as you see your server, request a container to take your leftovers
home in and load them up.
This saves money by ensuring more leftovers for you, making it
possible to eat a full meal or maybe even two from your leftovers when
you might have otherwise been lucky to eat just one. It also helps with
your health, because jamming more calories into your system is never a
good option when you’re already full.
15. Make eating out ‘special’ and eat ‘ordinary’ the rest of the time.
For us, eating out is a treat. It’s something to enjoy that’s usually
much more enjoyable than the “normal” meals that we eat at home. It
becomes an experience, not an ordinary routine.
That’s not to say we don’t cook good meals at home – we do. However,
they’re often simple fare – a simple pasta with sauce, homemade tacos,
chili, and the like. We stick with simple, easy to prepare meals that we
know our family will like. Those meals are really inexpensive.
This keeps our food budget nice and low so that when we do go out, it’s both a special treat and
not a budget killer.
Here’s the truth:
a few smart steps while eating at a restaurant can drastically reduce the expense.
Not all of the tactics in this article will work for your situation,
but some of them will, and if you can stack them together, you can
drastically reduce the cost of dining out.
- The Simple Dollar
