What You Order for Dinner Tells a Restaurant More Than You Might Expect

What You Order for Dinner Tells a Restaurant More Than You Might Expect

Men and women have different dining tendencies, challenging chefs to create menus to satisfy both

By Alina Dizik in the Wall Street Journal

Men order steak, women order salad, right?

The restaurant world has never been that simple, of course, and especially not now, when diners expect an experience and not just a meal when they go out to eat.

Yet many chefs say it is remarkable how many diners continue to order largely along gender-based lines. Restaurants and menu consultants say it pays to balance gender preferences, both when designing individual dishes and when planning the overall menu.

The Regency Bar and Grill, inside the Loews Regency Hotel on New York’s Park Avenue, had some of these principles in mind when it recently expanded its meat-heavy menu. It added a new section, “From the Grill,” featuring a simple protein (such as chicken, tuna, or lamb chops) served plain without typical sides like potatoes and mushrooms.

Megan Brock, general manager of the restaurant, said there were plenty of female patrons at breakfast and lunch but the restaurants wanted to draw more at dinner. The new offerings cater to calorie-conscious diners, many of whom are women, with options that don’t require them to make a special request for the kitchen to modify an existing dish. Women diners don’t want to appear high maintenance, Ms. Brock says. “We didn’t want [diners] feeling like they were asking for something that we don’t already do.”

Lois Nasser, a New York City real-estate agent whose office is across the street from the Regency, says the new offerings are attractive to demanding diners like herself.

When she is dining with colleagues or clients, she says, it is a lot easier to order directly from the menu rather than to request her favorite—grilled salmon without the mushrooms, bok choy and dashi broth. “I’m not shy about saying ‘hold the sauce’,” Ms. Nasser adds. “But they make it extremely comfortable with this menu.”

A typical female pattern is to order a healthy, vegetable-centric entree and then splurge on dessert, while men often favor more-substantial entrees featuring both starch and meat, says Elizabeth Capaldi Phillips, a psychology professor at Arizona State University, in Tempe, who studies the relationship between food and gender.

People are more likely to order according to gender stereotypes on a first date, at a business meal or when dining in a large group of friends, Dr. Capaldi Phillips says.

“The word ‘hearty’ is not a good thing for a woman,” she says, “but it’s a great thing for a man.” Meanwhile, a dish described as “delicate” is likely to be a turnoff to a man craving meat. If a menu describes a meat entree by naming specific animal parts, it is apt to sound gory and unappetizing to many women, Dr. Capaldi Phillips says.

Cultural expectations about diet and gender start at a young age, Dr. Capaldi Phillips adds. “Even little girls eat more vegetables than little boys.”

Michael Fiorelli, executive chef at Love & Salt, an Italian-inspired restaurant in Manhattan Beach, Calif., says his clients order in a somewhat predictable pattern. “You hear it all the time: ‘My husband wants steak, but I’m vegetarian,’” he says. The menu features some obvious guy-pleasers like flatiron steak and thin-crust pizzas, as well as a rotating mix of vegetable small plates.

To make the vegetable dishes more attractive to male diners, Mr. Fiorelli has adjusted recipes by adding cheese or a small amount of meat or other protein. He serves a shaved kale salad with ricotta, and a roasted baby cauliflower dish with a thick salsa verde and breadcrumbs. “You’re eating it with a fork and knife and you’re dragging it through a sauce,” Mr. Fiorelli says. “It has the char of a wood oven.”

Mr. Fiorelli says his menu intentionally isn’t divided between vegetable and meat dishes, because he wants every dish to appeal to both men and women.

The idea is to give more or less equal emphasis to both, he says. A dish of agnolotti pasta in broth with rabbit is described as “wilted escarole, Parmesan brodo, little rabbit meatballs” to help it sound lighter and more appealing to women. “Women will eat it like it’s a soup and guys like the mea

Keith Garcia, a 45-year-old production sound mixer who recently dined at Love & Salt, asked Mr. Fiorelli for a recommendation from the menu. Mr. Fiorelli suggested cauliflower and carrot small plates and a shaved kale salad—and promised to not to charge for any dishes Mr. Garcia returned.

Mr. Garcia said the dishes were outside his comfort zone. “If I were to order cauliflower, kale and carrots straight out of the gate, my friends would look at me and say, ‘Where did Keith go?’ ” he says. The two vegetable dishes topped with sauces made for “a hearty little meal,” he says, and the kale salad is now his favorite menu item.

At The Betty, a Chicago cocktail lounge and restaurant in a converted warehouse in Chicago’s meatpacking district, executive chef Rachel Dow says she wanted the menu to attract women to her restaurant’s “masculine space.”

Ms. Dow looked to create dishes that each might skew a bit more masculine or feminine yet would have some appeal to both. She added charred squid to a frisée salad, and for spring has added a lamb sirloin balanced with lighter-tasting artichokes and pea shoots. “Each dish wasn’t motivated by gender,” she says, but the product mix on the menu is intended to balance both.

Desserts are traditionally designed with women in mind and can be a tough sell to men. Yet women who are counting calories often don’t want dessert. At the Betty, some desserts are served in micro-portions: Diners can order a cookie, a peppermint patty, pizzelle or salted toffee brittle by the piece, for $1 each or a sampler plate of all five for $4. “Sometimes [women] don’t want to commit to a large portion,” Ms. Dow said.

Margaret Nolan Carvallo, pastry chef at Rancho Bernardo Inn, a boutique hotel in San Diego, says she introduced flavors reminiscent of childhood--peanut butter, caramelized popcorn, brownies—to help make desserts with appeal to men. And she added complex fruit flavors to chocolate dishes, which women tend to order. “Men go for food that they can identify from a ‘favorite flavor’ profile,” she said.

Women diners also are drawn to food descriptions such as “rosemary water granita” and “raspberry coulis,” says Ms. Nolan Carvallo. And to make sure couples can find something to share, she designs desserts that can be eaten with the fingers, with a scoop of ice cream added. Or she will decorate a slice of cheesecake garnished with edible hibiscus flowers to catch the eye of the woman, and a crunchy lacey cookie to appeal to the guy. Crème brûlée and other French-inspired dishes that can be too complicated for men, she adds. “To get dessert sold is like a game,” she says.