Restaurant Dive's latest piece on the rise of mini meals makes a simple point: value used to mean bigger portions, and now it means portions that actually fit what someone wants to eat. Apps, small plates, and shareables are no longer the appetizer section. For a lot of guests, they are the whole meal.
That sounds like a menu trend. It is actually a training problem hiding as a menu trend.
When a guest orders one entree, your server has one selling moment. When a guest builds a meal out of three or four small plates, your server has three or four selling moments, back to back, in the same visit. That is either a huge opportunity or a huge leak, and which one it is comes down to whether your floor actually knows how to work it.
Here is the leak. A table orders two small plates to start. If nobody says a word after that, the kitchen fires two dishes, the table eats, and the check stays small. Multiply that by every table on a Friday night and you have quietly traded your average check for a trend you never trained for.
Here is the opportunity. Every small plate is a chance to recommend the next one, by name, with a real reason, timed to when the guest is actually deciding, not whenever the server gets around to it. That is the whole structure: name the dish, give the guest a specific reason it is worth it, and ask while they are still building the meal, not after they have mentally closed the order. Then check back on that exact dish, not a generic "how is everything," because a guest who hears their own order repeated back to them feels seen, and a guest who feels seen orders again.
This only works if your team knows the small plates menu cold. Not just the name and the price, the ingredients, what makes it good, and why it pairs with what the table already ordered. With a four-item small plates section, that is doable in a five-minute pre-shift. With a sixteen-item section built around constant mix-and-match, it is not optional anymore, it is the job.
The other thing worth doing this week: actually look at your numbers instead of guessing whether this trend is helping or hurting your average check. Pull bill totals on tables that order small-plate-heavy versus entree-heavy, and see which one is actually worth more per visit, and which one brings people back faster for a second visit. Most operators have a gut feeling about this and no real data behind it. The data is usually surprising.
Small plates are not going away. The restaurants that win with them will be the ones whose staff treat every plate as a chance to make a recommendation and read a reaction, not the ones who just add more items to a menu and hope the order builds itself.
This is exactly the kind of thing Wingman is built for. The Playbook lets you put every small plate on a recipe card the whole floor can learn and get quizzed on, train the guided recommendation structure as a short recurring drill instead of a one-time onboarding slide, and track bill totals by visit so you can see, in real dollars, whether your small plates strategy is actually growing repeat visits or just rearranging the same check.