Walk into nearly any restaurant on a Monday evening and listen carefully. There’s a good chance your server will enthusiastically recite the day’s specials with practiced flair. Sounds tempting, right? Hold on. Before you nod and point to that tempting fish special, you might want to hear what professional chefs have to say about ordering specials on Monday. Here’s the thing: when chefs dine out themselves, they almost never order the specials, especially on the first day of the week. There’s a reason for that skepticism, rooted in the practical realities of restaurant operations. Let’s dive into why Monday might be the worst day to order that special, and what you should know before you make your next dining decision.
The Thursday Delivery Dilemma
Most restaurants order their seafood on Thursday night to sell over the busy weekend, with the chef’s goal being to complete that entire order by Sunday night since there are no weekend fish deliveries, meaning any fish served on Monday is leftover from that original Thursday order. Think about what that really means. Your Monday fish entree could be sitting around for four full days under varying conditions.
By Monday, that fish has been languishing for four days, and its quality ultimately depends on how vigilant the presiding chef was over the weekend, while refrigerators are constantly opened and closed during busy service. It’s hard to say for sure, but this isn’t exactly the fresh catch you might have imagined when you saw “catch of the day” on that chalkboard. According to Anthony Bourdain’s famous advice, if you order fish on Monday there’s a decent chance it was part of a seafood order for the weekend that wasn’t eaten on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, and four days is well past the point of a fresh filet.
Specials Are Really About Moving Inventory
Let’s be real about what “specials” actually mean in restaurant language. Gordon Ramsay said that specials are there to disappear throughout the evening, with chefs typically running specials to get rid of certain products. It’s not always sinister, honestly. Sometimes it’s perfectly innocent inventory management.
Specials are tricky in restaurants because while it could be the most fresh and delicious offering, in some restaurants specials are the way to clean up the fridge, as the chef can be trying to get rid of certain ingredients for a number of reasons, which with some establishments is a perfectly innocent action where the special might simply be something that the chef ordered too much of. Weekend leftovers often end up as the chef’s special or catch of the day, as rather than toss profitable inventory, the stuff that’s still in the kitchen on Sundays and Mondays is likely to get repurposed as a special so that it can still be sold rather than thrown out.
Monday Is the Chef’s Day Off
Here’s something most diners never consider. Monday is customarily a day off for chefs, so dining on that day gets you a weekend-weary staff without its head cook, and it’s also when you’ll possibly get older food from last week’s menu. Think about it. The most experienced person in the kitchen is probably at home, maybe nursing a well-deserved hangover or catching up on sleep.
When the A-team isn’t running the kitchen, you’re more likely to get dishes that don’t quite meet the restaurant’s usual standards. Generally speaking, the good stuff comes in on Tuesday when the seafood is fresh, the supply of prepared food is new, and the chef is presumably relaxed after his day off, since most chefs don’t work on Monday. The timing couldn’t be worse for quality control when you combine absent leadership with aging ingredients.
The Economics Behind Restaurant Waste
The restaurant industry spends an estimated $162 billion every year in costs related to wasted food. That’s an astonishing figure. Restaurants are businesses trying to minimize losses, and every piece of food that hits the garbage represents money literally thrown away.
Restaurants in the US waste between 22 and 33 billion pounds of food every year, with about 15% of all food that ends up in landfills generated by restaurants. To avoid adding to those mountains of waste, restaurants create specials designed to move ingredients before they spoil completely. Restaurateurs know that many diners will order the special and consequently they will raise the price, as everything in a restaurant is designed to minimize waste and maximize customer satisfaction which is a delicate line to balance.
Delivery Schedules Tell the Real Story
Tuesday is also when most eateries will be receiving their once or twice weekly deliveries of meat and produce, with the weekend’s leftovers having been cleaned out and meals prepared with ingredients at their peak. The supply chain reality shapes what ends up on your plate more than you might think.
When working in kitchens, restaurants would receive frozen and refrigerated products three times a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, while produce and fish deliveries arrived five days a week, Monday through Friday. So Monday morning might bring fresh deliveries for some items, but not necessarily the premium ingredients going into those evening specials. Timing matters enormously when it comes to food freshness.
The Soup of the Day Situation
While we’re talking about Monday specials, let’s touch on another classic menu trap. The soup of the day is one of the menu items Gordon Ramsay never orders at a restaurant, recommending asking your waiter what the soup was yesterday, as their answer can clue you into freshness, and if the specials over previous days were items like roast chicken and vegetables while today’s soup is chicken vegetable soup, that’s a big red flag that the kitchen is using older leftover ingredients.
Honestly, this makes perfect sense when you think about it. Soup is the easiest way to transform yesterday’s proteins and wilting vegetables into something presentable and profitable. It’s culinary recycling, which sounds better than it tastes.
When Specials Are Actually Special
Not every special is a warning sign, I should mention. Chefs do place legitimate items on the specials menu that they want to test as a trial dish ahead of a menu change, offering specials and tracking customer feedback is a great way to build a new menu, and chefs use specials to showcase their flair and creativity and can take pride in demonstrating their skills while sometimes chefs get a great price on an ingredient and use the opportunity to use the excess product while it is still fresh.
Specials showcase highly seasonal ingredients that practically can’t be on the regular menu year round. So there are legitimate reasons for specials beyond inventory clearance. The trick is knowing which restaurants you can trust and which ones are just trying to move aging fish on a Monday night.
Bourdain’s Retraction and Modern Changes
In an Insider Tech interview in 2016, Anthony Bourdain actually retracted his earlier sentiment on Monday fish nights, reflecting that the New York City market and restaurant scene was much different than it had been 16 years prior when he first wrote his article, while maintaining you should still be cautious if trying mussels on Monday at a local pub, noting that by and large people know more about food, eat a larger variety of fish, and expect more from restaurants than they did back in the day.
Bourdain explained that the restaurant landscape had transformed with food standards rising dramatically and diners expecting much higher quality across the board, using America’s love for sushi as an example, saying this change in standards meant restaurants could no longer get away with serving four-day-old fish, while noting that people now know what good fish should look like and smell like, with fish suppliers and restaurants raising their game to mean fresher seafood every day of the week. Things have improved, but that doesn’t mean every restaurant has caught up.
Tuesday Is Actually the Sweet Spot
Anthony Bourdain wrote that Tuesdays are the best day for dining out from his experience as a chef, noting the fish may be just as fresh on Friday but on Tuesday you’ve got the good will of the kitchen on your side, with chefs being their most creative at the start of the week when cooking for their local clientele, while weekends in New York City are for tourists and theater crowds.
Weekends are when restaurants will be the most crowded and when their kitchens and servers are at their most frazzled, while dining during the week, especially on laidback Tuesdays, is when you can expect the least wait and rush. The rhythm of restaurant operations favors mid-week diners who get fresher ingredients, more attentive service, and chefs who are still energized rather than exhausted.
How to Order Smart on Any Day
If you’re really after something fresh, ask your waiter if they can recommend a dish made with local ingredients or with ingredients that just arrived that day, and it never hurts to ask as long as you leave them a good tip. Servers usually know what came in that morning and what’s been lurking in the walk-in since last Thursday. Most are happy to steer you toward the genuinely good stuff if you ask directly.
Executive chef and owner Alberto Morreale of Farmer’s Bottega in San Diego said when he goes out to eat at other restaurants, he never orders the specials. When professionals who understand kitchen operations universally avoid something, that’s information worth paying attention to. These aren’t people being picky for no reason. They’ve seen behind the curtain and know how the sausage, quite literally, gets made.
What do you think about ordering specials on Monday now? Will this change how you order next time you’re dining out? Share your thoughts and experiences with restaurant specials in the comments below.
