You sit down at a restaurant, scan the menu, and immediately reach for the usual suspects. The eggs Benedict. The lobster roll. The truffle something-or-other. It all feels so right. So celebratory. So worth it.
Here’s the thing though – the very people who cook these dishes for a living are often the ones quietly skipping them. Chefs, culinary school instructors, and restaurant insiders have strong, sometimes surprising opinions about what’s actually worth ordering. Professional chefs have insider knowledge and very strong opinions about what menu items you should avoid at restaurants, and some of their answers are pretty surprising. So before you default to the familiar, let’s see what the pros are really thinking. Let’s dive in.
1. Eggs Benedict: A Brunch Classic With a Hidden Risk
Eggs Benedict has long been the crown jewel of the weekend brunch table. Toasted English muffin, silky poached egg, generous drizzle of hollandaise – it sounds almost impossible to mess up. Honest truth? It’s easier to mess up than almost anything else on the menu.
Hollandaise sauce is one of the unhealthiest menu items at some restaurants, not only due to the excess calories it can add to a meal, but also because it comes with a certain health risk. If the hollandaise is left at the incorrect temperature, the raw egg yolks contained within can go bad, potentially resulting in a bad case of salmonella-related food poisoning.
Cooks often pre-poach dozens of eggs during morning prep, then quickly reheat them in warm water when orders come in. The result? Overcooked, rubbery eggs that would make any chef cringe. A classic dish turned cautionary tale, especially during a heaving Saturday brunch rush.
2. Grilled Chicken Breast: The Menu Filler That Rarely Delivers
It’s on every single menu. Every. Single. One. The grilled chicken breast – a perennial placeholder for people who “want something light.” Culinary insiders, however, see it very differently.
Chicken breast is a staple on many menus, but it’s so easy to get wrong. The problem is that chicken breast is often under-seasoned and overcooked. Many chefs, including the legendary Anthony Bourdain, have called chicken a “chore for cooks to make” – it just doesn’t get the passion and attention that more exciting proteins receive.
Chicken breasts are the most common part to overcook, as thighs and other dark meat are more forgiving and less likely to dry out, because they contain more fat. So next time, consider asking for the thigh. It’s not a compromise. It’s actually the smarter, tastier call.
3. The Soup of the Day: Yesterday’s Leftovers, Today’s Special
A warm bowl of soup feels comforting, almost nostalgic. The server recites it with such confidence, too. But what’s really inside that pot is where things get uncomfortable.
Ordering the “Soup of the Day” is code in the hospitality industry for “the back of the house is trying to get rid of its walk-in inventory from the weekend before vendor deliveries come in for the following week,” according to chef Michael DeLone of Nunzio restaurant in Collingswood, New Jersey.
The famous chef Gordon Ramsay is very clear about avoiding ordering the soup in a restaurant, namely because it can be a canny way for chefs to use up old ingredients. Plus, restaurants have a tendency to serve their soup of the day several days in a row. This is done to decrease food waste, but it can result in you ordering a fairly expensive dish that’s neither special nor fresh.
4. The House Salad: Uninspired and Overpriced
Ordering the house salad feels virtuous. It also, in the eyes of most culinary professionals, feels like a waste of a restaurant visit. Think about it – you’re paying real money for something you could assemble at home in under five minutes.
Los Angeles-based executive chef Kayson Chong of The Venue says he stays away from the house salad when dining out. “I prefer to have something special that a chef created with seasonal products and interesting combinations. I like experiencing new and exciting things to eat when I go to other restaurants, not something I can find easily anywhere.”
Often, salads have a high price tag. “When you go to a restaurant and just want some leafy greens and vegetables, and they’re charging you $14-16 for a bunch of Sysco pre-cut tasteless carrots and pre-cooked chicken, it’s ridiculous,” one chef noted. Hard to argue with that math.
5. Pasta at Non-Italian Restaurants: Beautiful Markup, Basic Execution
There is something deeply seductive about a pasta dish on a restaurant menu. The generous twirl. The glossy sauce. The promise of pure comfort. The reality, according to chefs, is often far less glamorous – and far more expensive than it deserves to be.
Spaghetti, fettuccine, or penne is common on non-Italian restaurant menus, yet pasta dishes are often overpriced, especially if you calculate the cost of ingredients. Marcus Mooney, executive chef of Seattle Sutton’s Healthy Eating, says he once worked for an Italian restaurant group in Chicago where they were charging $20 for a plate of rigatoni with marinara sauce that cost just $1 to make. He can’t bring himself to pay that much knowing what’s involved.
Chef Ryan Jones, co-founder and executive chef of Free Reign Restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina, often hesitates to order pasta at a restaurant due to the relatively high prices, noting that the pasta is typically made with dry pasta instead of fresh and prices can reach as high as $38. That is a lot to pay for something that started its life in a cardboard box.
6. Avocado Toast: The Trend That Outlived Its Welcome
Few dishes in recent culinary history have inspired more eye-rolls per square inch than avocado toast. It had a spectacular run. At a certain point, though, even its most loyal fans started wondering if they’d been had.
Avocado toast had one of the most remarkable runs in modern food culture. It went from health-café curiosity to restaurant staple to cultural punchline in under a decade. Now, even chefs are questioning its staying power.
Slicing or mashing up avocado and serving it on top of a piece of toast has become commonplace on breakfast and brunch menus, and even at the local coffee shop, with a hefty price tag. Chef-instructor Richard LaMarita of the Institute of Culinary Education’s New York City campus describes it as “so popular but so overdone, uninspired and uncreative, and so expensive.” This simple meal is easy to make at home with just two ingredients: avocado and toast.
7. The Lobster Roll: Premium Price, Questionable Value
The lobster roll carries an almost mythic status on restaurant menus. It signals luxury. It signals summer. It signals, frankly, that you’re about to spend a lot of money. Whether that money is justified is something chefs openly debate.
That buttery lobster roll looks like the ultimate indulgence, but many chefs see it as a trap. It’s true that the labor involved in prepping it is significant, but the other ingredients are cheap – which means you’re often paying a high price for the experience rather than the ingredients.
Chef Evan Hennessey of Stages at One Washington in Dover, New Hampshire, puts it plainly: he likes lobster, but not enough to justify the cost of a $40-50 lobster roll. He acknowledges there’s labor involved in harvesting and prepping lobster, but notes that the rest of the ingredients cost very little. He feels people have become used to paying higher prices without questioning them, saying “the market has been driven so high that people are willing to pay astronomical amounts without blinking.”
8. Truffle Everything: When a Luxury Ingredient Goes Synthetic
Walk into almost any mid-range restaurant in the past decade and you’d have found truffles on something. Truffle fries. Truffle pasta. Truffle butter. Truffle aioli. At a certain point, truffle stopped being a luxury and started being a marketing tactic.
Chef Chuck Valla, owner of Valla Table, noted that he doesn’t think truffles taste any better than dried shiitake mushrooms, while chef Sarabjit Singh Assi of Sanjh Restaurant and Bar warned that “the obsession with truffle mushrooms, especially when synthetic truffle oil is being used, overpowers dishes, lacks nuance and often masks what could have been great ingredients.”
When chefs themselves are calling a signature menu move overrated, diners tend to agree and stop ordering it. I think that’s worth sitting with for a moment. If the professionals are bored of it, maybe the rest of us should be too.
9. The Plant-Based Burger: A Trend in Sharp Retreat
Not long ago, the plant-based burger felt genuinely revolutionary. It arrived with serious hype, serious celebrity backing, and a sense that meat alternatives had finally crossed the taste threshold that consumers demanded. That confidence has since taken a significant hit.
According to SPINS data analyzed by the Good Food Institute, US retail sales of most plant-based categories were down in 2024 against a backdrop of rising sales for conventional meat. Sales of plant-based meat and seafood specifically dropped roughly seven percent to $1.2 billion in 2024, with unit sales falling an even steeper eleven percent. The decline wasn’t a blip.
What dazzles diners one year can quietly fade into irrelevance the next, and chefs across the country are watching it happen in real time. According to a Menu Matters survey of consumers, the overriding need for 2025 was simply “just give me something new.” The plant-based burger, it seems, is no longer new enough.
10. The Daily Specials Board: Creativity or Clearance?
The specials board has a certain romance to it. You imagine the chef waking up inspired, heading to the farmers’ market at dawn, and crafting something brilliant by noon. Reality, according to many culinary insiders, is rather more pragmatic than poetic.
Executive chef Alberto Morreale of Farmer’s Bottega in San Diego says he never orders the specials when eating out at other restaurants. “Some restaurants put together their specials for the day based on what’s about to expire or what they’re trying to get rid of faster.” That’s not inspiration – that’s inventory management.
There are a few reasons why something might end up as a special. It could be because the chef is simply experimenting with a new dish, or because they wanted to make something seasonal. But in many cases, there is a pretty boring reason why something ends up as a special: the ingredients were approaching their use-by date. Worth asking your server a few pointed questions before you commit.
