Social media is rife with “hacks” for all of life’s challenges. From separating eggs to cleaning toilets, there’s a genius trick (or a hundred) for that.
A recent spate of TikTok videos have offered hacks for saving money at restaurants — and (spoiler alert) they are mostly people ordering from the kids’ menu.
Some of them focus on Olive Garden, where generous portions (and those breadsticks), along with frequent freebie add-ons, are a draw, offering budget-minded diners an alternative to fast food. Late last month, TikToker Somer Agnor shared the $7 full meal she picked up curbside from the Italian chain, which included pasta and a side of broccoli, a drink, two breadsticks, and a salad. The salad isn’t normally included, she said, “but they always bring one out to me.”
“I love doing this because sometimes I’m just sick of drive-through food,” she says in a video that has been viewed more than 1.2 million times.
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A former Olive Garden server posted a video that’s been seen 3.7 million times offering an idea for getting even more food for your buck when ordering off the kids’ menu (meaning it’s a hack within a hack?): Order a fettuccine Alfredo with chicken, then choose the pasta side and swap the regular marinara for another Alfredo with chicken. “It is the same size as the adult portion, and cheaper,” he promises.
Ashley Garrett describes herself on TikTok as a “kids meal connoisseur,” and the Orlando-based influencer offers not so much hacks as a lifestyle. Almost every night, she orders dinner off the kids’ menu at one of the dozens of chain restaurants in her area. Until earlier this year, her Instagram posts and TikTok videos had mostly focused on general lifestyle topics or Disney tips. But when she posted about one of her kids’ menu dinners in February, she was surprised at the reaction. “It really took off,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting it — when you do something that’s as natural as showering to you, you don’t realize that other people might be interested.”
Since then, Garrett — who says the routine is time- and cost-effective, because it allows her to save on groceries and skip meal preparation — has collected millions of views for videos in which she shares her adventures in kids’ menu dining. She analyzes restaurants’ offerings, looking for quality and generous portions. One of the most important factors that will garner a restaurant a good review from her is the ability to customize the order: a good selection of side dishes or options for picking burger toppings, for example. Carrabba’s Italian Grill and Bonefish Grill are at the bottom of her list, she says (limited choices on drinks and sides, plus small portions); recent favorites have included Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, where there’s a choice of 14 sides and the prices are either $4.99 or $5.99.
Adult diners ordering from the kids’ menu isn’t new, but the pandemic-born ubiquity of online ordering and curbside pickup has made it easier for grown-ups to skirt any side eye they might have gotten from servers skeptical of people ordering food designated for the 12-and-under set when there’s not a kid in the party.
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And there’s more reason than ever for diners to look for ways to save. David Henkes, a senior analyst at the market research firm Technomic, notes that restaurant prices are rising, leaving cash-strapped customers eating out less frequently — and looking for bargains when they do. Henkes says the restaurant industry is relying on higher price tags to stay stable, while customers pay the price. “Consumers are changing their behaviors — frequency of visits is down, and they’re moderating what they do when they go out,” he says.
Prices aside, some diners just want smaller portions — Garrett says people from the weight-loss-surgery community, who can’t eat large quantities of food at one sitting, are a vocal subset of her supportive commenters.
But even if you want to order from the kids’ menu, the question remains: Should you?
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“It’s a little tacky,” Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema says. The topic comes up every so often in his weekly reader chats, where diners seek recommendations and counsel for restaurant etiquette quandaries. “Restaurants are businesses, and businesses need to make money,” he says. “If someone is trying to spend less or eat less, it’s better to order one or two appetizers.”
He is a hard “no” on grown-ups ordering from the kids’ menu while dining on-site, because it takes waitstaff just as much time to serve a smaller portion as it does a regular-size one. Takeout, though, could be another matter, Sietsema says.
Share this articleShareGreat American Restaurants CEO Jon Norton also isn’t a fan of the practice. At his restaurants, which include nearly 20 locations in Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland, the items on the kids’ menus are priced lower with the hope of enticing families, including moms and dads who will order full-size entrees — and maybe an extra appetizer or a glass of wine. “They are a loss leader similar to happy hour pricing,” Norton says.
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But not all restaurants structure their prices that way. David Hopkins, a longtime restaurant manager who is now the president of the Fifteen Group, a consulting agency aimed at helping restaurants maximize profits, says kids’ food can be profitable, even if it doesn’t amount to much.
He says that to a restaurant, every dollar of revenue is gold — even the less than $10 customers might shell out for a meal from the kids’ menu. Consider, he says, that once a restaurant opens its doors, its costs (rent, utilities, staff and the like) are mostly fixed. The only additional costs it will incur are the cost of the product and a small percentage for credit card sales. As long as restaurants price their kids’ meals to cover that — which he says isn’t too hard, as most don’t involve expensive ingredients — they will still come out ahead.
A restaurant could theoretically lose out on the money a diner might have spent ordering a more expensive adult-size entree — but for many diners, the decision isn’t between an adult- or a kid-size meal, it’s between a takeout kids’ dinner at a restaurant and a fast-food order.
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That’s exactly the calculation Garrett makes. She has encountered critics, “haters,” she calls them, who say she’s stealing from restaurants. “The way I look at it, there’s no way I could do this if I was spending $20 a day for the adult-sized portion. So does the restaurant want my 8 or 10 dollars, or does it want zero?”
Even if a menu states that it’s for kids — and some specify that means 12 or under — few restaurants will enforce that policy.
In one TikTok video, Garrett explains that not once in her history of ordering kids’ meals for herself for takeout has she been questioned about it, even at places that specify an age limit. That might be, she says, because by the time she has arrived for pickup, she has already paid, and some restaurants can’t easily refund someone who has paid through their app. The person handing over her boxed-up meal might not even know its contents, she notes. And besides, she says, there’s no way for a restaurant to know whether she is, in fact, planning to serve the meal to a child.
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Sietsema says the restaurateurs he has talked to say it’s not worth the ill will they might engender by denying an order. “They’re in the hospitality business, after all,” he notes.
And although kids’ menus are getting attention on social media at the moment, it’s not likely that even millions of eyeballs on videos will translate to a shift in dining patterns that restaurants will feel in a meaningful way, experts say.
Henkes says restaurants might be concerned about rising orders from kids’ menus, but only because it indicates that consumers are feeling financially pinched. “It could be a yellow flag for understanding your patrons’ financial situation,” he says. “If you see a big uptick in kids menu sales, it might tell you your patrons are worried.”
Hopkins agrees that the impact of #kidsmenu trends isn’t something restaurant owners should lose sleep over. “It’s not the end of the world,” he says. “Things get blown up online, but a small, tiny percentage of people are actually participating.”
And many restaurants see the viral videos — even those aimed at saving customers money — as boons. The adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity endures in the age of TikTok, Henkes says: “Restaurants are secretly pleased with some of these social media hacks because it keeps their brands top of mind.”
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