15-05-2025
Half puds? Tiny plates? How Ozempic has changed restaurant menus
The other week, I suffered a minor bout of food poisoning — nothing too serious, but certainly enough to dent my usual enthusiasm for eating. It was unfortunate timing because, that evening, I was due to sit down to a ten-course tasting menu cooked by a celebrated chef and it was not something I felt I could duck out of. So I put on a brave face, took a tiny forkful of each dish and sent the rest back to the kitchen largely uneaten.
This is going to be awkward, I thought, expecting the chef, or waiter at least, to ask if everything had been all right. But no. Silence. They took away the plates without a murmur, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to spend £250 on dinner and barely touch a morsel. 'It's obvious, isn't it?' my wife said as we left. 'They just assumed you are on Ozempic.'
Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro — however we know the new class of GLP-1 appetite-suppressing drugs, they are already changing our relationship with food, and with ministers exploring how they can be accessed more widely, their influence is only going to grow. First to feel the pinch? Restaurants, which have already noticed the subtle effects on their bottom line. Chefs are having to reconsider their menus and diners are trying to establish the new codes of etiquette that their reduced appetites require.
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The restaurateur Jonathan Downey, who has just opened Town restaurant on Drury Lane in central London with the chef Stevie Parle, says that they 'absolutely design dishes specifically for the Mounjaro generation'. The common complaint among restaurateurs is that no one orders pudding any more, so they have their 'skinny slice puddings' such as half-sized portions of chocolate tart, single scoop servings of sorbet and individual spiced doughnuts.
More tellingly, they have made main courses available in smaller portions. 'When you are taking Mounjaro it's important to maintain muscle mass, so the focus is on getting enough protein even when your appetite is reduced,' Downey says. 'It used just to be gym bunnies who were obsessed with that, but now it's middle-aged mums and dad-bod men too.' At Town they serve a butterflied sea bass just with lemon, oil and salt, available as a whole or half fish, and 200g steaks as opposed to a more regular-sized 350g one. Cynics might say it's a way of reducing portion size to keep prices down, but Downey says not. 'It sits with the times. We thought we were just giving people more options, but it turns out to be part of the zeitgeist. You have to give people what they want.'
What the Ozempic diner really, really wants, though, is the chance to eat less without signposting it to one and all. Hence the return of the small sharing plate. These were popular before, of course, but after the pandemic they were disappearing in favour of longer, no-choice set menus as restaurateurs tried to push up the average spend. Now it's a brave restaurant that forces so much food on a customer. Even the smaller steaks and pork chops at Town arrive at the table already sliced to make sharing easier, and a dish of five asparagus spears draped with slices of lardo was quickly reconfigured, Downey says, to have each spear individually wrapped 'so people could divide it up more easily'.
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The Times critic Giles Coren has quickly seen the effects. 'It used just to be rich women who never ate anything in restaurants, but now it's all the men too,' he says. 'I met a friend the other day and he was looking a bit gaunt, and I asked if he was on Ozempic and he just laughed and said, 'Of course I bloody am.' Absolutely everyone I know is.
'I love a sharing plate, because it means you can spread yourself across more of the menu,' he adds, 'but the whole point is that you get lots of them. And as soon as you start ordering, your Ozempic mates go, 'Stop, stop, I can't possibly eat all that.' And I'm thinking, but I've only ordered some ham and half a dozen clams. That's going to make for a hell of a boring review.'
At least he knows where he stands when his companion is upfront about it. Much more irritating are those people who try to hide their Ozempic habit in plain sight. 'I've got friends who, for whatever reason, don't want to admit they are taking the jab,' says another regular restaurant-goer. 'So they order loads of sharing plates to make a big show of how hungry they are and then push a salad around their plate and hope that someone else will do the heavy lifting. The trouble is, half the table are probably secretly in the same position and you just end up ordering way too much food, and it all goes to waste.'
Gareth Birchley, buying director at Burns & German Vintners, who took Ozempic for six months last year, takes the view that honesty is the best way. 'People can be very cagey about it, but I think it's best to be open with your friends and the restaurant,' he says. He spends much of his time eating out with clients and hates the idea of spoiling his relationship with some of the country's best chefs. He recalls a low point in the private dining room of the three-Michelin-star restaurant Hélène Darroze at the Connaught. 'It was kind of embarrassing only being able to eat one mouthful of each course, but at least because I had been honest about the reason it made it less awkward.' In the end he came off the drug when his weight plateaued. 'I wasn't losing more weight, I wasn't having much fun and I was shelling out £400 a month. It wasn't a hard decision to make.'
Luckily for his line of work, he didn't feel sick drinking alcohol, which is a side-effect for many, but it did curb his intake. 'The obvious factor is that if you are not consuming so much food, you can't drink as much.' This is another headache that badly hits restaurants' margins.
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'Last year the typical restaurant revenue split between food and drink was 55:45, but now it's more like 60:40,' Downey says. 'We know people aren't drinking so much.' He has countered this by offering more wines by the glass and carafe and introducing a range of smaller-serve cocktails, such as half-measure martinis. He has also introduced a new category called 'chargers', served in small glasses as aperitifs. The restaurateur Jeremy King has introduced something similar at the Park, in Queensway, with his small-serve 'sharpeners'.
For the time being, GLP-1s are a rich person's drug, so it is only the more upmarket restaurants that are noticing the changes. However, as the drug becomes more widely used, as it inevitably will, it's going to be the mid-market chains and fast food shops that will be next in the firing line. Anyone fancy going halves on a Chicken McNugget?
