Mimi’s Cafe’s Just Enough Lunch menu features options such as Parmesan Crusted Chicken Breast, Chicken, Fruit and Baby Greens Salad and a Blackened Chicken Caesar Wrap.

Several years ago, Tustin, Calif.-based Mimi’s Cafe began to notice a decline in the number of guests who took leftovers home. The 134-unit chain also saw more guests routinely splitting their entrées.

“We have two tiers of eaters,” explains Lowell Petrie, vice president of marketing. “We have our core eater who is looking for the larger portions. That’s what our tradition and history is based on. But as eating habits change and our demographics skew toward females, [our guests] are looking for smaller portions.”

In response, the company added “Small Bites,” a menu section featuring modestly sized salads and quiches. Positive feedback led to the recent launch of Just Enough Lunch and Just Enough Dinner promotions, which offer smaller entrées for a couple of dollars less than core menu entrées. Although guests aren’t dissuaded from ordering Chicken Cordon Bleu, which contains 1,360 calories, they also can opt for the 630-calorie Grilled Chicken Bowl. “We’re trying to adapt,” Petrie says.

Smaller portions can mean lower check averages, but increased guest frequency prompted by the availability of smaller-portion options can more than make up the sales difference. The year-old Right Portion, Right Price program at Carrollton, Texas-based T.G.I. Friday’s accounts for 15% of Friday’s sales. At Mimi’s, although menu prices for the Just Enough Lunch and Just Enough Dinner items are lower than those for full-sized items, the promotion has been worthwhile for the concept, says Petrie.

Caprese salad at Second Story within Belamar Hotel in Manhattan Beach, Calif.

Guests at Mimi’s who gravitate toward smaller portions might be influenced by this decade’s surge in openings of tapas-style restaurants and wine bars serving smaller plates of food. The trend offers an ideal opportunity for a full range of operations to menu smaller, more diverse items. In October, when the National Restaurant Association asked more than 1,000 members of the American Culinary Federation to evaluate menu trends, 73% of respondents ranked small plates, tapas and mezze as “hot.”

According to Nathan Tanner, vice president of restaurants for Larkspur, Calif.-based Larkspur Hotels & Restaurants, small plates also have a steady consumer following.

“People love that they can get tastes and samples of the menu,” says Tanner, who finds small-plate menus particularly attractive to hotel guests seeking lighter fare between their engagements. “We’re finding that, for a lot of diners, they’re not coming to us all of the time for the whole meal,” he says. “They’re coming to us for an entrée, then they’ll go somewhere else.”

Executive Chef Chris Lusk found this to be true at Café Adelaide and The Swizzle Stick Bar within Loews New Orleans Hotel. Guests often arrived looking for a cocktail and appetizers before going out on the town. To respond to the demand, “We didn’t reinvent the menu,” Lusk says. “We just added small plates.”

Small plates make up the menu at Estéban in Monterey, Calif., a Larkspur Hotels & Restaurants property.

There are signs that entrée sizes are shrinking—many concepts that have opened within the last few years have served moderately sized portions from the start.

Located in an upscale mall in downtown San Francisco, Lark Creek Steak’s clientele is fashion-conscious and 50% female. Though the restaurant offers 16-ounce steaks, the top sellers are the smallest options: a 6-ounce filet and a 9-ounce New York strip.

“We are looking at ways so that when we put items on our menu, we’re offering the right size rather than food piled on a plate,” says Michael Dellar, president and CEO of Lark Creek Restaurant Group, the San Francisco-based multiconcept parent of Lark Creek Steak. Although expanded availability of healthful options can be seen as a corollary of serving smaller portions, most restaurants prefer to promote the idea that they’re providing choices, not dictating diets. “It’s the idea of having choices and letting people feel a little bit in control,“ Dellar says.

Yet for smaller portions to be successful, they need to be distinctive. This can translate into dishes that require longer-than-average prep time. Lusk admits that adding small plates to Café Adelaide’s menu has meant more prep work for his staff.

Scott Boberek, executive chef at The Sky Lodge in Park City, Utah, hires a second line cook at Easy Street, the hotel’s casual restaurant, to handle the grill station during the busy ski season. This year, the move allowed him to offer three 2-ounce sliders made from a choice of ground duck, bison, lamb or beef as a slightly lighter change from a standard 8-ounce burger. The more exotic sliders made up in flavor what they lost in heft.

“We’re getting repeat diners—they come in today for the sliders; they come in tomorrow for the spaghetti carbonara,” Boberek says.

But restaurants that reduce portion sizes, maintain similar prices and elect not to add interesting new dishes on the menu might miss the mark with diners.

“Too many people approach portion control from the approach of saving money,” Tanner says. “To me, it’s about giving guests a consistent product. The cost benefits are a byproduct. Any time you initiate it from a cost-cutting perspective, it’s a mistake.”

Dellar agrees. “Part of it is not cutting back on what people are accustomed to,” he says. “You have to stick to your guns and be true to your concept, serving portions that people expect.”

To get the most mileage out of smaller portions, operators need to determine the portion sizes with which their guests are most comfortable. As part of its customer surveys, Larkspur Hotels & Restaurants asks guests whether their menu portions were satisfactory.

There’s also a classic, low-tech method for monitoring how well portion sizes are meeting expectations. Says Boberek: “Sometimes a chef needs to stand back, watch the dishes coming back into the kitchen and see what’s left.”