New Beginnings: Healthier dining options for 2024

For many millions of Americans, a new year means New Year’s resolutions to eat healthy meals. While resolutions are notoriously short-lived, restaurants can help with this goal by offering good-for-you menu items. A healthy restaurant menu can help attract conscious diners of all varieties—from those simply looking to cut calories and embrace healthy eating to diners looking to combat obesity. So, want to learn how to create a healthy restaurant menu? It can be fun.

Eating healthy doesn’t have to be an exercise in asceticism and self-denial. Healthy cooking has been the norm for the majority of human history, and thus healthy menu items can look to tradition as well as modernity for inspiration. Further, in addition to advising on calorie counts, restaurants can look to provide a wide variety of nutrients to diners as well.

So, let’s look at how to create a healthy restaurant menu while having fun with it and making it delicious in modern America—all while keeping up with food trends.

Create healthy menu items

Good news! Creating healthy menu options has never been more possible, and there’s no need for compromise in flavor. While yes, you can offer homages to fast food like deep-fried everything, offering healthy food is an excellent all-round choice for restaurants. Even classic “unhealthy” foods like tacos can in fact be quite healthy when done right. It’s all in the preparation.

For quite some time now we’ve been banging the drum of fresh food sourced as locally as possible as the way forward for flavor. It’s also the way forward for health: Fresh, minimally processed food retains its nutrients more than ultra-processed food and further avoids the addition of unwanted preservatives, in addition to minimizing added salts and sugars.

Imagine grilled chicken breast tacos with fresh guacamole, for example, like you’d find at modern fast food Mexican chains like Chipotle. Ingredients would include chicken, spices, veggies like bell peppers and onions, whatever is in your salsa, wheat or corn and a source of fat in the tortillas, and avocados for the guacamole. Everything in that can be easily recognizable and would be something someone from 100 years ago would be familiar with.

For those seeking a vegetarian or vegan menu, look to legumes and whole grains as an excellent source of nutrition, especially protein, without adding ultra-processed meat alternatives to the dish. Lentils are exceptionally versatile and often underrated, and can find their way in all sorts of menus—from Mediterranean to Indian and much more. Quinoa exploded in popularity for a reason and is versatile as well as healthy. Black beans are always good news, as are chickpeas as in the form of hummus—one of the backbones of the Mediterranean diet.

Speaking of Mediterranean, the Mediterranean diet has been steadily gaining in popularity for many years. The diet, while sometimes high in fats, is known to help prevent heart disease while being delicious. We’re talking fresh fish, veggies, olive oil, whole cuts of meat, and a wide variety of soups and salads. Italian, Spanish, Greek, or southern French cuisine is full of traditional and tasty options that are healthy options and still delicious.

Consider the oils you use as well. Seed oils have gained a bad reputation in recent years—for better or worse—so advertising that you don’t use seed oils can attract certain audiences. Replacing your sautéed dishes with peanut oil or good ol’ butter instead of canola oil can make for fine marketing material while keeping your food healthy and tasting good. There’s currently a significant scientific debate as to whether or not omega-3 fatty acids are healthier than omega-6, especially in regards to inflammation. While information on omega-6 is still controversial, omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to reduce inflammation.

Since healthy food can be found in any genre, we’d simply like to repeat our mantra: fresh food with ingredients you recognize is healthy. The fresher, the better. Organic food may provide benefits as well, though this is up for debate as well. Consider a seasonal menu to fully access what’s locally available, healthiest, and freshest at the time of serving.

Offer healthier alternatives

A good way to up the health quotient of your menu is to offer healthier alternatives to traditional dishes. This can be something as simple as offering brown rice as an alternative to white rice, offering salads or other low-carbohydrate alternatives to french fries, and so on. Notably, doing so doesn’t require a whole revamp of your kitchen: You can simply offer alternative side dishes to entrées already on your menu as a way for guests to reduce their caloric intake. Offering non-starchy vegetables of any kind as a replacement for high-calorie meals can help diners on a low-carb diet.

Similarly, if you offer tacos like mentioned above, you can offer lettuce wraps instead of tortillas for further calorie cutting. Sandwiches can be served naked, i.e. without bread, as another meal option. This requires nothing more of your kitchen than simply serving slightly less. Gluten-free options like rice or, again, lettuce wraps are another viable option. A fajita burrito bowl is a fine example of a transition away from carb-heavy tortillas to somewhat lighter fare. Make sour cream optional for those looking to cut calories (even though it’s delicious).

Consider offering healthier options for appetizers. In place of buffalo wings, for example, cauliflower “wings” can be a popular and still delicious option. Veggie soups can make for a great starter and keep guests healthy while keeping costs down. Sweet potato fries can make a replacement for standard french fries, while offering a higher nutritional value.

Keep portions reasonable

The food service industry in the U.S. has a bad rap for bigger and bigger portion sizes. It does not have to be this way! If you notice diners are frequently asking for doggie bags for their leftovers, there’s a good chance you need to serve smaller portions. As Gordon Ramsay frequently points out in “Kitchen Nightmares,” if your diners are walking away with a whole extra meal, you’re serving too much.

Reducing portion size is the simplest way forward to reducing costs and calories. It also helps cut down on food waste as guests may indeed not opt to take leftovers home, leaving your kitchen staff to throw their hard work in the trash. An appalling 30-40% of food produced in the US is wasted, and a significant portion of that comes from restaurants. While you certainly don’t want diners to leave hungry, you don’t want them to have a silly amount of food remaining after they’re full.

Make your trends known

If you’re interested in making your menu healthy, you’ll want to get the word out. Eating out can be both a healthy and fun affair for guests, and if you can offer a reasonably healthy menu while keeping dishes delicious, you’ll be ahead of the curve. It can even help you save money to hit your KPIs.

Getting the word out and getting diners through the door is crucial, of course. And to do so, there are few better options than Yelp combined with Yelp Guest Manager. Yelp reaches 9x more consumers online than OpenTable*, meaning you have access to a huge swath of potential health-conscious diners. And restaurants that start using Guest Manager experience up to 2x the traffic on their Yelp Business Page**.

If you’re looking to boost your front-of-house game while improving your healthy options, look no further than Yelp Guest Manager. We’re talking fully customizable floor plans and seating options, push-button reservations, waitlists, and check-ins with two-way communication, and much more.

Sound like a healthy move for your business? Reach out to us for a free demo and we’ll get you headed in the right direction. A healthy restaurant making healthy food will keep guests coming back, especially if the service is done right. That’s where we aim to help—since every bit counts.