#1 French onion soup with a big piece of toast and melted cheese on top. ‘70s.
Image source: mbw70, chandlervid85
#2 Crepes as an entree were popular in the 70s, filled with chicken or crabmeat in a sauce.
Image source: Uvabird, mdjaff
#3 Beef Wellington, at pricier restaurants. Hard to find now, but not too hard to make at home for the right occasion.
Image source: newleaf9110, Nadin Sh
#4 No one has mentioned bread being served before meals, always. Or a basket of crackers at family restaurants. Salad bars were all the craze. Nice restaurants to Wendy’s. Salad bars everywhere!
Image source: eastcoastme, Vidal Balielo Jr.
#5 For a while, there was a massive advertising effort for Bacon. People started talking about their love of bacon like it was a unique personality trait. Restaurants were serving everything with bacon, chicken wrapped in bacon, bacon ice cream, bacon doughnuts, bbb— bacon bacon and bacon sandwich.
Image source: airckarc, Nicolas Postiglioni At a business dinner, someone would order something with bacon, and everyone would just go on about bacon. It was strange to me because I’ve always thought bacon was pretty good, but not something I really needed to share with others. Like many foods- ice cream, hamburgers… bacon has always seemed to be an American staple that most people enjoyed. I didn’t understand why people were suddenly acting like it was a new product. Bacon has now seemed to move back to where it had been.
#6 Potato skins were pretty big in the 80s.
Image source: bg370, anetode
#7 Quiche, In the late 70s and the 80s. Every fern bar restaurant like TGI Fridays featured quiche, and people were cooking quiche. The popularity of quiche even inspired the title of the book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. That book inspired the humorous meme of “Real Men Don’t (fill in the blank)” Salad bars. In the 80s every restaurant had one, even some fast food burger places like Wendy’s.
Image source: MarshmallowSoul, Mike Bird
#8 Please travel back in time with me, to the SIXTIES, and let’s talk about baked potato “fixins” being brought to your table in that thing with connected metal bowl. Sour cream? Coming up! And it was spun around to that bowl so the server could spoon it into your potato. Ditto cheese and bacon bits. And ditto salad dressings, served the same way, including the rarely-seen (but then popular) Thousand Island and Roquefort dressings.
Image source: ronmimid, KamranAydinov
#9 Oysters Rockefeller. Cherries Jubilee. Meatloaf. Chicken Cordon Bleu.
Image source: not-your-mom-123, Rachel Claire
#10 This is an ice cream flavor but man I miss a good Rocky Road Ice Cream. ?.
Image source: Superb-Fail-9937, stu_spivack
#11 Chocolate mousse in a stem goblet. It was my favorite thing about eating out as a kid in the 80’s . ? Then at some point it was all crappy frozen chocolate cake.
Image source: Organic_Bookkeeper32, Ella Olsson
#12 Bananas Foster and the whole tableside performance flambé craze I remember from the 70s. Maybe some places still offer that? I’ve not seen it on a menu in forever.
Image source: Careless_Ocelot_4485, vxla
#13 Tiramisu was the go-to fancy dessert at every possible restaurant for a while.
Image source: GraceStrangerThanYou, Melanie Dompierre
#14 Monte Cristo Sandwiches? Reuben Sandwiches? Are they still a big deal?
Image source: Lelabear, freepik
#15 Steak Diane. Particularly, made the correct old school way, flambéed tableside.
Image source: MooPig48, Gonzalo Guzman
#16 Fondue.
Image source: sretep66, Michael Pointner
#17 Around 1980, seems like every restaurant had fried zucchini and fried mozzarella sticks as appetizers.
Image source: Intelligent-Rip-2270, Shameel mukkath
#18 Prime rib was huge back in the day.
Image source: IGotRoks, azerbaijan_stockers
#19 I will submit Swedish meatballs, which I actually just got done making for dinner. Idk if it died out, but I never see it on the menu anywhere.
Image source: dimestoredavinci, Rachel Claire
#20 Orange Roughy the fish……It turned out that the fish were incredibly old-up to 200 years old-and they are almost fished to extinction.
Image source: Gl3g, Jan Dvorak A great Reddit link to it….
#21 Nobody serves beef stroganoff anymore.
Image source: mynameisranger1, Nano Erdozain
#22 Prawn cocktail.
Image source: Fast-typist, chandlervid85
#23 I can’t think of a specific dish but there was a period in the 90s when pesto was EVERYWHERE and so were roasted red peppers. ??♀️.
Image source: Professor-genXer, Thiea Alhoz
#24 Baked Alaska.
Image source: SirWarm6963
#25 Blackened everything. It seemed like chefs were working overtime to figure out what they could make in a Cajun blackened version.
Image source: igotplans2, Engin Akyurt
