Is takeout dying? The middle ground between the cost of eating out and cooking is disappearing

My house used to have Thai Tuesday.

We’d order takeout from our favorite local spot, happily trading time at the stove and a sink full of dishes for curries and noodles that arrived hot and delicious. At a little more than $10 a plate, it felt like a splurge — but a manageable one. An easy-to-rationalize indulgence on a random weeknight when everyone was tired and hungry, and no one wanted to talk about quinoa.

But Thai Tuesday has gone the way of free bread at restaurants and anyone but me changing the rolls of toilet paper at my house. Not because we stopped loving Thai food, but because dinner now comes with a side of financial anxiety. As someone who loves to eat and try new restaurants, but who also loves paying her (thankfully-locked-in-at-2.5%) mortgage on time, I keep coming back to that age-old question, but for different reasons these days: What’s for dinner?

Ordering takeout used to feel like opting out of effort. Lately, it feels like opting into credit card debt. I do the quiet mental math while waiting in drive-thru lines: $13 meals times four people adds up to nearly $60 for my family’s beloved Good Times burgers and fries.

And that’s just for fast food. Somewhere along the way, the dinner middle ground disappeared. Picking up to-go food from the local Chinese spot or even Chipotle was once the compromise between cooking at home and sitting down at a restaurant. It cost a little more than a home-cooked meal, but not so much that it felt out of reach. But now it’s adding up.

I’ve had this conversation with pretty much everyone I know lately. A friend tells me her Chick-fil-A lunch ran $16. Someone else grabbed drinks and appetizers at The Cherry Cricket and left $60 lighter. Scroll Denver Food Reddit for five minutes, and you’ll find the requisite “Can you believe this sandwich cost $20?” thread.

Dinner choices, like so many things right now, feel increasingly stratified. There’s the cheapish and labor-intensive cooking at home and stretching leftovers, or the takeout/eating out experience that’s increasingly expensive. What’s missing is that once-reliable in-between option that made weeknights easier without blowing the budget. Middle-ground food, like the middle class itself, feels like it’s slipping away.

Takeout used to be the pressure valve, the thing that kept us from burning out after returning from work, out of energy and willpower. Too tired to cook? Too broke for a sit-down restaurant? No problem, have some takeout tacos. But lately, even fast-casual feels like a decision you have to justify.

How did that happen? Not because restaurants suddenly got greedy, or because we all collectively broke Apple Wallet when money stopped feeling real. It’s not like restaurant owners banded together at their Annual Restaurant Owner Meeting and decided to spike prices for the heck of it. I don’t see the owner of my local pizzeria driving around town in a Ferrari.

If anything, it was inevitable. Restaurants are dealing with the same things the rest of us are — runaway rents, soaring food costs and, at least in Denver, a tipped minimum wage that’s nearly $5 higher per hour than that in notoriously expensive New York City. And all of this is happening in an industry that’s always operated on famously thin margins.

Unsurprisingly, a 2025 Expert Market Food & Beverage Industry Report, which surveyed restaurant professionals, found that 85% believe labor issues affect their business, with more than half pointing to wages and benefits as the single biggest threat to profitability. To cope, nearly two-thirds have raised prices. Almost one in five have raised them significantly.

So, yeah, this is why the math stops working at mealtime. A recent Newsweek article called the food and beverage sector “the canary in the coal mine,” one of the first sectors where economic anxiety shows up when people start tightening their belts. Which means that that $20 pad thai could be just the beginning.

The real loss isn’t any one dish or restaurant, but the ease of it all. Thai Tuesday didn’t disappear at my house because it stopped being good; it disappeared because it stopped being reasonable. The middle ground it occupied ghosted us, along with the idea that a weeknight meal could be both convenient and affordable.

Tonight, “What’s for dinner?” is about more than just food. It’s about time, money, burnout and what we’re willing to give up. Cooking means more work. Eating out means more money. And somewhere between the fridge and the menu board, we’re realizing, often with a side of sticker shock, that the way we eat now says as much about the economy as it does about our appetites.

Allyson Reedy is a Denver-area freelance writer, cookbook author and novelist. She is also a former Denver Post food writer. Food, Honestly is a monthly column discussing how people actually eat right now – not through reviews or recipes, but through real talk about cost, convenience and everyday food decisions.