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You’re less likely to focus on an entree’s cost if dollar signs are omitted from the menu.

Experts reveal the sneaky strategies restaurants use to get you to spend more money.

Expect the Unexpected
We’ve all been there: You head out to dinner with a friend, a ballpark amount in mind that you want to spend. You have a great time, laughing and catching up, and before you know it, the wine is flowing, you’ve ordered the extra appetizer, that tasty-sounding special, and life is fantastic-until the check arrives, and it is double what you wanted it to be.

It’s not a coincidence.

Smart restaurant owners know how to boost their profits by using subtle strategies that encourage you to spend more. Here, a restaurant insider and a behavioral psychologist dish about these secrets, so you won’t fall for them.

Read more: How to Avoid a Costly Restaurant Bill

These culinary destinations around the world include Michelin-star splurges and street food.

To come up with our food-obsessive bucket list, we picked each other’s brains and combed our most trusted resources for countries and cities where food is not only a cause for national pride, but is also particularly lauded and loved by the world’s top critics, and is simultaneously accessible and enticing.

Read more: Restaurants To Try Before You Die

Franchises inspired by this model are picking up steam, but they’re also drawing a lot of heat.

As business models go, it’s all pretty straightforward: beer, fried food, and pretty girls who smile a lot and show some skin. And it’s successful, too. The ‘Hooters’ chain has made a lot of money that way, but so have a number of other chains. For evidence, see this story by Jason Daley, for Entrepreneur: ‘Breastaurants’ Ring Up Big Profits.

Franchises inspired by the Hooters model — such as Celtic-themed sports bar chain Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery and faux mountain sports lodge chain Twin Peaks — have expanded rapidly over the last half decade, while corporate-owned chains like Brick House Tavern + Tap and Bone Daddy’s House of Smoke are picking up steam regionally. In fact, for the next couple of years, this segment (often referred to as “breastaurants”) is poised to be one of the fastest-growing restaurant categories….

Read more: Beer, burgers, and pretty girls

A chef-school grad reveals seven crafty restaurant tricks that lure you to more expensive items

I am totally proud. My younger son Ezra recently graduated from the CIA. Not the government spy agency but the Culinary Institute of America. Based in Hyde Park, N.Y., it trains chefs and restaurant managers, and according to its website, is “recognized as the world’s premier culinary college with an industry-wide reputation for excellence.” I hope so, because, over the years, we paid a lot of tuition.

Ezra’s education, however, included mastering some skills almost as surreptitious as those employed by a secret agent. Example: Menu engineering, the topic of his honors thesis.

“The menu is the heart of the restaurant. It embodies the restaurant’s demographics, concept, physical factors and personality,” Ezra wrote in solid prose that is an obvious genetic inheritance from his mother. But don’t kid yourself. A menu, he confided to me in an exclusive interview, is also a sales vehicle, and many restaurants — smart ones — use it to get you to eat right. And, we’re not talking about your health, but about their profits.

Read more: Tricks of the Restaurant Trade: 7 Ways Menus Make You Spend

Noma restaurant’s unusual menu hasn’t stopped it from being named the planet’s top place to dine for two years.

Denmark’s Noma won one of the restaurant world’s highest accolades for the second consecutive year on Monday with a menu that remains deeply committed to an innovative Nordic cuisine.

Noma’s 33-year-old chef Rene Redzepi, whose restaurant topped the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list released late on Monday, has created a menu that includes sea urchin and dill, potatoes and milk skin, beef cheek and pear.

Redzepi, an ambassador for the New Nordic Food program set up by the Nordic Council of Ministers, has headed the restaurant since its 2003 opening.

The Noma approach to cooking is concentrated on obtaining the best raw materials from the Nordic region such as Icelandic skyr curd, halibut, Greenland musk ox and berries.

Read more: Pulses and sea urchin on menu at world’s top eatery

An ear-popping elevator ride and lofty views aren’t the only signs you’re in a “luxury yacht in the sky.

Dubai’s boom may have fizzled, but you can still live the high life perched atop the world’s tallest building as the glitzy Gulf emirate unveils one of the world’s highest restaurants.

Atmosphere, on the 122nd floor, is one private elevator ride up the glass and chrome Burj Khalifa.

Its designers say that Atmosphere, touted as the world’s highest restaurant, shows that Dubai may have lost its luster as a business hub after the financial crisis, but for those seeking the lifestyle of the rich and famous, it can still dish it out.

Read more: Dubai keeps aiming for skies with “highest” restaurant

“Bottomless” breadsticks, salads, pancakes, and fries are true diet disasters.

Remember the story of Hansel and Gretel? How the witch of the woods lured them into her edible candy hut and gave them piles and piles of free food—just so she could fatten them up and turn them into stew?

Well, think about that old fairy tale the next time a waiter drops a plate of “free” food on your table. For years I’ve been recommending the best foods to buy, and warning about menu items that might make you fat. But our newest Eat This, Not That! research reveals that some of the worst dietary sins aren’t ordered at all. They just come to your table for free!

Read more: The Worst “Free” Restaurant Food

An angry restaurant owner goes after a veteran Los Angeles Times restaurant writer.

For anyone who hasn’t been following along, here is the story of S. Irene Virbila, the veteran Los Angeles Times restaurant critic, and Noah Ellis, the Beverly Hills restaurateur who outed her.

It began Tuesday night. Virbila and several friends had been waiting 45 minutes for a table at Red Medicine, a new Vietnamese food joint where Ellis is a managing partner. Upon learning that Virbila, who had logged her reservation under another name, was indeed Virbila, he marched up to her, snapped a photograph, and asked her entire party to leave. She was banned.

Read more: Outed L.A. Times restaurant critic won’t stop writing reviews

An eatery with the “most fascinating pizza toppings on earth” is among the most notable places to nosh.

America’s food renaissance keeps expanding, in all kinds of creative directions—not all of them fancy. From a $20 million gamble in Manhattan to a desolate block in Oakland, our tireless food correspondent, Alan Richman, crisscrossed the country in search of the best and tastiest this land has to offer. Start booking those tables now!

Read more: GQ Eats: The 10 Best New Restaurants in America

The competition for meals packed with calories and fat was fierce this year.

When we published our first edition of Eat This, Not That: Worst Foods in America back in 2007, we made a lot of restaurant chains very unhappy. But we also made a lot of their attorneys really, really happy, as they soon began earning massive legal fees sending us saber-rattling correspondences on behalf of the food marketers they represented.

As 2010 draws to a close, it’s time for another walk down the Hall of Restaurant Shame. And we’re sorry to say that, despite the fact that more than 6 million Americans have begun using Eat This, Not That! as their weapon of choice against bad-for-you food and the restaurants that proffer it, the restaurants themselves still haven’t gotten the message. This year brought perhaps the craziest, most calorically damaging menu items we’ve ever seen. In fact, you should not attempt to eat a single thing on this list unless you are sharing it with at least three other people—because each of these “individual servings” include a full day (or more) worth of calories.

Read more: Worst Foods in America, 2010