When you finish a plate clean in a fine-dining restaurant, does that make you look starved and classless? Should you leave at least some amount of it?

I eat with my customers at fairly “fine dining” places all the time. I’m talking maybe $35 ~ $50 per meal without drinks, but the presentation is outstanding.

The problem is that the amount of food served in order to make the beautiful presentation is also outstanding. This is fine if it is one night, but when we have to eat like this five or six nights in a row, it gets ay too much.

I always tell the customers that in Japan it is not rude to leave food in such places, in fact it shows that you were sufficiently filled up, and if everything is gone it means the host failed to provide enough. I say this mostly to lessen the guilt of the customers because I know they can not eat it all. I NEVER finish my meals. If I had to eat that much for 20 days month I would die.They know I will not finish, and they know why, and they serve it anyway. I just make sure to always tell them it was delicious, but I just can’t eat that much today. Also, they know that the reason I bring my people there has a lot to do with the food, so I do not feel rude when something goes uneaten. Sometimes too the food is strange for foreigners - especially the kids, and they understand that so are not offended.

I used to try to tell the hosts to serve less, but it makes their meal look too plain or simple, and they already have set menus an procedures, and it messes up their workflow, so there is always waste.

I used to keep chickens, and the host knew that once we had left the table, he or she is to throw all the scraps into one big plastic bag which I would take home for the most pampered chickens in the world - unless it was untouched, then it went home to my wife and daughter.

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Restaurant dining is different from dining as a guest with a friend or on some other more personal occasion. It was the etiquette thing in those personal dining occasions to not eat everything on your plate. That was to provide the Host/Hostess the satisfaction of having fed you properly and not left you hungry.

Restaurant dining is a business. :-) The Chefs and Restaurant owners are enticing you into the restaurant for you to pay to eat. They entice you with atmosphere, musicians sometmes, and most especially the food and the proportions thereof.

You do NOT owe the restaurant the luxury of a host/hostess, though of course courtesy, politeness, and other forms of dining etiquette still make everything go smoother and more pleasant. As other answers demonstrate, the Owner and Chefs want to know ‘what works’ that provide food and portions that the customers relish and will likely come back to eat. If you clean your plate, maybe they’ll slightly increase the portions. If you leave something behind like some side dish offering the taste of which you didn’t like, then the management wants to know that information.