GLP-1 Course Menu

6 Minute read

16 Oct 2025

Writer

As diners slim down, restaurants follow suit with Ozempic-inspired menus.

I’ve learned not to comment on other people’s bodies, which is a shame since I’m good at it. Lately, it’s been even harder to hold back, with so many people showing up to dinner 30 pounds lighter than when I last saw them. But I never say, “You look good.” Instead, I’ve found a more subtle way to get them to admit they’re on Ozempic: “Are you going to finish that?”

But Cuba Libre, a Cuban restaurant with locations in Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Washington, D.C., and Orlando, has come up with a more elegant solution to my problem. By the end of the month, Cuba Libre will offer a “GLP-Wonderful Menu” to diners who request it. The five main courses are smaller, cheaper, carb-light, fiber-filled, and protein-heavy to fit into Ozempic users’ shrinking stomachs. The menu lists all the nutritional information right above a drawing of a midriff-exposed flamenco dancer who looks like she’s taken a bathtub full of Ozempic.

In more demure, pre–social media times, it might have been awkward to ask your server for a menu tailored to our diet drugs. If a woman in the 1970s had asked for a Dexedrine Menu consisting of coffee, cigarettes, and Tab, her date, Steve Rubell of Studio 54 fame, might have questioned his entire life for six seconds. But in this oversharing era, the GLP-Wonderful Menu is merely a conversation starter.

Cuba Libre co-founder Barry Gutin got the idea for the menu on September 19, when he sat down with a regular who said he was on a GLP-1 agonist and wished there were a menu suited to his teeny, tiny needs. Gutin left that table to join another regular who said the same thing. I think Gutin may have been drawn to booths that had extra room for him to squeeze in.

Gutin ran the idea by his chef, Angel Roque, who—to his surprise—was into it. They partnered with Charlie Seltzer, an internist who specializes in obesity and conditioning. Together, they developed presentations for salmon a la plancha, ropa vieja, pollo asado, and a couple of other classics. It wasn’t at all like creating a spa menu for Canyon Ranch. As Gutin explains, “You don’t dumb down the dishes because they don’t have much of an appetite. Instead of giving them boiled chicken, you have to make it super appealing.” Hence, the flamenco dancer.

Other restaurants, such as New York City’s Tucci and Clinton Hall, have introduced sections of their menus with smaller portions designed for Ozempic users. But none have explicitly labeled theirs a GLP-1 menu—except for Smoothie King, whose GLP-1 Support Menu includes the Gladiator® GLP-1, the Activator® Recovery GLP-1 Almond Berry, and the Keto Champ™ GLP-1 Chocolate. Apparently naming a tiny serving is a lot like naming a tiny penis.

Gutin, however, is the first to shake free of Ozempic shame, which is so Philly. Nonetheless, he rejected my suggestion to reserve bathroom stalls for people to shoot up their Mounjaro.

I was excited to celebrate Cuba Libre’s bold inclusiveness with Virginia Sole-Smith, the fat-positive author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. She, however, was not enthused. In fact, the word she emailed me was “Agh.”

Sole-Smith dislikes any menu nutritional information. “Yes, there are folks pursuing intentional weight loss who find this information useful. There are many, many more people who just want to go out to dinner and enjoy a meal in community—and now they're getting nudged out of that space and into a restrictive mindset,” she says. “I want restaurants to avoid this kind of pandering to diet culture. Be on the side of food!” Though I’d argue that any restaurant, like Cuba Libre, is firmly on the side of food when its menu lists a $39.50 Havana Banana Split served with “sparklers, marquee sign, light show, music, and more.”

Sole-Smith thinks restaurants should offer two menus to make everyone comfortable. But comfort has no bottom; next we’ll want one for every appetite, allergy, and ideology. Eventually, each of us will have our own restaurant, until we not only bowl alone but eat alone. And it will be called Grubhub.

16 Oct 2025