You are truly too kind.
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Mmmmm, the little restaurants we patronize in France very often change their menus daily. There are definitely old , meaning venerable, ones like you describe that don’t
Many of our local bistros, such as those I mentioned a post or two earlier, also offer a midweek menu, offering a cutdown version of their main menu to maybe just three choices at each course. Others might offer a similar menu for early diners (say, before 7.30) . Price might be £20 for three courses, whereas three courses from main carte might be around £30
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I certainly didnt have venerable places in mind. I was thinking of just ordinary places in small towns and villages that we’ve visited regularly.
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Smiling, some of those simple, unpreposing survivors are the most venerable in our humble opinion. 
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I took one for the team and got the turkey Hungry Man which is now 2.52 instead of 99 cents.
It’s now all “white meat turkey” instead of mostly white meat. I got the turkey smell from the oven but that meat was bizarre, kind of like a plastic texture that I don’t remember.
The fake potatoes were edible when mixed with the gravy which wasn’t bad. The veggies could have used some butter. The best thing was the cranberry apple dessert but there wasn’t much of it.
This will probably cure any urge for a TV dinner forever.
I do have some turkey legs in the oven for today’s NFL playoff games. 
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The newer-style meat is probably the result of newer ways of getting more of the remaining meat off of a turkey carcass that has had the big pieces of meat removed beforehand. Part of a range of products including TechnicallyTurkey™, BelievablyBeef™, ProbablyPork™, ConvincinglyChicken™, and so on; all are available from Perfectly Normal Food Substances LLC.
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I think TV dinners went downhill around the time they switched to plastic and paper trays from aluminum.
I remember saving the aluminum trays.
There are very few HungryMan choices in Canada these days, maybe 4 at most. There are a lot of microwaveable bowls and some Indian/Thai/Chinese frozen meals, but I haven’t seen any that include a frozen dessert section in the tray the way HungryMan does.
When I was a kid in the 1980s, there were over a dozen choices HungryMan options. My dinner, when a babysitter was hired, when my parents went out to an event, was a HungryMan dinner (usually turkey or fried chicken), a Chinese TV Dinner (haven’t seen those in a long time, that would be baked in the oven rather than microwaved), Alphagetti /Zoodles/Chef Boyardee Roller Coasters or Kraft Dinner (Kraft Macaroni and Cheese).
What we do buy now, for convenience dinners, which we didn’t buy back in the 1980s, are frozen tourtieres, frozen samosas, frozen Asian dumplings and frozen precooked ribs in sauce.
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I only saw four Hungry Man’s at MY HEB in Houston which is huge.
For the record I took a few bites of the turkey and discarded the rest. I did eat most of the other offerings.
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@jcostiones
These are the current Canadian HungryMan options. I haven’t seen most of them offered at my local grocery stores.
Here’s another review and it’s right in line with yours. Bold is mine. Thanks for taking a $2.52 one for the team.
Review: Hungry-Man
Review: Hungry-Man is owned by Swanson, the creator of one of the first TV dinners. That meal? None other than a Thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkey, sweet potatoes, peas and cornbread stuffing.
They’ve had more than 60 years to perfect the recipe and by the results of this meal, it looks like they need a few more. This one-pound meal has five half-circle slices of all-white meat turkey, which because it’s sliced from a formed roll, suffers some of the same spongy downfall that was Banquet’s undoing, though not quite as much.
The mashed potatoes were well-seasoned and didn’t have that distinct “instant” flavor, but they were very thin and not rich. The corn, carrot and green bean blend wasn’t seasoned, but the vegetables still had a bit of texture, which was nice.
The stuffing was crumbly; it almost resembled feta cheese. The bits that had not been soaked with gravy were dry. As for the gravy, it was perfectly respectable in the world of frozen dinner gravys.
Hungry-Man does get some credit for being the only dinner to include dessert: A cranberry-apple mixture that had a nice tart flavor and whole cranberries (good!) but was thin and soupy (bad!)
Grade: 5/10
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Terribly sad period filled with genocide in our history.
This person could have been looking over my shoulder.
I failed to mention the lack of seasoning on the veggies. I never made it to the stuffing because the turkey was so bad.
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The level of agreement, both generally and in the details, was pretty clear.
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From the $2.52 price tag, it’s pretty clear that the company’s market research is telling them this kind of dinner is bought almost solely for its low price, and if they want to sell any, they had better make them cheap as hell.
(I don’t actually know the going rate for hell; that just seemed like the right way to say it.)
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I don’t really eat tv dinners anymore, but there’s is nostalgia with them and every once in a while I grab one just for kicks (especially if I see a promotion/sale) and it has to be the Hungry man brand. Growing up with traditional Chinese meals, tv dinners were a curiosity for me and my sister and an odd occasional treat because they were so different.
Most of everything in there is pretty forgettable, but for an unknown reason, my favorite memory is always that tiny square of dessert, with the brownie and that cranberry apple thing (not even sure what is supposed to be).
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Mine, too. As a kid, I loved that little bite of dessert when we got TV dinners every now and then. I suspect the reason was that the dessert was just for me—no obligation to share, no portioning by an adult—to enjoy as I pleased.
I tried a TV dinner some years ago as an adult. Yep, some things are better left to memory as others here have already noted.
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I have Swansons TV dinners to blame for my love of Salisbury steak.
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I’ve only had the tv dinner version. Time to branch out 
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Salisbury steak was a mainstay of our school lunch menu.
The same meat patty could transform to Swiss steak with a tomato sauce or chicken fried steak with breading and cream gravy in addition to the brown gravy that designated Salisbury steak. 
All 3 with prefab potatoes.
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