After the Holiday Table Report, we turned to the everyday table: Sunday dinners, weeknight and payday meals, church potlucks, backyard cookouts and school lunches. Piaci Pizza readers cast 9,547 votes on 903 photos of dishes and dinner tables, and 5,917 poll answers about dinner, cooking and hosting.
Please note that some of the images in this article were created with the assistance of AI.
The short version: readers love the old everyday table. 78% of all votes were hearts.
Casseroles and sides lead
Casseroles (83%) and side dishes (82%) drew the most hearts, with soups level on fewer votes. Salads were the one course readers split on (53%). At the bottom of the whole list: molded ham salad that wobbled on the…, tomato aspic, the wobbling red… and head cheese, the deli slice nobody….
Homemade beats retro
Food that looked rustic and homemade drew 85% hearts; food styled as vintage and retro 73%. In a separate poll, 70% of readers picked a rustic, homemade plate over a restaurant-polished one.
Pans and spreads beat plates
Skillets (85%), casserole dishes (84%) and spreads (88%) beat plated food (76%). And 66% of readers would rather eat a 1970s classic than today’s dinner.
The full report
The Everyday Table Report pools the photos by course, era, serving style, look and cuisine, ranks the most- and least-loved, shows why readers voted the way they did, and adds 27 polls on dinner, cooking, shopping and hosting. It includes the full dataset.
Get the full report at StatwrenHow we did this
- Readers tapped a heart or a thumbs-down under each photo in 28 of our everyday-food articles between Aug 31, 2026 and Nov 5, 2026. One vote per reader per photo.
- Votes are anonymous: no names, emails or accounts. Readers were reacting to photos, not tasting it.
- Percentages are the share of hearts. Traits such as course and era the dish reads as were read from each photo; article groupings are ours.
- More on how we collect reader data: How our reader data works.