Nearly all advice on this is about willpower at the table — order the grilled thing, skip the bread. It isn't wrong, but it's fighting on the worst possible ground.
You're hungry, you're with people, there's a menu in front of you, and you're trying to out-discipline all of it in real time. Some people win that occasionally. Nobody wins it consistently, and treating it as a character test is why people end up avoiding restaurants altogether.
Everything below moves the decision somewhere easier.
Your body doesn't reset at midnight. If your target is 2,000 a day, that's 14,000 for the week, and it doesn't have to come out in equal slices.
So if dinner's on Saturday, take 200 off Monday to Friday. You will not notice 200 — it's a smaller lunch or no afternoon snack. That's 1,000 banked, which covers most restaurant meals, and you arrive already in credit. Same weekly total, completely different evening.
Eating nothing all day to save room is the mistake almost everyone makes once. You arrive starving, drink faster on an empty stomach, and eat considerably more than you saved. Eat normally that day, with some protein in it before you leave.
If a week won't balance, trim the event rather than starving the week. Commonly around 1,500 for men and 1,200 for women, though take advice if you're unsure. You can't buy a big night with a punishing week — that's the route to bingeing, not to being lean.
One meal has never undone anyone. A genuinely enormous dinner might be 1,500 over, which is under half a pound of fat. What does the damage is the next three days, when you've decided it's ruined.
Go back to your normal target the following morning. Not below it. Normal.
Leeway is a free tool that does this arithmetic for you. Put what's coming up into the week and it spreads the cost across the days around it, with a floor it won't plan below.
Open the planner — freeLeeway is a planning tool, not medical or dietary advice. Calorie figures are typical estimates and vary by brand, measure and recipe. It isn't suitable if you have, or have had, an eating disorder or a disordered relationship with food. If you're unsure what a safe calorie target is for you, speak to a GP or registered dietitian first.