That is what the icon is for. to bring up the start menu, so no surprise that is what happens when you press it...….
However you can change the way this behaves, if you go to settings and personalisation, then choose start, you can choose if the list of apps shows to the left of the start menu.
If you do not want to see the start menu at all and just the list of apps, I do believe you can achieve this by unpinning all of the apps from the start menu.
Hope that helps.