Things Your Mother Didn’t Warn You About (In Restaurants)

Mondays

Only fools and daredevils should eat at any chain restaurant on a Monday. The chance of you actually getting fresh food, delivered, and prepared THAT day are about as likely as the moon being made of cheese. It’s MORE than likely you are eating something that was bought near a week ago, prepped, then dumped in the back of a cooler. If you are in real luck, during the weekend rush the station cook actually followed FIFO rather than grabbing the first thing his wandering hand came across. If you don’t know what FIFO is, you should. It’s the theory that the oldest foodstuff is sold first, before the newer product, thus minimizing the amount of food that turns and is unsellable (see soups). Labeling and dating food is law in most states. But during that busy weekend things get hectic, and nobody wants to slow the pace of the kitchen, things get overlooked, and product turnover goes out the window. So that lovely crab cake you are eating may well have been made last Thursday. Leave Mondays for the other suckers and stay at home and cook.

 

“Made Fresh Daily”

This one really creeps me out. That’s like a newspaper informing you that it is printed fresh daily. Never believe them unless they sell out every day. If the cooks cannot keep up with the pace of sales that an item sells out every day, you better believe is fresh. Probably your favorite place that says made fresh daily, is making more than enough daily to not run out during business. So you are really eating yesterdays, but it was made fresh yesterday. Good bakeshops are usually the ones to sell out, though I’ve been to some great dumpling places in New York, only to find out they sold out by 3p.m.

 

Desserts

Unless I know the restaurant I’m eating in employs a pastry chef, I almost never look at a dessert menu. More often than not, your average place doesn’t have the time or the skill required to bake consistently every day and get a uniform product. So your cheesecake probably entered the door frozen, wrapped in plastic and a thick cardboard box as to minimize the damage. That ice cream, has icky gummy stabilizers in it, to allow it to sit out longer than real ice cream while being delivered. That whip cream just came out of a can. Don’t bother asking your service, they rarely know the truth about the desserts, just the line the chef or manager has taught them to say. In fact, a good portion of servers do not like selling desserts. They’d rather get your butt out of that seat and get another full dinner at that table before close, not look at you and your date share that double fudge brownie cake.

 

Batter Dipped

Never before in all of human history have two such harmless words been combined to form such a hideous phrase. Chances are, you could batter dip rat shit and sell it. Most places buy bottom of the line food for their fry stations, why waste money on a good fish, when cheap ole catfish will work just fine. And since your favorite restaurant fries all of it’s food in the same fryer, chances are your fried calamari are just going to taste like french fries and chicken, so you may as well heap on that marinara sauce. What is that? The chicken breasts are turning? Cut them into strips and sell them as chicken fingers. Oh No! The Zucchini is as limp as my grandfather taking a swim on a cold springs day? Coat it in bread crumbs and fry it up! (Never bother asking me what I think of mozzarella sticks).

 

Pasta

Unless you know that the place you are at hires some poor soul to show up early in the morning to make pasta for a barely livable wage, don’t bother ever ordering pasta at any restaurant. Standard procedure in most restaurants is to precook that dry pasta hours before you arrive. If you’re lucky enough that the busy cook pulled the pasta from the boiling water before it turns back into a dough, they more than likely are dumping it into a bowl of ice water, thereby rinsing off a measure of flavor and starch. Then when you order your disgusting Chicken Alfredo with Fettuccine, it goes back into a boiling water bath, more than likely for longer than the 30-45 seconds it takes to warm it up, and thereby cooks it even more, then drenched in sauces, bakes for a minute under the heating lamp before being delivered to your table limp, lifeless, longing for a trash bin.

 

Bottled Water

Ok, so maybe your Mom didn’t know about this one, it’s a new thing at most places. Unless you need that refreshing Perrier, that flat bottled water you are forking up $2-5 bucks for is more then likely to get you sick than plain old tap water. In fact, a good number of bottled water is bottled from the same place you get your tap water from, then marketed with a name with Springs or Falls in the name. It’s just a scam to get you to run up your bill a few more bucks. Save your money and order a better wine. Which you should order by the glass to pair with your food, you cheap bastard, but that’s for another time.

~ by Michael Taeuber on May 25, 2007.