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Taking the Fun Out
of Eating Out
by Mad Dog
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Even if the restaurant offers only a handful of dishes, each
description will be longer than your college entrance essay. And better
written. Honestly, if I want to read a novel I’ll bring one with
me. |
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Eating out used to be fun.
You ate good food in a nice atmosphere, usually ordering things you
wouldn’t — or couldn’t — make at home, and best of all you
didn’t have to slave over a hot microwave or clean up the mess
afterwards. Ah, were it only so simple now!
For starters you need to figure out
what kind of food the restaurant actually serves, since any restaurant
worth its Chowhound page describes itself as fusion these days. You
know, combinations like Pan-Asian, California-French, nouveau-homestyle,
vegan-steakhouse, and Thai-Norwegian. How silly. The last thing lutefisk
needs is a lemongrass and coconut milk sauce. If you do find a
restaurant that cooks in a non-hyphenated style, chances are it’s all
burgers. But even that’s not a sure thing since they might specialize
in teriyaki-burgers, in which case you should run to the nearest
Wendy’s as fast as you can.
Once you give in to — I mean,
decide on — a hyphenated style you’ll be confronted by the lengthy
menu. Even if the restaurant offers only a handful of dishes, each
description will be longer than your college entrance essay. And better
written. Honestly, if I want to read a novel I’ll bring one with me.
That’s why it’s important to make your reservation for an hour
before the time you actually want to eat. You’ll need the extra time
to slog through the menu and you don’t want to starve or eat so much
bread you’re no longer hungry enough for anything more than an
appetizer — I mean, a small plate. This, by the way, isn’t to be
confused with a small portion on a big plate, something you see all too
often, particularly in your more expensive restaurant. It used to be
that when it came to portion size you got what you paid for, but now the
amount of food on your plate is inversely proportional to the price.
Incidentally, Einstein predicted this in his Second Course Theory of
Relativity, though it might be the third. I haven’t had time to check
since I spend all my spare reading time looking at menus.
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Here’s a tip: If it takes the waiter longer to describe the dish than
it does to eat it, something’s radically wrong, and it’s not the
number of times you chew your food before swallowing that’s the
problem.
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A rule of thumb is that the more expensive the dish the smaller
the portion, the higher it will be stacked, and the more drizzles and
dustings you’ll find scattered around the rim of the plate, which is
supposed to distract you from the fact that you were just handed a small
plate on a large platter for an even larger price. A corollary is that
the longer the description, the higher the prices. Chefs have decided
that we don’t just want to know what we’re ordering and how it’s
being cooked, we want to know the color, origin, lineage, age, and
pedigree of each ingredient. Here’s a tip: If it takes the waiter
longer to describe the dish than it does to eat it, something’s
radically wrong, and it’s not the number of times you chew your food
before swallowing that’s the problem. If it takes more than a
sentence, stop your server immediately. Ask if he or she would start
over in English this time because you left your Foofie-English
dictionary at home next to your Zagat Survey of the Michelin Guide. If
this doesn’t help, sit quietly, look attentive, smile, and nod
appreciatively, then when they stop and ask if you have any questions
say, “The third item you mentioned, is it also available on the
kid’s menu?”
Take a burger, for example. All you
need to know is how much it weighs, whether it’s grilled or flame
broiled, and if it comes with fries. I’m really not interested in
whether the cow was grass fed, hand fed, or fed up with what it was
being fed, nor do I care about the name of the farmer who raised it.
Actually, I’d much rather know the name the farmer’s kids gave the
cow and how they felt when they learned that Chocolate Chip was going to
be tonight’s chuck roast, but for some reason you never see that on a
menu.
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Not long ago I saw a menu that described the chicken as “humanely
raised.” How humane is it when they end up wringing its neck and
butchering it so I can eat it? |
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Apparently
Rene Dessert Cart once said, “I cook, therefore I’m foofie.” Even
the simplest dishes now get the upscale treatment. The next time
you’re in a restaurant check out the roast chicken. No doubt the menu
will tell you that it’s — choose any three! — free-range,
grass-fed, pastured, naturally raised, hormone-free, antibiotic-free,
lo-fat, decaffeinated, shade-grown, free-trade, and/or organic. Not long
ago I saw a menu that described the chicken as “humanely raised.”
How humane is it when they end up wringing its neck and butchering it so
I can eat it with wood-fired oven roasted fingerling potatoes that have
never even seen a map of Idaho better yet the ground there and heirloom
micro-greens that were cut down before their prime?
It’s enough to make me actually
want things like eggplant, capers, and watermelon in my salsa, something
that would give any Mexican a heart attack if they heard about it.
Another thing that doesn’t belong in salsa is antidepressants, though
someone should have mentioned that to the Iowa woman who was arrested
for putting Trazodone in her salsa cheese dip. She was charged with
administering a harmful substance though the truth be known, her friend
just didn’t understand when she told him she was serving chips with
“a psychoactive compound created in Italy in the 1960s that lacks the typical
fused ring structures.” Will someone pass the Fritos Chili
Cheese dip, please?
©2007 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country.
Read them instead of a menu.
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