How is that restaurant food so often doesn't taste anything like what it is supposed to be? How can a kitchen with trained chefs, sous chefs, specialized equipment as well as ingredients I can shop for in my local grocery store, produce coffee, tea and meals that have no taste? What happens to create this? Is it me? Do my taste buds refuse to cooperate once I'm eating some selection from a restaurant menu? I don't have high expectations, just possibly unreasonable ones. I want the food to taste like what it is supposed to be. If you purport to offer me French onion soup that has nothing approaching the flavour of said dish--how do you achieve that and consider it reasonable to charge me $6 for it? And in a dish so shallow that one cannot fill a soup spoon with the liquid? Are you, the chef, betting that I will happily dine on three drops of swill and be satisfied with my memory of what French onion soup ought to taste like? The menu claimed the soup was created out of broth, but for all the flavour in the broth it might as well have been the leftovers from the breakfast 'coffee' carafes. Do you as a chef (forgive my use of the term when it clearly doesn't apply) ever eat the food you and your staff make? Are you then all receiving medical treatment for digestive problems? Or for an overload of interesting unpronounceable chemicals in your bloodstreams?
And the coffee. Whoever decided that 'coffee' was merely a brownish liquid created from caramel and a toxic sludge of 'flavours' which have never even been in the same warehouse as a coffee bean; and then has the nerve to sell this as coffee?
No wonder North Americans are obese, we are forced to eat fried potatoes in some form or other merely to get something approaching flavour in an average restaurant. And I'm not talking here about my experiences in some greasy spoon off the main drag where surprisingly the food is often better and much cheaper. Oh no, my complaint stems from several days of eating in major chain hotel restaurants when compelled to do this while travelling for work.
To give credit where credit is due, I can say that even a hotel restaurant can do eggs over easy, but if I have to look at eggs any time in the next week, I'll probably cluck. End of rant!
1 comment:
I recently saw an episode of No Reservations wherein good ol' Tony expressed his shock and amazement at actually having decent food in a major hotel chain restaurant. Of course, this was in Singapore if I remember correctly. I think the problem in North America is the same with our TV and books and movies; people assume that 'inoffensive' is the same as 'popular' so we get dull, mass-produced pablum. Or else the robots are finally taking over and your meals were made by the Chefdroid 6000. Everyone knows robots don't have tastebuds.
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