This is sort of a spin-off from the Pit Thread on sending food back. My view was, if the waiter brings me something different from what I ordered…well, why not? It’s food, isn’t it? I asked for a hamburger, and got a chicken sandwich. Fine! I like chicken sandwiches too!
So: anybody else out there enjoy playing Chef’s Surprise roulette?
I do this all the time, and have enjoyed some truly remarkable creations. When a chef isn’t too awfully busy – it’s a rotten thing to do in rush hour! – ask him to “indulge himself” and “be creative.”
(It helps if your tastes are fairly all-inclusive.)
I don’t think I’ve ever HAD a waiter bring me a completely wrong thing. I mean, sometimes the wrong thing at our TABLE…“No, the sauteed chicken breast is over there, I get the Goat Head Almondine.”
I guess I would try this at a place where I was kinda well-known; sounds fun. But I’d worry that that I’d get either the most expensive things the cook could throw in and be charged a hundred bucks, or worse, that I’d get the shit he was close to throwing out but figured here was an opportunity to sell it.
“The gentleman ordered the roasted slightly-off stinky duck stuffed with foie gras and buried under Beluga caviar? With wilted greens and yesterday’s roast potatoes in congealed goose fat?”
It does require an element of trust… To date, that’s never happened to me; instead, I’ve been happy to receive unexpected combinations, like asparagus-stuffed mushrooms with diced ham.
In St Louis there is a restaurant called “The Kitchen Sink” where one of the items on the menu is titled “IDK” (for those of you who aren’t familiar, that’s shorthand for I Don’t Know). It says it will be different for everyone (ie it’s not just the Chef’s special feature of the night) and you’re taking a chance…
I’ve tried it a couple of times, being the quasi-adventurous sort.
There’s a local family owned Chinese place we go to where I’ve known the owner did 20 years. Sometimes I just tell her “fix me something good”. I might end up with some kind of deep fried whole fish, or a curry chicken stew. Always good though.
There are many high end restaurants that offer a chef’s tasting menu, and you are served a 3,4, up to 10 course meal from selections made by the chef without your knowledge of what you’re getting until it is brought to your table. These are fun to do, and normally take a few hours, where the meal is the entertainment as well. I don’t consider myself a foodie, but my wife and I will indulge in these sorts of meals once or twice a year.
There are also a couple of farm to table places, where you make reservations and they are preparing one meal for all of their guests that night, with no knowledge of what is being served beforehand.
Both of these type of experience usually are done with preselected wine pairings.
I’ve had a long-standing dream of being able to go to a good sushi place, slap $100 on the counter and say Omakase! Essentially, that means “Surprise and delight me!”
Unfortunately, I may need to up the budget - there’s a restaurant in San Francisco called Omakase that works on this menu-free scheme, and their prices are $150 or $200, plus hand-selected sake pairings for each course at $80/person.
Absolutely not unless the price is known beforehand. This is a known scam in many restaurants and cafes. They offer you the special but don’t tell you the price and it’s many times higher than the other items.
I do that at a sushi place. I order a tamaki roll or two that I really like, such as baby scallops, and tell the chef I’d like 5 nigari that he thinks is best that day. Or maybe his choice of a roll or two.
The only times I’ve been given a completely different meal, the wrong plate had been grabbed and my plate had gone to another table. So I’d check for that before making any decisions.
When I’m traveling in a non-English-speaking country, I enjoy going to restaurants that don’t have a menu in English. I then point to something in my price range and order it. I’ve often been surprised, but never disappointed. I once did this in a Chinese restaurant in Italy. The menu was in Italian and Chinese, and the waitress didn’t speak any English. To this day I have no idea what I ate, but it was delicious.
I like variety, and I will often ask the waiter for a recommendation, but I see no added value in the dish being a surprise. Whatever I’m eating, I like to spend a little time getting myself in the mood for it. Plus, there are a few foods that I genuinely don’t like, so I would appreciate having veto power in case the “surprise” is, say, asparagus.
I went to one fancy schmany restaurant here in Dallas where the whole idea was “chef’s surprise”… Other than that though, if it ain’t what I ordered, it’s going back. Not that I can recall ever getting a completely wrong dish in the first place.