How is it that restaurants seem to have the best looking and best tasting produce especially compared to the hit and miss stuff I buy at my grocery store?
When I go to a decent restaurant or a hotel, the melons, strawberries, grapes, avacados seem like the top 10%- 20% of the same items I get at the grocery store. I am a pretty good produce picker, but I get stuck with duds and OK stuff all the time.
Where can I get the hook-up for the pre-selected, sorted out good stuff? Or is it that restaurants buy a lot and we never see the merely ok stuff on our plates?
Because a good restaurant’s chef will be at the markets around 4am buying the best before they sell the rest on to stores and then what is left over to street markets.
BUT, the funny thing is, things like potatoes, carrots, bananas, melons, onions etc, things you don’t really see in their original form, they take the seconds. It works out for everyone that way. The wholesalers sell them the ugly carrots at a great price which once peeled, chopped and cooked look and taste just fine and then the stores get the nice looking stuff since that’s what the public wants.
Also, the turnover is much higher at a restaurant that buys it’s produce 2-7 times a week and can afford to buy stuff that will be garbage in a few days where as the homeowner can’t always do that.
Also, some higher-end restaurants have relationships with specific growers for supplies. This is especially true if the restaurant touts using local and/or organic produce.
Are fruits and vegetables graded? I want to know how the wholesellers or the buyers know what is the good stuff- someone has to do the sorting somewhere along the line. I would pay them to teach me how to pick avocadoes and watermelons- ok, then teach me about cantaloupes, strawberries, and peaches!
They get second crack. My parents get first. (Not really a joke. Both are CIA trained chefs, and dad used to run Resturant Business magazine) Our tricks? Join a farm collective, grow in the backyard, and Costco, Costco, Costco. Much better than the supermarket.
Most restaurants buy from restaurant suppliers like Sysco who deliver produce each morning. There’s usually very little, if any selection going on. On the higher end, some chefs do make it a point to get high quality produce, either by shopping at farmer’s markets or forming personal relationships with growers. You can generally get about the same quality as any restaurant that costs less than $30 an entree simply by visiting farmer’s markets rather than supermarkets.
The owner/manager/chef of my favorite local restaurant always has a booth at the farmer’s market I go to, and it only recently occurred to me that that’s probably where she gets her produce in the first place. She also changes the vegetables she uses throughout the year, according to what’s in season.
When I worked at a fancy-schmancy catering outfit, we got most of our stuff from Sysco. I think if we needed something right away on a weekend, or something special, someone would go out to the West Side Market early in the morning to buy it.
Anyway, I worked mainly with produce (I was the salad bitch) and we did have to toss a lot of moldy berries and limp lettuce. Maybe not as much as I would at home, since fresh produce was coming in every 2-3 days. But still, customers didn’t see the shitty produce because it never made it past me.
It’s not just Costco. I get all my fruit at Sam’s. They have, by far, the best looking and tasting produce I’ve ever seen. Their fruit also lasts longer. The last time I got fruit there, the blackberries were easily 3" long and about 1" wide. They were HUGE! The grapes are massive too. And they’re really firm and stay that way for a long time. All the fruit I got lasted me about a week and a half before I finished eating it and only the blackberries were starting to get mushy when I finished them.
I know that the Indian restaurant in town shops there.
I would imagine buying bulk helps. Get a ton of watermelon, serve the good ones, and make juice into the weird looking ones. That way the customer always thinks he’s getting only the good ones
(Not really a joke. Both are CIA trained chefs, and dad used to run Resturant Business magazine) Our tricks? Join a farm collective, grow in the backyard, and Costco, Costco, Costco. Much better than the supermarket.