I’ve seen menus online for restaurants in New York that’ll sell you a bowl of cold cereal or half a grapefruit, for somewhere around $5. I can’t imagine bothering to leave the house and waddle into a diner just to get some Froot Loops. Must be a New York thing.
Every diner I’ve ever been in offers cold cereal and milk or half a grapefruit. Sometimes you go out with friends or famiky and thats what you want. No waddling required.
I am a great cook! But there are definitely dishes that I won’t attempt or that I can’t get the ingredients for. That is what restaurants are for. It is worth it to taste what great chefs have created. It is their skill and imagination that is the attraction not the simple cost of a dish.
I have to disagree on pasta sauce. I’ve tried really, really hard, many times, to make pasta sauce. It has never approached the quality of a half-decent sauce out of a jar.
We have an NYC Dopefest several years ago, and we all went to a fairly nice restaurant one night (I think it was called the Americana…I had the lamb chops).
On the menu, they had a PB&J for $7. I can make a pretty nice PB&J at home. Nevertheless, this Indiana boy had never been to NYC before, and I had to know what a $7 PB&J tasted like. So I ordered it to eat later.
White bread. Creamy peanut butter. Grape jelly.
Severely disappointed. So now I REFUSE to order PB&J in a restaurant. No fool I.
Except for that one time.
I must not be going to the right diners, then, because I’ve never encountered that menu option in person.
Meanwhile, I’ve rarely found a jarred sauce that I like. So much so that I’ve given up.
I also won’t order pasta at a restaurant not so much because it’s easy to make (and I’m surprised at how many places manage to screw it up anyway with overcooking), but they generally come way over-sauced and a bit over-spiced for my tastes (like, really, lay off the oregano and especially the sugar a bit). Very occasionally I will find an Italian restaurant that does it just how I like it, with a gentle hand, but, more often than not, it’s just not a meal I enjoy unless I make it myself.
Caveat before I reply to individual posts: I am a professional cook, with 30 years of experience.
To answer the OP directly, with this question:
“Do you have any dishes that you refuse to pay for (that you like)?”
Fucking oatmeal. In my town, every time there is a proposed property tax increase, I would see letters in the newspaper from senior citizens protesting the tax increase because “I’m on a fixed income, blah blah blah…” And meanwhile, in my job as a cook, I’d see senior citizens coming into my restaurant day after day after day, ordering oatmeal and toast. I looked at what we charged for a bowl of oatmeal and a side of toast, and did some math, and determined that these seniors were paying well over $1200 a year for somebody to cook their damned oatmeal (assuming they were doing this 5 days a week, as many of them were).
I swore that, no matter how decrepit I become in my old age, I would never pay for somebody else to cook my damned oatmeal.
I like my steaks flame-broiled. But I live in an apartment. I don’t own a flame broiler. I’ve lived in houses that don’t have a flame broiler. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house with a flame-broiler in the kitchen. Damned right I’ll pay for somebody else to cook me a flame-broiled steak.
Exactly. When you go to a restaurant, you’re not paying for the food. You’re paying for the convenience of not having to cook it yourself (and the convenience of not having to clean up afterward).
Thank you 
PBJ is a pain in the ass in a restaurant, because, damnit, I don’t keep PBJ on the line. You order a PBJ, and I have to go find the PB, and find the J, and that keeps me from cooking everything else…
Anyway, I will add that, despite what you see on TV cooking shows, professional cooks are the easiest people in the world to cook for. We’ll order it, and you put it in front of us, and, unless it’s completely inedible, we’ll eat it. Because we didn’t have to cook it, and we have empathy with the person in the back who cooked it. I’ve sent back exactly ONE plate in 30 years.
The only things I can think of that I tend not to order at restaurants are simple sandwiches.
It makes no sense to me to go to lunch and pay someone to make me a turkey(ham/roast beef) sandwich on wheat with mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce and pickles.
That’s something I could have just as easily made at home and brought with me for a lot less money.
I tend to get more involved sandwiches or ones with ingredients that I usually don’t buy- capicola, etc…
I remember when my kids could order off the children’s meal, the restaurant was proud to offer Kraft macaroni for kids. I never let them order the macaroni and cheese as I was not about to pay over $5 for a small bowl of Kraft Macaroni and cheese.
Or sometimes you’re traveling, and even that is an improvement over room service or the hotel restaurant. (Not that I’d order it, just saying I can understand why people would.) Or the picky kid at your table wants it.
I think there are very few things I can’t make at home cheaper than at a restaurant, with the exception of those that require rare ingredients or expensive tools.
Making cheaper at home never factors into my decision at a restaurant.
That’s very true! Sometimes I actually want to go out for breakfast, but don’t want a huge, heavy meal and order something I’d enjoy (like oatmeal), because it simply tastes good.
Yeah, sure, but, if you’re like me and eat sandwiches maybe once a week or every two weeks, it’s easier just to go get a prepared sandwich since you don’t have the deli meats, cheeses, and veggies always lying around. Bonus points if the deli makes their own roast beef and roast turkey.
The main thing is I won’t eat out what I can make at home better to my tastes in a reasonable amount of time (and is a good reason why I don’t eat out all that often. I simply enjoy cooking and eating my food more.) When I go out, it’s usually because I want a specific place’s rendition of a specific food. For example, I can make very good pizza, but I can’t make a pizza that tastes just like Chicago style thin crust, so I go to my favorite pizzerias for that. I don’t have the dough sheeter, I don’t have the deck oven, I can make something in the ballpark, but it ain’t gonna fool me for the real thing. Or a greasy spoon hamburger. I love the hamburgers I make, but there’s something about a burger griddled on a god-knows-how-old flattop with greasy onions that is just different enough that I like to go out for a burger from time to time. Plus I don’t have to stink up the kitchen. Or sometimes I want some food that, while not difficult to make, takes hours or days to get (like sauerbraten), and I just have to have it right now!. Then I might go out for it, even if I make a version of it that’s preferable to me.
When I lived in NYC, one of my favorite things was to go to the nearest greasy spoon, no-name restaurant (there were tons of them) and get those great, cheap breakfasts: eggs fixed how you liked them, great hash browns, sausage or bacon, toast and jelly, coffee - all for about $4.00. Sure I could have made it at home, but geez - take your newspaper, order and eat and go. I loved that, and for a non-morning person, I would actually get up a half hour early to go eat at those hole-in-the-walls.
I am sure they are more expensive now, but still - just the mess in the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning is enough reason to say “screw it - I’ll go eat at some diner.”
I am pretty good at pasta and pasta sauces and lasagna, etc. so I rarely go to Italian restaurants. Not that they might not be good or have some interesting variations, but when I see standard spaghetti with a basic tomato sauce being sold for $14.95, I just can’t wrap my head around paying that.
On the other hand, point me to any Indian restaurant, or Chinese or Greek, and I pretty much don’t care what it costs. I don’t have any of those ingredients, don’t know the tricks, probably don’t have the utensils and certainly not the patience to try to make those at home from scratch - but I love the food!
I remember going to one Ham and Eggery that sold cereal. Bizarre.
Like, who the hell would travel all the way to a diner to eat Lucky Charms?
Salad. Salad is what you get “free” when you order almost anything else.
(Yes, I know, a lot of stuff doesn’t come with a salad, and yeah, sometimes you just want to get a salad because you want to keep it light or you’re not that hungry or whatever other reason, but I’d never specifically go out to get a salad.)
Yeah, that was my thought as well. If I’m out to eat, I’m out to eat. And if they make a great pasta dish I’ll order it if I want. So what if I can make one just as good at home? I’m not at home!
And those of you saying “steak” don’t realize that it’s almost impossible for you to buy the grade of beef that a top notch steak house gets. It’s not just the preparation, it’s the very steak itself. The top to of the top grade meats are sold exclusively* to restaurants.
*If you have a really good butcher, there’s a chance he can order it for you as a specialty item.
Depends. There are salads I gladly pay for. The chopped salad at Portillo’s, the shrimp salad at Baja Fresh, Nam Tok from a good Thai place, the chicken salad from Roti…
Missed the edit window…
I should add that I eat out a lot. A real lot. I suppose if I only ate out a few times a year, I might be more selective.