Tyler Cowen, in his book An Economist Gets Lunch, says that he has ways to get good Chinese food even in small town Chinese restaurants that normally serve very poor, very Americanized food. He asks to speak to the cook, he asks for food the way the cook likes it himself, and he throws in phrases like “Ma Po Tofu, like you eat it,” “real Chinese food,” “family style,” “Sichuan,” and “spicy.” He says that he can get fairly good food that way.
Tyler Cowen is a lot of things but I’ve always found his food advice to be overly simplistic and idealistic. The tactic he espouses is pretty hit or miss. There are some Chinese restaurant chefs who were excellent cooks back in China and are just champing at the bit to let their culinary talents fly in Hicksville USA. But far more likely, especially these days, is someone who came to America with zero culinary training or aptitude and learned everything they know about cooking via a rigid apprenticeship program inside of Chinese American restaurants in the US. They’re likely to be far more knowledgeable about Chinese American cooking than authentic Chinese food.
Years ago the local repertoire movie theatre ran a samurai film festival where they showed a pair of them each week for like six weeks. A bunch of us at work liked them so we attended each one, eating first in a nearby Indian restaurant (there being no Japanese ones close). It was a tiny place with a half-dozen tables where Wife did the cooking and Hubby worked the front. We kept asking for the hot curry until the fourth week, he asked, “Do you want the really hot curry?” “We-l-l-l…” “I’ll put it on the side.”
Capsaicin heaven. We took it the remaining two weeks.
Remember the McDonalds coke spoons? :smack:
For a short time, the coffee stirrers had a small spoon bowl instead of the flat blade they have now. I never did drugs and I still recognized what they had accidentally done at first sight.
I mentioned it to the counterperson and they responded that they were for the coffee, not the Coke®. I gave them the personal equivalent of :dubious: and then the penny dropped. Hilarious.
OOPS!
should have read on…
What sometimes works, if you really want it hot, is asking for the dish as “Indian spicy” or “Thai spicy” or “Thai extra spicy.” But that does depend on the server really trusting you and your heat tolerance. Or how sadistic they are. 
Plus there are places where the heat levels are all over the map. There’s one Laotian-Thai place in my neck of the woods where just the regular “spicy” is hotter than the "Thai spicy"s are at other places, and their “Thai spicy” is wonderfully blazing (for certain dishes–I don’t like them all at that heat level, but there’s a couple dishes I enjoy where the flavors can stand up to pretty much as spicy as a restaurant will make it.) I think it also depends on the people running the place and their tolerance for heat. While these cuisines are, on average, quite spicy to the average American palate, they’re not necessarily blow-your-head-off spicy if you’re used to spicy food. Adding a shitload of hot peppers does not make it necessarily any more “authentic.”
There’s a strong trend that started in the high-end restaurants and is spreading down to the mid-prices ones:
You have to order your entree and sides separately. You don’t get a plate of food anymore - you have to build it.
So, if you want a steak with starch and veggies you are forced to order a giant plate of broccoli for $14 and a baked potato for $12. The “logic” is that these can be sharing plates for the rest of the table.
I don’t share. I don’t go to these restaurants.
I’ve always had a really tough time telling Indian restaurants how to make my food. My usual instruction is “Tell the chef to make it the way that he likes it, and don’t tell him that I’m white”. Even that doesn’t usually work, though.
Yes, that is common in high end steakhouses. But that’s the way i like it. I wanna eat a real nice steak and not get filled up with a salad, baked potato and the like. They bring you a small loaf of fresh baked bread, and a large juicy steak. I need nothing else.
She’s not pretending. She came up working with David Chang and her stuff is very high quality. Her products are all original and she is one of the only people out there using advanced techniques from Molecular Gastronomy and Science to make her products. She’s the real deal.
I got a kick out of this. I currently work at an Iron Skillet restaurant. We still serve everything (except pasta) on iron skillets, including the salad bar.
This one showed up – or became popular – in the Raleigh, NC area around 2003 or so.
They probably stripped down the concept so it could be crammed into an airport. I would definitely try a proper Genghis Grill if I encountered one.
Ha! I’m glad to see I remembered correctly; I had to have been around 12 at the time (on a road trip with my grandparents in Ohio… not a place I visit all that much these days). Those cold, heavy skillets were especially difficult for a scrawny kid to handle, but I learned something about angular momentum that day.
“Don’t whitespice[sup]TM[/sup] me, bro!”
I semi-fondly remember a Chinese food truck near my workplace in Philadelphia, where the guy dishing out the meal would look at you and say “You like spicy, right?”.
It’s good when the default is scalp-sweating hot food.
I’ve heard the routine from Beyond the Fringe, and saw Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore perform it on Broadway in Good Evening, so I was surprised to learn that there really ARE restaurants called “The Frog and the Peach”. I assumed that they got their inspiration from the comedy routine. But you never know.
One is in New Brunswick, NJ:
Here’s another, in Georgia:
https://locu.com/places/the-frog-and-the-peach-southern-buffet-savannah-us/
A Thai restaurant made me a customer for life (which, unfortunately, wasn’t that long as it closed down a few years later) when, on my first visit, I asked for it “Thai spicy” and the owner paused, looked at me with a raised eyebrow and said “Are you sure?” In all the times I’ve used this phrase, I have never been asked about the seriousness of my request; the question having more a tone of a warning, rather than confirmation.
Caught slightly off-guard, I hesitated a sec before answering “yes.” He let out a long, drawn-out “O…K…” which trailed off into an implied “you asked for it.” The meal did not disappoint. It was the spiciest I’ve ever gotten on my first trip from a Thai restaurant (And I actually was a little bit nervous before taking that first bite.)
I love Papa Murphy’s, but I’m always struck by their business model. A pizza restaurant with no oven. So, not a restaurant at all, more like a mini-grocery store that sells nothing but pre-made (but not frozen) pizzas and raw cookie dough.
My cousin, back when he was younger, stopped by Papa Murphy’s when it first opened in his town. He ordered the pizza and they gave it to him, and he said, “Aren’t you going to cook it?” The cashier replied, “We don’t have an oven”, and my cousin said, “I don’t have an oven either!” He ended up having to drive to his mom’s house to cook his dinner.
Medieval Times. Awful, awful, awful. Eating bad food in the dark with the smell of horse manure.
…and with no utensils.