Could this be due to the trans fat ban?
Not that I’m against the ban.
Could it be because you just spent many years in Thailand, quite the opposite of a bland food culture, and your tastes have been recalibrated?
We eat out frequently, tending to patronize the same handful of local places. Everything tastes great as far as I can tell.
One local Chinese restaurant makes a great Ma Po Tofu. I asked the chef/owner if he could amp up the heat a tad, and he did. It was awesome, for a while. Last weekend he took it up several more notches. My gf was unable to eat it. I liked it, but it was a bit overboard. I’ll have to tell him next time.
Also, adding salt AFTER cooking requires adding a greater amount of salt to get the same level of saltiness that would have been achieved with less salt added WHILE cooking.
You don’t seem to care for me. This isn’t the first rude comment you’ve made.
Why is that exactly? Just mild curiosity.
I was wondering about this recently.
My town has had a really wonderful uptick in small restaurants and those menus tend to be much more daring. I had some family in town last week and ended up taking a relative to IHOP one morning (rather than my preferred place) because it was close and convenient.
I was shocked at how bland it was (and also the high prices, but that’s not relevant). It’s been a long time since I ate there because I know have a couple locally owned breakfast options which are cheaper and tastier, but I’ve never turned my nose up at an IHOP omelette before.
So I figure there might be two factors at play here, which could overlap.
- A wider availability of good non-chain restaurants are refining the palates of American diners, making chain restaurants seem blander by comparison.
- American chain restaurants are doubling down on their blandness to provide maximal “sameness” of experience as a way of competing with all these new, scary restaurants for aging demographics.
If there’s a general trend I think it’s to a wider gamut of flavor. Spicier dishes are more easily available, and so are more subtle dishes. There’s no point having a dish with local varietals if their flavors are going to be bombed out with salt or capsaicin. Per always, there’s no accounting for taste: try different restaurants, talk to the regulars, talk to the waitstaff, talk to the cookstaff, and find what you like.
If anything, it seems spicier than it used to be.
I agree with Johnny Bravo. Smaller chains and independent restaurants are trending spicier and more flavorful, especially if they are aiming at any sort of younger foodie demographic. National chains seem to be getting blander.
This. I don’t see chain restaurants getting blander - in fact trying the opposite with spicer entrees, but compared to the non-chain restaurants with tons of flavor, they just taste like nothing.
I don’t think so as transfat was a sub for the taster animal fat when people wanted a healthier alternative. Fine restaurants would still use animal fat for the taste, if they went to transfats they already lost the taste race. The veg fats that are used now is about the same as transfats in terms of taste.
Now lots of taste went away when we went to transfat, though that was quite some time ago.
For clarification purposes: I was referring to blandness of entrees from non-chain restaurants (specifically thinking of a couple of highly rated Italian places in my area).
There are certainly a lot of fast-food chain options for supposedly spicy food (i.e. “hot wings” and the tendency to offer sriracha sauce on all sorts of things, which is starting to approach the ubiquitousness of “Tuscan”-style promotions).
Low or no salt is easy to fix if necessary. I miss actual spices (basil, oregano and their kinfolk).
Over the past few decades, ethnic restaurants from a much wider array of nationalities have become present further from the big cities. And we’re generally talking about the spicier cuisines.
And ISTM that over the past several years, the more mainstream American restaurants have been catching up. Red Lobster comes to mind as an example: last time my wife and I went there, I had some dish that was, by my standards, pleasantly but far from overwhelmingly spicy - but way more spicy than I would have expected to find in any major American chain in, say, 2005.
That’s really going to depend on your particular choice of restaurants, or maybe your general location.
Yeah, if anything, the non-chains have gotten much more funky with their food and spicing (that is, less catering to what once was middle-of-the-road American tastes) as interest in ethnic foods has increased tremendously over the last couple of decades. Now, with Italian food, I don’t know. If you’re used to Southern and Sicilian style Italian food and encounter a Northern Italian joint (which are becoming a bit more popular, though southern Italian and “red sauce” places dominate Italian food in the US), then maybe you’ll find it bland in comparison. (For example, I make a traditional bolognese, and it has no oregano or basil or anything like that in it. Just a slight grating of nutmeg and black pepper. But it’s plenty delicious.) But, overall, food has become far more adventurous and more heavily spiced (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse), around here.
Of course, I also live in a big city with a cosmopolitan population, so tastes here may not be reflective of your area.
there’s the possibility that- if they’re sticking to traditional preparations- the dishes may simply just be bland. I think some (i.e. “foodie”) Americans have this notion that any dish from any other country other than this one simply must be bursting with intense flavors, and any replication we can find here is watered down. You mention Italian; guy I work with is northern Italian (Genova) and the stuff he makes would be unrecognizable to the average American who equates “Italian=tomato, garlic, lots of herbs.” instead it’s a lot of seafood, beans, pasta, etc. in light sauces.
As I suppose I already intimated, I definitely haven’t experienced this.
I was thinking the same thing about Siam Sam’s post. Many years ago I traveled in Thailand, and found Thai food in Thailand to be completely unlike what I had here in Thai restaurants.
I don’t think so. I think there was an SD column on trans fats where Cecil pointed out there was no difference in taste between them and their substitutes and so that could not be a valid argument.
Possibly. I’m not into spicy food, but then it’s a myth that all Thai food is spicy. A lot of it is not. But it is more flavorful.
I would say quite the opposite. I think foodies (at least the ones I know) know very well that heavily spiced does not mean its necessarily indicative of the way it is prepared in its native land. For example, Neapolitan pizza is quite respected among foodies, and often people who are not familiar with the style are perplexed by the lack of spicing in the sauce (often, just crushed tomatoes, nothing else) and paucity of toppings (mozzarella and basil, that’s it.) \