When you see the word “Kobe” on a menu, run the other way. Restaurateurs have figured out that this is the ticket to 200% markups. It’s not just that you won’t be getting Japanese beef; it’s that no matter how much they swear it’s wagyu, it’s whatever – it’s not (outside maybe a few gaijin-unfriendly places in N.Y. or S.F. who illegally import meat) going to be anything like high-end Japanese beef in Japan. This is especially true of the “Kobe slider” at your local sports bar. Save your pennies and splurge on a big teppanyaki meal in Tokyo one day.
On the wasabi issue – it’s my impression that even in Japan hand-grated real wasabi is the exception rather than the rule – I think I’ve generally had the ersatz paste. As someone noted of surimi, the Japanese aren’t averse to certain forms of improvisation.
As with “Kobe,” everyone and his mother has decided they’d like to sell you sushi. (Nice markups, lots of a la carte items adds up). Unless you’re eating in a big East or West coast city, the odds are very very low that the people running the restaurant are Japanese (they’re probably Fukienese Chinese). That doesn’t mean they can’t prepare sushi of course, it does detract from it being a core competency and from their knowing how to handle raw fish. This applies in spades to the “sushi as an afterthought” places, as many of the Chinese restaurants around here have decided to tack on a sushi menu. Finally, you should know that many investigations have caught restaurants mis-labeling inferior/cheaper fish as tuna, yellowtail, etc. Not to be too much of a downer, but I’m at the point where if I can’t be reasonably assured the chefs were trained in Japan, I’ll save my sushi budget for when I can.
Server here. Worked at several different kinds of restaurants. Here’s me looking out for you, the diner. I also apologize in advance for lack of direct quotes, they were from a few pages ago and I’m not going to dig around to find them.
1. Don’t eat on a Friday or Saturday night. Go on a slow night and enjoy a server who has nothing better to do than get you a new fork before your dropped fork hits the ground. Your food will be cooked faster too.
2. Be nice to your server! This isn’t just for karma, it’s good for you too. If you have some special request (half-orders, extensive modifications, etc.) you are much more likely to get it if you are nice about it. If you are friendly and kind and then have some ridiculous request, the server will go into the kitchen and try to convince the kitchen to honor the request even after the kitchen refuses. If the server says, “Please? They were so nice about it!” then the kitchen is more likely to do it (though there are some things that the kitchen simply cannot do). If the kitchen says no and the guest was rude and demanding anyway. Shrug. Boo hoo for that guy.
3. Sit where the host asks you to sit. The host is seating you with the server who has the most time to serve you. If you pick your own table, you run the risk of double or triple seating your server and getting slower service all night, because instead of pacing everything out, your server has to do everything at once. Also common is requesting to sit at a table in a section that has no server. So, the host has to find a server to cover that table. You’re likely to get neglected because the server may have a section on the opposite side of the restaurant and has to make special trips to visit your table. To be fair, I understand that some tables/locations may be considered better than others, and if having that table is worth the extra time to you, then go for it.
And in regards to previously posted rules:
The rule about not ordering anything way above the average price point isn’t necessarily true. I worked at a place that had 2 items that were $10 more than anything else on the menu – $28 vs $12-18 – and they were some of our best items. They weren’t overpriced at all. In fact, we didn’t turn any profit on them, they were just dishes that we wanted to serve because we thought they were good. He priced them at the bare minimum to break even because even that was significantly above our average price point.
As far as not eating fish 50 miles from where it was caught or landlocked areas, I worked at a couple sushi restaurants in the Midwest, and our sushi was flown in and picked up ASAP from the airport. I must admit that I haven’t eaten sushi along any coasts, but I asked our guests about eating sushi in California and they shrugged. They said good sushi is good sushi and the stuff that sushi in Minnesota is as good as what they had in California, with the caveat that there is probably a higher grade of sushi that is only available in places near the sea, but it was ridiculously expensive and they couldn’t afford to eat it anyway (and the sushi I served in the Midwest was by no means cheap).
Asking for the house specialty is kind of weird to me. The only places that I think of as having a house specialty are divey ethnic places where the specialty would be fairly obvious anyway, i.e. pho at a Vietnamese place, or Peking duck at a Chinese place. If someone asks me for a recommendation, I always say “Well, what do you feel like eating tonight? Something light, spicy, rich, or seafood?” If you give your server guidelines for the kinds of things you’re looking for, then he or she will name the best dishes within that. Asking for the most popular dishes will by no means get you the best food.
This is a probably-necessary but not sufficient precondition of getting good food. Every Chinatown I’ve been to has more than a few restaurants jammed with Chinese people, eating . . . swill.
There could be a couple of reasons for this (that could apply to other ethnicities).
AIUI, corn startch sauce bases and MSG are legitimate parts of Chinese cooking, but it is very easy (as with the lard in Mexican food) to use them as a crutch to where they become the main flavor of the dish (especially if you’re skimping on the quality of the other ingredients).
Also, recent Chinese immigrants tend to be notoriously (necessarily, I guess), uh, thrifty, and there can be a real race to the bottom in the quality/quantity/price calculus. Many’s the time I’ve fallen for some crappy five-for-a-dollar Chinatown dumplings and said in exasperation – “Could I just have like two, but with real ingredients and more actual filling?”
This can be true but you probably need to do a little more homework to make sure that they have that kind of direct pipeline like that. A funny exception to my “no Japanese sushi outside of big cities” came in Evansville, Indiana, where my business associate was raving about the sushi joint. I rolled my eyes ridiculously as one would until he managed to reveal a kind of important data point he’d left out – Toyota had just built a major R&D and manufacturing plant in Evansville. That got my interest, and sure enough, the Toyota execs (and some very lucky locals, the few who were willing to try) had a savvy Japanese guy who’d been willing to trek out to the wilds and provide them with high-quality fresh fish.
The best sushi place in town here is owned by the mom of a former student of mine. She came to a parent’s night at school once, but she had to leave early, she told me, to go to the airport to pick up an order of fish.
I went to her restaurant the next week and haven’t looked back.
Huh. I would never, ever take someone out to eat Peking Duck without a) knowing the restaurant, and b) calling a day or two in advance to order it.
Maybe you meant General Cho’s Chicken with Eggroll?
Yeah. Fusion (Indian-Chinese food, Tex-Mex, etc.) counts as one cuisine. As do fusion dishes that have become an important part of another cuisine (curry at a British restaurant, for example.)
When you run into trouble is when you have restaurants that serve both curry and chow mein, or hamburgers and tacos, or pizza and pho. The crappiness goes up the more the menu approaches equality- I knew a great American diner that also served pho because the owner was Vietnamese and couldn’t bring himself to run a restaurant without it. A few “Mexican” items at a breakfast joint won’t ruin things. But when the menus start approaching equality- you are in trouble.
Obviously this is less of a problem for high-end restaurants that are taking care to work with different flavors. This rule is more about lunch places, take-out joints and buffets.
Exactly. If no Asian people are there, it is probably bad. But the presence of Asian people does not mean it will be good. My local late night student-slop takeout joint always has plenty of Chinese people in it, but the food sucks even as inauthentic American style take-out, much less something trying to pass itself off as real Chinese food.
Why? Probably the same reason I ate crappy “Western” food in China. I used to go to this “Australian steakhouse” that served canned peaches on the pizza, inexplicably cracked eggs over everything, and offered something they called “McFlour coated cock-strings.” The food sucked, and did not remotely resemble anything they eat in Australia or anywhere outside of Chinese “Western” restaurants. But it scratched an itch, was cheaper and closer than places that served more authentic Western food, and had enough ambiance to feel familiar-ish.
In addition to doing non-piglike things, the pig on the sign at a barbecue place should look far happier than you’d expect given the situation.
A good barbecue place should also have at least two of these three things on the walls: a mounted boar’s head, old license plates, a picture of the local little league team that they sponsor.
In general, a barbecue place’s quality is inversely related to the number of sauces it offers. There are exceptions, such as Dixie Barbeque in Johnson City, TN. (They make up for it with at least three mounted boar’s heads and plenty of confederate flags.)
It’s been stated by others, but it’s true: if a crappy-looking restaurant in a bad location is still open, there’s a reason for that.
In general it’s a good idea to avoid popular, well-marked restaurants in touristy locations, but I have to re-evaluate that rule whenever I’m in Asheville and have a great breakfast at Tupelo Honey Cafe (as I did this weekend). It has the best location in town and there’s a 45-minute wait most of the time on weekends, but the food really is spectacular. I can’t decide if this is just an exception or if the rule needs to be revised–particularly, I think it doesn’t apply here because Asheville is not a huge family travel destination.
I’ll second the Red Iguana’s “Killer Mexican Food”. As far as I can tell, it’s authentic. They have about 10 different “mole” sauces from various parts of Mexico (get the almond mole - or if you like it spicy, the amarillo). And there is always a mob of people outside waiting to get in. You’ll be standing on the curb for an hour, but it’s worth it.
Indeed-we’re kind of a foodie destination here, and there are a ridiculously disproportionate number of good restaurants in town.
But there are some places in town that are, IMO, way overhyped. The quintessential example is Mellow Mushroom, which has a great location, oozes atmosphere like a suppurating wound, and has the nastiest pizza and most incompetent/apathetic service people in town.
Left Hand, thank you for your OP. While I vaguely “knew” everything, this is a perfect time for a reminder as I’ll be traveling to St. Louis (10 hours!) this weekend. I often get caught up in trying something “new” or getting the fish at a Mexican place and get into trouble.
I ate McDonald’s for the first time in years a few weeks ago and puked all over my future mother-in-law’s front lawn ten minutes later. It’s on the “do not want” list for the trip.
Two things could be at play: 1) ownership recently changed hands. I got several recommendations for a Chinese and Sushi place that changed hands 2 months before I went. It was garbage. 2) If it’s the only Brazilian place in town, they’ll still go for an ounce of nostalgia.
Here’s my rule: Don’t just check Yelp, Google, and Urbanspoon. Look at the most recent reviews - those sites automatically give oyu the most recommended or first review - and ownership can change and in a flash into something horrible.
A corollary: Don’t eat with menu or cocktail modification snobs. Ever. I have never met one who is content to receive their order without color commentary to the rest of the table on how the server didn’t listen, how they got it wrong, this isn’t what I ordered, how establishment B does it better…
Anything beyond salad dressing on the side, or dry toast with butter on the side, means you should have packed your own lunch to eat in the car while the grownups get to enjoy the restaurant.
Good general rule, but the best Maine lobster I have ever had was in Chicago.
Another good rule (and green key lime pie is a personal peeve), but funnily enough neither of those ingredients specifically mentioned is really local anymore. Key limes have been all but wiped out in Florida commercially (citrus canker - they were particularly susceptible - and they weren’t really key limes but persian limes - key limes have been limited to backyard growing for decades). Almost all commcercially are now from Mexico/Central America. On the other hand, taking conchs hasn’t been legal for YEARS. There may be some small aquaculture operations in Florida, but for the most part conchs are harvested overseas (there is at least one major conch aquaculture operation in the Turks, I believe.