In my neighborhood, there’s a Mexican goat place that only serves goat as a main course. I mean, they do have one more thing: quesadilla, but I don’t know if it’s regarded as a main course or not. It is always bristling with business. My preference is towards places with very short menus that have simply chose to perfect those items than multi-page menus. I mean, even In N Out is basically that way: they just have burgers, fries, and shakes, and only one of those is a main dish.
My wife and I are going to a World Top 50 restaurant for my birthday in the fall.
There’s no menu. You sit down and they serve you a set series of courses. The series changes regularly, with some dishes swapped in and out daily, based on what’s in season locally and the freshest available ingredients.
Your only choice is in beverages: you can get bottles off the wine list, or you can get the course by course pairing, either wine or non-alcoholic. Other than that, everyone gets the same food on that day.
It’s supposed to be astonishing and I cannot wait (tables are fully booked six months out). But at the same time, I fully grant that this experience is not for everyone.
If you don’t know what you’re in for at a place like this, if you’re not willing to sit down and just see what happens, then don’t go.
And definitely don’t take a guest there, birthday or otherwise, unless you know they’ll be okay with it.
The birthday boy here sounds like my wife. She has very specific likes and tends toward “meat and potatoes” entrees. If the restaurant has steak on the menu, but they do some kind of rub, that ruins it for her. We’ve been sightseeing in other cities, and we’re on our sixth restaurant (reading the menu outside by the door) and she still turns up her nose and says, “I don’t like any of this.”
A conversation we’ve had countless times: “I don’t like [such and such].” “Have you ever tried [such and such]?” “No. But I know I don’t like it.”
I, OTOH, am pretty adventurous re: cuisine and love to try new things. I haven’t eaten meat (only fish) for about ten years now, and I am still always confident wherever we eat they’ll have something I can live with. It might be something absolutely yummy. Or it might be something meh that fills up my belly. Either way, I won’t complain. I’m the opposite of picky.
So, I just wouldn’t make a reservation at a restaurant for my wife’s b-day without being certain the menu was okay. That said, it is frustrating. Different strokes, and all that, but I can’t help thinking at times, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, just eat something! Seriously, out of the twenty items on the menu, nothing is acceptable?” Grrr.
I don’t know about the goat restaurant, whether you mean goat is the only meat and the menu has it prepared a few different ways or whether you mean today they are serving goat stew and and tomorrow it might be goat tacos and that’s it. I don’t like multi-page menus either , but there’s a whole lot of room between that and serving only a single dish. Even steakhouses generally have a chicken and/or fish option. But what I’m sure of is that at the goat restaurant there won’t be much of an issue of not knowing whether you will find something on the menu you like - because if all they serve is goat, you probably won’t end up up with food you like on Monday’s menu and Friday’s menu but there’s absolutely nothing you like on Thursday.
Twice I have ordered a BLT at a place that did not list them. I remember the waitress at one, “Well, sure - I guess we can. We have everything available”.
Another place I frequent no longer offers their sumptuous breakfast sandwich on sourdough. At the bartender’s suggestion you can order the grilled cheese sandwich off the children’s menu and add bacon and an egg. It’s lovely.
It’s just goat stew prepared in a Jaliscan style.
Yup.
If it’s that sort of restaurant, and he’s not that sort of eater, you shouldn’t have made his birthday reservation there in the first place. This mess is your fault.
If I’m one of the people eating: if it’s that good a restaurant, I’m going to assume that they’ve done something both delicious and interesting with each of those options, and even if it doesn’t look great to me on the menu I might well like it and would be curious to find out.
(At least, unless it’s the kind of restaurant that feeds you two tablespoons of processed foam in an interesting shape and expects you to be awed by it. But if you know me well enough to invite me to dinner for my birthday, you probably know me well enough not to pick that restaurant. And if you did, I’d probably suck it up and eat the stuff. Maybe it would astonish me.)
Basically – I think that somebody who isn’t going to be at least curious enough to try something on that menu simply isn’t a person to give this type of present to. Give them something else. But if somebody gave you that for a present: it’s like any other present that went slightly wrong. Say ‘thank you very much’ and eat up. If everything’s actively repellent, since you can’t with this sort of present say ‘thank you very much’, shove it in the back of the closet, and eventually donate it: then confess that everything’s actively repellent, tell the restaurant that you’re really really sorry but there’s nothing allowable on your diet (don’t try to be specific!) and leave. (They’ll probably think you just saw the prices and can’t afford it.) But that’s only if it’s all really repellent.
The way I understood the OP, the birthday boy is not a particularly picky eater, and there being nothing on the menu he wants is not something you normally would have anticipated.
If the birthday boy is not at all adventurous and doesn’t like surprises, that calls the whole premise into question.
I meant, the sort of eater who when faced with something unexpected thinks ‘I wasn’t expecting to like any of this, but what the hell, I’ll give this one a try. Maybe it’ll surprise me.’
Because a restaurant that serves only 6 things, a different 6 every time, is the sort of place where you could, indeed, reasonably anticipate that there might not be anything that you already knew that you wanted to eat.
And the sort of person who when faced with six different options can’t find anything they want to try, not because it’s all drenched in fish and they can’t stand fish but just because they’re not in the mood that night, had better be the one who makes dinner; because they’d be hell to cook for.
I had similar thoughts: between home-cooked meals made by parents and SO’s, school lunches, banquets and reception dinners, etc. meals where I had limited choices have been extremely common in my life, and usually not any problem.
But I decided that this was different. For one thing, a meal that’s good enough for an ordinary occasion may not be good enough for an expensive special occasion where I’m the guest of honor. And for another, I don’t know how weird the food can get in the kind of restaurant the OP describes.
This sounds to me like “What do you do when you’ve just jumped out of the airplane, but decide that you’d rather not go skydiving after all?”. If you go to a place like that, you’re accepting that you’re going to get a limited set of options, and if that’s not an acceptable risk to you, then you shouldn’t be going to a restaurant like that to begin with. Once you’ve walked in the door, you’ve already made your choice to eat there.
Or, what if someone invited you over to their house for a home-cooked meal? There, you’d only have one choice. You eat it.
I’ve been to a few tasting or chef’s table menus, and the fun about them is not having a choice. At nearly all of them the dish I’ve had some trepidations about turned out to be my favorite item of the evening. One place the two dishes I thought I’d like the least I liked the most.
I couldn’t deal with a picky eater SO. If otherwise I really really loved them, I just wouldn’t eat out with them, and I’d find friends who were more adventurous eaters to enjoy meals with.
I reread it and you’re right. But it feels like a distinction without a difference to me. Unless they were six toxic, vomitous choices—not likely—I’d pick something and eat it. “Not particularly appealing” does not equal “I simply can’t eat this” to me.
But, believe me, I can picture it. And my wife would not agree that she’s picky either. But “none of these six pretty typical offerings are something I can eat” is close enough to picky for me.
A restaurant with a lot of options on a big menu, is a bad place to eat. Why? Because many of the items will be frozen, pre-packaged, heated and served. You got a couple cooks in the back and there is no way they can learn to cook all these menu items, or have all the ingredients to do so, and be any good at it, you might just as well visit the frozen foods section at your local grocery store and heat up something at home.
A limited menu with 6 or 8 specialties, the cooks/chefs know what they are doing and will put some time and effort into your meal. Probably the best meal you can find. Better to eat there and tell the picky eater to bring a sack lunch.
I prefer those kinds of restaurants too but the entire premise of the OP is taking a picky eater out for their birthday.
Well, upon re-read, the OP’s premise does state that the eater in question is not picky. In that case, I don’t know.
Why lie or make something up? “Thank you. We’ve decided not to eat here.”
I’ve been to places like that on special occasions and they always get their money up front when you make the reservation. Not the kind of place to take a picky not-picky eater like in the OP, that’s for sure.
Again, the way I interpreted it is that the birthday boy is not picky.
I don’t consider myself a picky eater, but I could probably come up with a list of at least six foods that I don’t particularly care for. Could you? What if, just by chance, all six of the items offered were from your “no thanks” list?