I never thought celery tasted bitter. I was going to say maybe I’m less sensitive to bitter flavors than you are, but then again I dislike really hoppy beers, because I find them too bitter.
I like the flavor celery adds to food, but I don’t like the texture raw or cooked. When I make gumbo and other dishes using the Holy Trinity I chop the celery very fine so I don’t notice the texture. For many dishes I salt with celery salt as a matter of course. Luckily most restaurants have some non-celery dishes.
I don’t find it especially bitter. But I do like the taste. I use celery seed in my egg salad. Yum.
Interesting. It’s definitely bitter to me. Not overwhelmingly so, but definitely bitter. Then again, I’m also someone who does taste the soapiness of cilantro, and loves cilantro (though that “soapiness” has become recontextualized over time and now comes across as “green” and “fresh” where before it was “somebody didn’t rinse the dishes.” Weird how tastes works.)
Getting back to the original, I find good restaurants with a limited menu sticking to their expertise are often better than playing “find the god stuff”. While you could pick a bunch of different varied options that might not appeal, that would be quite unlikely. At worst I might find no highly pleasant choice and most likely some would interest or be adequate. I am glad I largely outgrew the foods I found inedible many decades ago, some of which I enjoy often.
Yeah. That is why I am highly skeptical of eating at places like Cheesecake Factory that has an encyclopedic sized menu. They can’t possibly be doing anything really well. It’s all mediocre. Maybe not “bad” but also “not bad” in a way that some frozen dinners are “not bad.” I much prefer a place with a semi-limited menu that they excel at making. It need not be a tiny list of choices but should not be everything in the pantry either.
My one caveat to that are Chinese restaurants. Most of the ones that deliver seem to have a bewildering amount of choice but that kinda seems that’s how they roll and, at least, they are almost exclusively focused on Chinese cuisine…not like Cheesecake Factory which is all over the place.
A lot of that usually seems to me to be the same ingredients mixed up in different combinations.
Chipotle seems to have quite a limited menu, but they do okay.
Maybe not so much if you look at them from a more abstract level. Nearly all the entrees are cooked the same, and consist of a meat, vegetables and a sauce. So you might have beef and broccoli in a brown sauce, and also pork, cabbage, and carrots in the same brown sauce. Or you can get Mongolian beef, pork, chicken, or shrimp, but they are listed separately
And, certain combos. A lot of the menu at many Chinese restaurants (at least the ones in the U.S., which cater to non-Chinese palates) is things like:
Sweet and Sour [protein]
[Protein] Egg Foo Young
[Protein] Fried Rice
Moo Shu [Protein]
[Protein] Almond Ding
[Protein] Chow Foon
etc.
That can add up to dozens of menu items, but not that many actual dishes, other than choosing if you want chicken, shrimp, pork, etc.
Sure, but when you head to Chinatown, you can find giant menus of fairly unconnected things, not just sauce and protein swaps.
Totally agreed.
I never had a bad meal at Shopsin’s:
In my experience Cheesecake Factory exists primarily as a fallback answer to the perennial “where you do you want to eat? I don’t know, where do you want to eat?” discussion.
Ten officemates decide to go out to lunch. Two want sushi. Four are okay with sushi but one can’t abide it. Three really want pizza but two people can’t handle gluten and are tired of always getting the caesar salad side and picking out the croutons. One person really wants Indian but two people refuse because they think it’s always too spicy. Three people argue for sub sandwiches but there’s disagreement about how recently they did that as they rotated through the options trying to give equal time to the different preferences.
They end up at Cheesecake Factory because nobody really likes it and nothing exceeds the bar of minimal adequacy, but there’s enough variety that everyone can find something tolerable and they can quit arguing and just go eat.
(I still have fond memories of a favorite group of workmates, from years ago, in large part because everyone on the team loved dim sum and we went out for it regularly with no arguments.)
That’s my experience. Note that I knew nothing about the Cheesecake Factory, because we don’t have them in Canada. But my American wife knew about them, and so did her sister, and sister’s boyfriend, and we were in Seattle, and wondering where to go.
Comments from all abounded at every suggestion. Sushi? “I hate sushi.” Italian? “Too carb heavy.” Chinese? “Too complicated.” And so on. Finally somebody said, “Well, it looks like the Cheesecake Factory then.” And that’s where we went. I liked it.
I think Cheescake Factory has mastered the mediocre. The food is ok. As I mentioned before, kinda like a decent frozen meal you microwaved…a bit better.
When a big group cannot agree it might be a solid choice. No one will love it but no one will hate it. The food equivalent of Muzak.
But never would I choose it as a place to take my SO for a special dinner. YMMV.
6-ish choices is limited?
You get that if there is more to choose from it is all coming out of the microwave?
i went to claim jumpers … their menu felt like as book …
That’s actually a perfect example for me. I’m a very adventurous eater - I’ve gladly tried everything from insects to freeze dried mammoth. But I dislike cured meats in general, and had to go pretty far down that menu before I found something I thought I might like. But then, honestly, anyone who knew me at all would never choose that restaurant for my birthday dinner. So there’s that. . .
Not to fight the hypothetical, but the OP is really a story about someone who simply doesn’t know their partner. Nonetheless, yes, I would find something o the menu that I could choke down in that position, and hopefully my partner would never know the depth of my discomfort - just that I’d rather not go back to that restaurant.
Really depends on what the items are - are there loads of disconnected dishes or is it similar to the Chinese restaurant mentioned above? I know a restaurant that has twelve meat entrees - chicken breast made six ways and veal cutlet made six ways. Of curse, five of the methods are shared between the veal and the chicken. Then there are ten pasta dishes which is basically “pick a sauce”, And one of the pasta sauces is also used on the chicken and veal.