…
How could you eat it if it tasted like soap? Are you a regular? Does the cook have a beef with you?
But mostly, how could you eat it if it tasted like soap?
You’re eating spaghetti in soapy water at Denny’s. If that’s sobriety, I’m happy not to be afflicted!
nm (mixed up which place screwed up the pasta)
Ok, now I have a theory.
the pasta is premade at both places. In the semi-nicer place, its been parboiled previously so they throw it in boiling water for a minute to heat it up and finish cooking. there is some water carryover onto your plate.
At Dennys, Sizzler (off topic but is Sizzler even still in business?), and the like, the pasta is just thrown in the microwave and plunked down on your plate… No water carryover.
Like a good scientist, I’d test this theory, but i doubt I could stomach it. maybe one of my grad students would be interested…
Depending on how many rounds of pasta they’ve cooked in that same water, the bubbles might be from starch rather than soap. Every time we’ve ever cooked a second batch of pasta in the same water, there’s always been a scummy-looking foam all around the edge of the pot that looks exactly like old dishwater, and that’s with a pot that I washed and rinsed with my own hands. If they’re reusing the hell out of their pasta water (most places do, it’s not feasible to boil fresh water for every order) and then draining adequately, the agitation of mixing in the sauce and then swirling the pasta up onto your fork can be enough to form bubbles.
This seems far more likely to me than the notion that you willingly ate food that was contaminated with dish soap and never noticed anything wrong with the taste.
At how many restaurants did you think you saw this dishwater at the bottom of the spaghetti plate? (Come on, you can make at least an approximate estimate.) Is this really nearly all restaurants you’ve ever eaten spaghetti at, not counting Denny’s, Shakey’s and The Sizzler?
Is it possible you’ve got slow-acting long-term rabies and your mouth-foam is getting back into your plate as you eat?
You actually don’t need to drain the pasta all that well at all (I go straight from the pasta water into the sauce using a strainer.) You want a little bit of the starchy water on the pasta (and you certainly don’t want to rinse your pasta before saucing, as some people do). But you do have to cook it for about a minute in the sauce to incorporate. That way, you get a nice sauce that sticks to your pasta and doesn’t leave a pool of water on the bottom of your plate.
I confess, I don’t do that technique for every type of pasta I make, but one where I want the sauce well incorporated with the pasta, I do it. Often, I will save a few tablespoons of pasta cooking water itself to incorporate into the sauce, as well.
When I see spaghetti being served cafeteria-style, it is kept in pans with a little water in them to keep it from drying out. If said pans were not previously rinsed well after cleaning, there could be soap residue in them, hence dishwater-taste.
Blecch.
It would not surprise me if places like Sizzler and Denny’s had a pan of warmed spaghetti sitting somewhere in the kitchen, gradually softening into a pasta ooze.
The only time I get spaghetti at a restaurant is when it comes as a side dish at an Italian place. It’s generally overcooked even at good restaurants.
Moral: the best spaghetti is what you make at home.
Be careful, P, you don’t wanna get whacked for fuckin’ up the “macaroni”! 
Could the “suds” be from the starch?
I third this idea. If it were soap, I think you’d taste it. Starch water, on the other hand, has pretty much no taste.
To all the people who are too “special” to order spaghetti at restaurant:
Plplplplplplp!
Sometimes you just don’t feel like doing it yourself. Or you are far from home. Or the place does a very good pasta. “I would never order something I could make better/cheaper myself” is the call of the “Obnoxious Twit.”
Not too special. Too cheap, me.
But that reminds me. The SO said she has a hankering for fettuccine alfredo. I’ll need to run to the store today to get a block of parm.
For me, it’s only partly about cheapness, but mostly that I just don’t like the way most restaurants make pasta/spaghetti, so if I’m at an Italian restaurant (which is rare, as I’m not huge on Italian food, and if I’m eating Italian, it’s because of someone else’s suggestion, or I’m at home), I’ll usually order something like osso bucco or a fish dish or something. When I do do Italian pasta, I like the way I make it at home, as almost everything I’ve ever had at restaurants is just way oversauced and overspiced or too sweet for the way that I like most pasta dishes. Why would I order something I’m most likely not going to like?
That said, this thread actually is giving me a taste for some spaghetti or penne, as it’s been months since I’ve last had it.
Yeah, it’s better to just spit out the suds.
I guess Denny’s spaghetti is a slight step up from frozen spaghetti dishes you can get at the supermarket.
I eat a lot of spaghetti. Mine is so good that I have spoiled myself (not soiled, spoiled).
No, that’s “Ork Ork Ork”. 
I said plainly that the spaghetti at Dennys did NOT have the puddle of soapy water. In the places that did–the first was a restaurant on Main Street in Disneyland; the last was the defunct Wooden Shoe in Redondo Beach) the spaghetti was just fine (as were the sauce, the meat and the Parmesan cheese) untril the very end, when the sauceless spaghetti was saturated in soapy dishwater–and it tasted like it.
And I can differentiate between the tastes of soap and starch.
Slight tangent: The woman’s lovely daughter once told me that sake tasted like dishwater. I should have asked her how she knew…
Many people use the phrase “tasted like dishwater” not to mean that it had a soapy taster but that it had no taste at all.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dishwater
I still want to know, dougie_monty, approximately how many restaurants you noticed that there was dishwater underneath the spaghetti?
Maybe four or five…The Wooden Shoe being the last. After that I quit ordering spaghetti in restaurants, deciding that it must be “endemic” within the restaurant business. Nearly ten years passed before I tried it again–at The Sizzler.
Besides, the older woman’s health began failing steadily; this was in Fall 1996. She stopped eating out in November and died at the end of January. 