I went to one of my favourite restaurants for lunch today. It is an Indonesian/Malaysian place with cheap crappy tables and chairs but would fill twice each lunchtime and is booked out for weeks on weekends. I probably go there at least once a month on average, and have done so for over 10 years. While I have tried plenty of things on the menu, more than 9 times out of 10 I simply have the Beef Rendang and a pot of green tea. Only $7-50 for the lunch special, served with rice and a tiny salad, big chunks of lean beef that fall apart at a touch in a thick fragrant sauce.
I have probably ordered it over 100 times and can’t remember when I last had something different, probably about 5 years ago when I went with a friend and she ordered our meals and we shared what she felt like trying.
My first ‘real’ job was near Chinatown; there was a great (cheap) Vietnamese place there where me and my co-workers would often go on Fridays. For about 6.50 you could get the vermicelli with pork or beef or chicken, and it would have yummy sprinkles of onion and carrot, peanuts, sprouts, and a layer of mint on the bottom. Top it off with the fish sauce and chili paste, and they were the most awesome things ever. (Even includes tea)
Due to availability, I’ve probably ordered burgers and fries more often than anything else, but if it was an option, I’d go for that almost every time.
My husband and I have a pub we sometimes go to on Sundays for lunch and to chill and read the papers. Every time it’s the same.
I have dark rum and coke, white bread with mayo, roast beef, lettuce, red onions, brie and horseradish. He has Guinness and a club sandwich on white.
We also have a default Chinese takeaway order- Shredded chilli beef and fried rice for me, battered sweet and sour chicken and chips (french fries) for him.
Eating out in restaurants though, we’ll get what we feel like and rarely have the same thing twice.
There’s a really raggedy-looking crab house a few miles from us - Capt Leonard’s - and they have the best crab cake platter!! Two big patties full of lump crab meat, seasoned just so, a salad with bleu cheese dressing on the side (big hunks of cheese in it), a fresh, warm roll with butter, and green beans. For $15. Absolutely wonderful! Their large fried shrimp is as good and is my second favorite order there, also $15.
I just wish they had a larger non-smoking section - it takes a while to be seated there on weekends if you get there after 5.
American: wherever I go, I usually test the bacon cheeseburger, and onion rings if they have them.
Chinese-American: almost always wonton soup and sesame chicken
Italian-American: almost always tortellini alfredo
Friendly’s: always clam chowder and then the cripsy chicken salad, Reese’s Pieces sundae for dessert
I have a lot of issues about food and tend to stick to what I know I like.
Sadly, my most common order is probably cheese sandwich. Unless I know the place, I stick to reasonably safe dishes. Servers generally understand that stuff containing big chunks of meat isn’t vegetarian (although some have the strange idea that sea life doesn’t count, and the even stranger idea that feathered life doesn’t, and a few think meat is a synonym for cow), but many, many, many of them can’t quite reconcile beef stock with cows or lard with pigs or other non-chunky meat products with, well, meat.
“Non-smoking section”, that’s a term I haven’t heard in a long time. Smoking is illegal in all public spaces here, I didn’t realize it wasn’t nation-wide. You can still smoke in restaurants in Maryland?
My Chinese must include beef with mushrooms. No beef with mushrooms, I feel like I’m not eating Chinese.
In serve-yourself restaurants I usually head for the kiddie choices: spaghetti bolognese and 1/4 of chicken. There’s one in Sants train station in Barcelona which I like a lot because they offer many other good choices (roasts, subs, a good salad bar where the salad is actually fresh)
Elsewhere I like to go for local specialties or for stuff I can’t be bothered to cook at home.