Whenever I get breakfast-type food in a restaurant, IME the bacon has been cooked to the point of brittleness. No juiciness, no moisture left in it - you can crumble it into bacon bits on the spot, that’s how dry it usually is.
Now there are reasonable disagreements over just how well-done a slice of bacon should be when it lands on one’s plate. But ISTM that a reasonable upper bound is this:
You should be able to bend a slice of cooked bacon without breaking it in two.
But that would be the exception with restaurant bacon, IME. In fact, if I’ve got a choice of sides, I’ll order sausage instead, because they can’t fuck up sausage nearly as badly, even though I prefer bacon if it’s anywhere within a pretty wide range of doneness.
My daughter, to spite her me and her mother, like her bacon simply scared by the heat of the griddle. I like crisp but not burnt bacon. When we simply say “bacon” in a diner, one of us will be disappointed (and the other will have double bacon). So now, we’ve learned to be specific. She gets “extra floppy” bacon and I get mine, like I said, “crisp but not burnt”.
Some restaurants use pre-cooked bacon. It will be done to medium, on the verge of crispy, and in reheating it’s easy to overdo it. Even if they don’t buy it pre-cooked they’ll pre-cook the bacon themselves because it takes too long to make for each order. I think most places lean toward more well done with bacon, but not to the point where it crumbles. I do fine with my local diner for breakfast, just there yesterday morning, bacon was perfect, but I’ll eat it as long as it’s not raw or charcoal.
Whereas, my wife is on the other extreme. She enjoys bacon, but not if it’s soft at all. Even when she orders it “well done,” half the time, it’s still “too flobbery” (in her view). It’s at the point where, when she orders her bacon, I’ll pick up my table knife at one end, and hold it up, horizontally, to show the waitress. “If it doesn’t look like this, it’s not done enough.” One of the waitresses at our favorite breakfast place calls how my wife wants it as “dead bacon.”
I love bacon, and I’ll happily eat it at any point between flobbery and dead. If you don’t want the crispy stuff, specify!!!
And they don’t mess with frying it. They par-cook it in the ovens, which is much easier, then just grab a tong full of strips out of the holding bin and throw them on the grill when needed.
I used to eat breakfasts in cafes and diners a lot, and I came up with the Rough Draft Scale of Difficulty in Preparing Breakfast. Here it is, from easiest to hardest:
Toast (anybody can make decent toast)
Eggs (also easy, but sometimes hard to get that perfect combination of liquid yolk and cooked white)
Hash Browns (the world is full of greasy dehydrated strings or last night’s leftover baked potato monstrosities)
Bacon (rare enough that a perfect serving is a thing of beauty)
Or I’ve heard that places that do a lot of deep-frying just deep fry the bacon as well, which may explain that sort of strange uniform brownness and overly crisp texture that some places provide.
I went to a restaurant when I was visiting Newfoundland and ordered some bacon. They literally took a huge handful of thin strips of bacon, dropped it in the deep fryer and then dumped it on my plate in a greasy, crispy mass of deliciousness. It was heaven but…has forever tainted my view of what good bacon is…I just want more of that…I want it so much…
I’d agree except I’d put bacon in between toast and eggs, since I only marginally like eggs, and bacon, while easy to make sub-par, ends up so good anyway that I often like it better than the eggs. Hash browns, though, do often wind up dry (or cold, at a buffet, since they have so much surface area.)
Restaurant bacon (on the infrequent occasions that I get it) is OK. Usually not as good as mine, but at least I don’t have to worry about setting off the smoke alarm.
However, the “bacon” that is available at motel breakfast bars is an alien concoction that apparently comes out of a giant pressing and cutting machine and only superficially resembles genuine bacon, both in texture and flavor.
I don’t usually mind buffet bacon as long as it is bacon from a pig. However, turkey bacon is not always labelled as such and is indeed an abomination.
Bacon that can’t slide itself down your throat is overdone. My daughter agrees. We order “loose” bacon at the couple of breakfast places we (kinda) frequent and haven’t ever had an issue. Mrs KCB prefers nearly incinerated bacon, and has ordered similar at the same places with adequate results.
If you don’t want the crispy stuff, specify!!!