There is an existential crisis in the restaurant industry. Right now.
Forget about Chili's re-re-vamping their menu to try to win back alienated customers. The restaurant industry is now getting squeezed from multiple directions: rising minimum wages, rising rents, rising legal and regulatory costs, and of course rising food costs too.
What's new this time around is the industry finds itself absolutely unable to pass these costs through to consumers in the form of higher prices.
The latest and most shocking admission of this was from the restaurant chain Red Robin [ticker symbol RRGB]. Red Robin's management said this in their most recent quarterly conference call:
"A top area of focus for us has been managing labor costs. The minimum wage and general regulatory environment is growing at an unprecedented rate, especially on the West Coast, where we have our strongest and largest footprint. Hourly wages are up again this year in the mid-single digits, and we know there's no appetite by today's consumer to spend more to cover this. Absorbing these increases with higher pricing is not an alternative for us."
There it is, straight out of the bird's, I mean CEO's, mouth: Not only are food and regulatory costs rising and minimum wage is increasing "at an unprecedented rate," but worst of all, they can't hike prices any more to compensate.
I'll share yet another an example from a local Irish pub we sometimes go to here in suburban New Jersey. This place is a basic, no frills, casual restaurant, a good place, and it now charges $11 for a burger. And an extra buck fifty for a piece of bacon and cheese.
So, imagine the management of this restaurant as they experience the same inevitable cost squeeze that Red Robin and others face. At first, they'll do what they've always done: they respond to their higher costs by passing them along to us. Just hike that burger's price by yet another buck.
That worked in the past, as the consumer didn't mind (or even notice) a burger increasing from $6 to $7 or $7 to $8.
But at some point the consumer notices. And minds. At some point, that burger just stops being worth it. Where that point is, it's hard to know. It depends. But when a basic burger starts to get up into the double digits, at $11-ish, $12-ish, can you hike prices another buck? And, then, a year from now another buck?
Before you know it, a modest dinner of, say, two burgers and two beers, maybe a side order, add in taxes and tip... suddenly, you're looking at a sixty or seventy dollar tab. For burgers and beers.
It ain't worth it. So people stop going out to eat. This is exactly what intelligent consumers do in the face of inflation.
Heck, I can easily feed the two of us for two weeks on $70.
Even Jim Cramer, stock market spaz for the masses, is onto this. Partly it's because he actually owns a restaurant, a Mexican place in Brooklyn. Regarding these trends, he wrote recently:
"It's a nightmare for any restaurateur. And it's just beginning."
A final note, regarding yet more synergies of being an investor and a (frugal) consumer. You'd have seen this theme coming, likely as much as a few years ago, if you were paying attention to the rising cost--and increasingly questionable value--of dining out versus cooking at home.
Resources:
Red Robin's Third Quarter 2017 conference call transcript
Finally a quick housekeeping note: Next week I'll run Casual Kitchen's top posts of 2017. Stay tuned!!
Read Next: How to Become a Sophisticated Investor: Six Steps
Showing posts with label restaurants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label restaurants. Show all posts
Five (No, Six!) Places for Great Cheap Eats in Honolulu’s Waikiki District
Laura and I are spending some time in Honolulu right now, taking an extended vacation from the USA's east coast to work on our surfing and our fitness.
Whenever we travel, we try to allocate some of our time and money to exploring interesting restaurants, wherever we happen to be. At the same time, however, we try to be as frugal and as healthy as we can. Which brings us to the big challenge here in Hawaii: the extraordinarily high cost of living. Food costs can be outlandish: anyone who's ever been to Waikiki beach and stared down a $15 cocktail at a hotel bar (or even worse, gazed at a $2.29 can of black beans in a local grocery store here) would know exactly what I'm talking about.
And yet, there are still some really good restaurant values here--if you know where to look. So, in today's post, I'll share our favorite low-priced restaurants here in Waikiki, Honolulu's main tourist district.
1) Rainbow Drive In
3308 Kanaina Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 737-0177
An iconic Honolulu eatery, just 25 minutes' walk from central Waikiki. Rainbow's offers delicious, no-frills plate lunches and dinners, with sides of rice and macaroni salad. Eight bucks or so buys you a huge meal. Get the Loco Moco plate or the Combo Plate.
2) Marukame Udon
2310 Kuhio Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 931-6000
Go early! Marukame Udon often has a long line out the door, and for good reason: it’s one of the best values in Waikiki. A cafeteria-style restaurant where you first choose your broth, your bowl size and then select various tempura-coated extras to go with your udon noodles. Staffers hand-make the udon right in front of you while you wait! Delicious and a great value. Three of us ate much more than we should have for a mere $34.
3) Gyu Kaku Japanese BBQ
307 Lewers Street
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 926-2989
A grill-it-at-your-own-table style Japanese BBQ restaurant, located just one block off of Waikiki's main road, Kalakaua Ave. We enjoyed an amazing dinner at this restaurant: three appetizers, two entrees and even a "beer tower" (64 ounces of Kirin Beer!) for only $44, including tip. Recommendations: try the Garlic Noodles, the Yaki-Shabu Beef, and the Pork Belly, all of which were insanely delicious.
PS: This restaurant also intrigues my inner economist, thanks to how it offers "happy hour" pricing at all times except from 6:30pm to 9:30pm. In other words, they use a creative form of surge pricing for the always crowded dinnertime hours. Once again, go early--or go late.
4) Musubi Cafe
2427 Kuhio Avenue (actually the main entrance is around the corner on Uluniu Ave.)
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 921-0168
There's one obvious clue why Musubi Cafe is worth a visit: most of the customers are local employees from all the nearby hotels. They're there because the food here is both delicious and a great value. Enjoy a Spam Musubi, one of Hawaii's all time iconic foods, along with plenty of other simple and handmade food options. Also, if you don't quite get Hawaii's love affair with Spam, this post might help you wrap your mind around it.
5) Me's BBQ
151 Uluniu Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96805
(808) 926-9717
An unassuming restaurant in an impossible-to-miss wildly pink building, offering one of the best restaurant food values in Waikiki. For around $8.50 you can get a gigantic Korean-style meat plate with your choice of four sides. Laura ordered the Fried Man Doo dumpling plate and I had the Chicken Katsu plate. It was so much food that we had plenty left over for another dinner the next day. Delicious.
Bonus! 6) Ezogiku Ramen
2146 Kalakaua Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 926-8616
Ultra-long time readers might recall we featured Ezogiku Ramen in a long-ago post here at CK about cheap eats in Honolulu. Restaurants come and go, of course, and while several of the restaurants we featured back in 2009 have since closed, Ezokigu Ramen lives on--and it's as good as ever, offering big delicious bowls of every kind of ramen you could imagine, all at incredibly reasonable prices. My favorite ramen place in Waikiki.
Read Next: On Timeshares, Beware
Bonus: How to Prepare and Eat a Rambutan Fruit
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Whenever we travel, we try to allocate some of our time and money to exploring interesting restaurants, wherever we happen to be. At the same time, however, we try to be as frugal and as healthy as we can. Which brings us to the big challenge here in Hawaii: the extraordinarily high cost of living. Food costs can be outlandish: anyone who's ever been to Waikiki beach and stared down a $15 cocktail at a hotel bar (or even worse, gazed at a $2.29 can of black beans in a local grocery store here) would know exactly what I'm talking about.
And yet, there are still some really good restaurant values here--if you know where to look. So, in today's post, I'll share our favorite low-priced restaurants here in Waikiki, Honolulu's main tourist district.
1) Rainbow Drive In
3308 Kanaina Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 737-0177
An iconic Honolulu eatery, just 25 minutes' walk from central Waikiki. Rainbow's offers delicious, no-frills plate lunches and dinners, with sides of rice and macaroni salad. Eight bucks or so buys you a huge meal. Get the Loco Moco plate or the Combo Plate.
2) Marukame Udon
2310 Kuhio Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 931-6000
Go early! Marukame Udon often has a long line out the door, and for good reason: it’s one of the best values in Waikiki. A cafeteria-style restaurant where you first choose your broth, your bowl size and then select various tempura-coated extras to go with your udon noodles. Staffers hand-make the udon right in front of you while you wait! Delicious and a great value. Three of us ate much more than we should have for a mere $34.
3) Gyu Kaku Japanese BBQ
307 Lewers Street
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 926-2989
A grill-it-at-your-own-table style Japanese BBQ restaurant, located just one block off of Waikiki's main road, Kalakaua Ave. We enjoyed an amazing dinner at this restaurant: three appetizers, two entrees and even a "beer tower" (64 ounces of Kirin Beer!) for only $44, including tip. Recommendations: try the Garlic Noodles, the Yaki-Shabu Beef, and the Pork Belly, all of which were insanely delicious.
PS: This restaurant also intrigues my inner economist, thanks to how it offers "happy hour" pricing at all times except from 6:30pm to 9:30pm. In other words, they use a creative form of surge pricing for the always crowded dinnertime hours. Once again, go early--or go late.
4) Musubi Cafe
2427 Kuhio Avenue (actually the main entrance is around the corner on Uluniu Ave.)
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 921-0168
There's one obvious clue why Musubi Cafe is worth a visit: most of the customers are local employees from all the nearby hotels. They're there because the food here is both delicious and a great value. Enjoy a Spam Musubi, one of Hawaii's all time iconic foods, along with plenty of other simple and handmade food options. Also, if you don't quite get Hawaii's love affair with Spam, this post might help you wrap your mind around it.
5) Me's BBQ
151 Uluniu Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96805
(808) 926-9717
An unassuming restaurant in an impossible-to-miss wildly pink building, offering one of the best restaurant food values in Waikiki. For around $8.50 you can get a gigantic Korean-style meat plate with your choice of four sides. Laura ordered the Fried Man Doo dumpling plate and I had the Chicken Katsu plate. It was so much food that we had plenty left over for another dinner the next day. Delicious.
Me, trying to figure out how I can fit this mountain of Korean food into my belly.
Bonus! 6) Ezogiku Ramen
2146 Kalakaua Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 926-8616
Ultra-long time readers might recall we featured Ezogiku Ramen in a long-ago post here at CK about cheap eats in Honolulu. Restaurants come and go, of course, and while several of the restaurants we featured back in 2009 have since closed, Ezokigu Ramen lives on--and it's as good as ever, offering big delicious bowls of every kind of ramen you could imagine, all at incredibly reasonable prices. My favorite ramen place in Waikiki.
Read Next: On Timeshares, Beware
Bonus: How to Prepare and Eat a Rambutan Fruit
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
The Modern, Oblivious, Restaurant Diner
Readers, take thirty seconds to read this Craigslist posting, published by an apparently frustrated New York City restaurant owner. (Also here.)
There's so much to say about this posting, starting with the fact that it's possibly not entirely true. Sometimes, though, things that aren't entirely true tend to resemble the truth far more than things that actually happen. (Which is why newsroom editors tell idealistic young reporters to "save the truth for your novel!")
Thus there's a reason why this Craigslist posting resonated with people as much as it did: it shows something true, deeply true, about us as modern customers: We've become needier, more distracted, more annoying, more oblivious, and less and less present than ever. Here's what I mean:
1) We pay little to no attention to reality. Look across any random sample of people today--at restaurants, while shopping, walking down the street, wherever--and you'll see a staggering percentage of them staring or texting into their phones.
2) We're never happy enough with what comes our way. Examples: customers nitpicking about where they sit, getting up and changing tables, micro-managing their food orders, sending their food back.
3) We need to be led, behaviorally speaking, to perform basic tasks, like putting down our phone and opening a menu. And then, later, we apparently need to be led once again to choose something from that menu.
4) We need to make everything we do into some form of conspicuous display.* This helps explain peoples' neurotic need to post photos of their food, or their need to share photographic proof of conspicuous leisure activities over social media. More on this in just a minute.
5) We no longer seem to be "here" anymore. Instead of being present in the here and now, our attention is elsewhere. We're anywhere but where we are.
Another word or two about conspicuous display. It's not just that people seem less and less "here" in the psychological sense. It's that they also need all the cool things they're doing to be seen by people who aren't even physically here with them either. Social media was created to fulfill this need to be seen, and it does it so well that it's almost as if an experience doesn't count--or perhaps never even happened--unless there's some meta-representation of it online.
Look, it's a free country, and the last thing I want is for this post to sound like some "kids these days!" rant. Come to think of it, it can't be a kids these days rant when people of my own demographic are among the worst offenders. But is that little glowing rectangle really that interesting? Is blarfing out our lives online really so important that it's worth interfering with reality to do so?
Readers, what do you think?
* See Thorstein Veblen's difficult but mind-bending book The Theory of the Leisure Class,
particularly Chapter 3, "Conspicuous Leisure" and Chapter 4, "Conspicuous Consumption" for more here. For a book written in 1899, it's astonishing how predictive it is of modern consumerism and modern identity construction.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
There's so much to say about this posting, starting with the fact that it's possibly not entirely true. Sometimes, though, things that aren't entirely true tend to resemble the truth far more than things that actually happen. (Which is why newsroom editors tell idealistic young reporters to "save the truth for your novel!")
Thus there's a reason why this Craigslist posting resonated with people as much as it did: it shows something true, deeply true, about us as modern customers: We've become needier, more distracted, more annoying, more oblivious, and less and less present than ever. Here's what I mean:
1) We pay little to no attention to reality. Look across any random sample of people today--at restaurants, while shopping, walking down the street, wherever--and you'll see a staggering percentage of them staring or texting into their phones.
2) We're never happy enough with what comes our way. Examples: customers nitpicking about where they sit, getting up and changing tables, micro-managing their food orders, sending their food back.
3) We need to be led, behaviorally speaking, to perform basic tasks, like putting down our phone and opening a menu. And then, later, we apparently need to be led once again to choose something from that menu.
4) We need to make everything we do into some form of conspicuous display.* This helps explain peoples' neurotic need to post photos of their food, or their need to share photographic proof of conspicuous leisure activities over social media. More on this in just a minute.
5) We no longer seem to be "here" anymore. Instead of being present in the here and now, our attention is elsewhere. We're anywhere but where we are.
Another word or two about conspicuous display. It's not just that people seem less and less "here" in the psychological sense. It's that they also need all the cool things they're doing to be seen by people who aren't even physically here with them either. Social media was created to fulfill this need to be seen, and it does it so well that it's almost as if an experience doesn't count--or perhaps never even happened--unless there's some meta-representation of it online.
Look, it's a free country, and the last thing I want is for this post to sound like some "kids these days!" rant. Come to think of it, it can't be a kids these days rant when people of my own demographic are among the worst offenders. But is that little glowing rectangle really that interesting? Is blarfing out our lives online really so important that it's worth interfering with reality to do so?
Readers, what do you think?
* See Thorstein Veblen's difficult but mind-bending book The Theory of the Leisure Class,
particularly Chapter 3, "Conspicuous Leisure" and Chapter 4, "Conspicuous Consumption" for more here. For a book written in 1899, it's astonishing how predictive it is of modern consumerism and modern identity construction.How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
When The Bill's Wrong In Your Favor, What Do You Do?
Readers, a question for you:
Let's say you just had dinner in a nice restaurant, but when you looked over the check you noticed you weren't charged for one of the items you ordered. The food was excellent, the restaurant experience was great and there were no problems whatsoever with your service.
Would you say anything to the waiter or waitress? Be honest now... what would you do?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
Let's say you just had dinner in a nice restaurant, but when you looked over the check you noticed you weren't charged for one of the items you ordered. The food was excellent, the restaurant experience was great and there were no problems whatsoever with your service.
Would you say anything to the waiter or waitress? Be honest now... what would you do?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
The Tragedy of Ersatz American Restaurant Food
A month or so ago, in the main dining room of the last cruise I'll ever take, I was offered a chocolate souffle.
The problem was, it was fake.
If you've ever had a real souffle, you know what it's supposed to be like: an incredibly delicious dessert with a weirdly perfect texture, halfway between liquid and air, that trembles and collapses with the first plunge of your spoon.
Sadly, this ersatz souffle was essentially a hypersweetened chocolate pudding/mousse mixture with a thin layer of what appeared to be cake batter poured on top of it. At least it was warm.
And not only was the souffle itself fake, but the entire rhythm of the souffle-ordering process was phony, as our waiter went around the table before dinner asking which of us would like the souffle, so he could "put the order in ahead of time." Thus was preserved the fiction that our souffles would be hand-made in advance for us.
I was more mad at myself than at the cruise line for this hilariously fake dining experience. I should have recognized the logistical impossibility of real souffles being lugged up from the ship's galley and heaved across the main dining room to you and 900 other guests at the same time. It doesn't matter how much you embellish the fiction by taking orders in advance. This ersatz "food" was quite clearly manufactured days--if not weeks--ahead of time.
But here's what's worse. I actually overheard people in that cruise ship dining room say they thought this phony souffle--not made, but rather shelf-stabilized, frozen and loaded onto the boat along with their suitcases--was absolutely amazing.
There are at least two distinct levels of tragedy here.
The first one is just a simple reality. When you sit down at almost all high-volume restaurants, the idea that your dinner entrees are actually "made" for you is a quaint fiction.
Instead a restaurant supply company--perhaps Sysco Foods, some other food service company, or the restaurant chain's parent company--prepares, plates and freezes most of the food, puts it on a truck, and ships it to the restaurant.
Sure, these foods--in all their oversalted, hyperpalatable and shelf-stabilized glory--might be customized a little bit with a fresh sauce, a side dish, or seasonings added by the restaurant staff. But make no mistake, most restaurant food is mass-produced, institutional food.
Foods are made this way because they have to be. Feeding thousands of customers in chain restaurants, on cruise ships and in high-volume restaurants presents immense logistical challenges. The restaurant and its workers need to have a good chunk of their work done in advance. Then, they can just add a couple of minor final touches before that food gets into our bellies. And thanks to consumers being willing to consume this food, it's quite a profitable business.
A better question, however, is whether it's worth our money to purchase restaurant experiences like these.
But there's a second distinct level of tragedy here, and it's particularly depressing when I think about my ersatz souffle. Imagine an unsuspecting diner who never had a souffle before, and this was his first one. What happens someday down the road when he gets a real souffle? An actual souffle that's good? There's an entirely good chance that he will prefer the phony ersatz souffle, or even think that the ersatz souffle was the real thing and this real souffle isn't.
It's getting to a point where the average American diner cannot tell the difference between food prepared in the ersatz style and food actually made at the place at which they are eating. Hey, the next time you visit a Chile's or a Cheesecake Factory, look around. People prefer ersatz foods!
Here's the point: we here in the United States do a bang-up job at manufacturing perfectly uniform, shelf-stabilized food that can be served in massive volumes. And manufactured food, when considered within its genre, doesn't have to be bad. Heck, I like an ice-cold Coke once in a while, and I would die without my beloved Cool Ranch Doritos.
But don't try to fool us into thinking these are actually foods. And that's the real tragedy of high-volume restaurant food.
One final thought: Serving a bad souffle isn't a crime. Serving a phony souffle isn't a crime either. But serving a bad, phony souffle to an audience that doesn't know that they're being served a bad phony souffle... well, if that's not a crime, it should be.
When you go to restaurants, go small. Go local-owned and owner-operated. And try to order food that was actually made there, not purchased flash-frozen from a restaurant supply company.
Otherwise, why eat out?
Readers, what are your thoughts?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
The problem was, it was fake.
If you've ever had a real souffle, you know what it's supposed to be like: an incredibly delicious dessert with a weirdly perfect texture, halfway between liquid and air, that trembles and collapses with the first plunge of your spoon.
Sadly, this ersatz souffle was essentially a hypersweetened chocolate pudding/mousse mixture with a thin layer of what appeared to be cake batter poured on top of it. At least it was warm.
And not only was the souffle itself fake, but the entire rhythm of the souffle-ordering process was phony, as our waiter went around the table before dinner asking which of us would like the souffle, so he could "put the order in ahead of time." Thus was preserved the fiction that our souffles would be hand-made in advance for us.
I was more mad at myself than at the cruise line for this hilariously fake dining experience. I should have recognized the logistical impossibility of real souffles being lugged up from the ship's galley and heaved across the main dining room to you and 900 other guests at the same time. It doesn't matter how much you embellish the fiction by taking orders in advance. This ersatz "food" was quite clearly manufactured days--if not weeks--ahead of time.
But here's what's worse. I actually overheard people in that cruise ship dining room say they thought this phony souffle--not made, but rather shelf-stabilized, frozen and loaded onto the boat along with their suitcases--was absolutely amazing.
There are at least two distinct levels of tragedy here.
The first one is just a simple reality. When you sit down at almost all high-volume restaurants, the idea that your dinner entrees are actually "made" for you is a quaint fiction.
Instead a restaurant supply company--perhaps Sysco Foods, some other food service company, or the restaurant chain's parent company--prepares, plates and freezes most of the food, puts it on a truck, and ships it to the restaurant.
Sure, these foods--in all their oversalted, hyperpalatable and shelf-stabilized glory--might be customized a little bit with a fresh sauce, a side dish, or seasonings added by the restaurant staff. But make no mistake, most restaurant food is mass-produced, institutional food.
Foods are made this way because they have to be. Feeding thousands of customers in chain restaurants, on cruise ships and in high-volume restaurants presents immense logistical challenges. The restaurant and its workers need to have a good chunk of their work done in advance. Then, they can just add a couple of minor final touches before that food gets into our bellies. And thanks to consumers being willing to consume this food, it's quite a profitable business.
A better question, however, is whether it's worth our money to purchase restaurant experiences like these.
But there's a second distinct level of tragedy here, and it's particularly depressing when I think about my ersatz souffle. Imagine an unsuspecting diner who never had a souffle before, and this was his first one. What happens someday down the road when he gets a real souffle? An actual souffle that's good? There's an entirely good chance that he will prefer the phony ersatz souffle, or even think that the ersatz souffle was the real thing and this real souffle isn't.
It's getting to a point where the average American diner cannot tell the difference between food prepared in the ersatz style and food actually made at the place at which they are eating. Hey, the next time you visit a Chile's or a Cheesecake Factory, look around. People prefer ersatz foods!
Here's the point: we here in the United States do a bang-up job at manufacturing perfectly uniform, shelf-stabilized food that can be served in massive volumes. And manufactured food, when considered within its genre, doesn't have to be bad. Heck, I like an ice-cold Coke once in a while, and I would die without my beloved Cool Ranch Doritos.
But don't try to fool us into thinking these are actually foods. And that's the real tragedy of high-volume restaurant food.
One final thought: Serving a bad souffle isn't a crime. Serving a phony souffle isn't a crime either. But serving a bad, phony souffle to an audience that doesn't know that they're being served a bad phony souffle... well, if that's not a crime, it should be.
When you go to restaurants, go small. Go local-owned and owner-operated. And try to order food that was actually made there, not purchased flash-frozen from a restaurant supply company.
Otherwise, why eat out?
Readers, what are your thoughts?
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
What's Your Take On Restaurants Charging Mandatory Gratuity Fees?
Over the past few weeks, another controversy over automatic tipping has burst back onto the scene, following recent controversial articles in the New York Post and Eater.com.
The Post article, by author Steve Cuozzo, argues that tips should always be built into the cost of a restaurant meal, and that doing so would unleash a Utopian paradise where waiters and customers would forever treat each other with professionalism, respect and dignity. At Eater, however, we hear the contra-case in a a post where a diner complains after a party of four adults and two infants got charged an automatic 20% gratuity in a NYC restaurant because, technically, they were a "party of six."
Should we adopt the European model here in the USA, and build tips into the cost of the meal? There's at least some logic behind the idea. For example, in cities frequented by European tourists, waitstaff can get badly hurt when foreign customers don't know the tipping conventions here in the USA. If the customer leaves little or nothing as a tip as they do back home, the waiter bears all the risk of not getting paid. Many restaurants in cities frequented by tourists tack on automatic gratuities for this very reason.
On some level I can see the value adopting the European model: just build the cost of paying the waiter into the prices of the food and be done with it. Of course, doing so would conflict with the standard practice of every other restaurant in every other city across the entire USA. It's funny how Manhattan-based journalists often get very confused and forget that outside their tiny little island is a whole country of 300 million people and 3.8m square miles--with its own firmly established dining conventions.
And of course, there are glaring gaps in the logic behind mandatory tipping. For example, one argument in favor of mandatory tipping is this: if you just put a 20% fixed charge on the dinner check, then waiters won't have to upsell diners on pricier entrees, appetizers and wines to boost their check.
Except that the 20% charge is based on the value of the dinner check, so there is still the exact same incentive to upsell the customer. A bigger check means a bigger tip, mandatory or not.
Another perfectly justifiable question: if the waiter knows she's automatically going to get 20%--no more and no less--for waiting on a table, is there an incentive to try?
Fortunately, here at CK I not only have lots of restaurant-goers among my readers, I also have quite a lot of restaurant owners, managers and waitstaff reading here too. So here's your chance to share your views: what is your take on automatic tip fees?
Related Posts:
On the True Value of a Forgotten Restaurant Meal
How Do You Define Truly Great Restaurant Service?
Cheap Eats in Honolulu: Nine Inexpensive Restaurants You Should Check Out in Waikiki
The Pros and Cons of Restaurant Calorie Labeling Laws
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
The Post article, by author Steve Cuozzo, argues that tips should always be built into the cost of a restaurant meal, and that doing so would unleash a Utopian paradise where waiters and customers would forever treat each other with professionalism, respect and dignity. At Eater, however, we hear the contra-case in a a post where a diner complains after a party of four adults and two infants got charged an automatic 20% gratuity in a NYC restaurant because, technically, they were a "party of six."
Should we adopt the European model here in the USA, and build tips into the cost of the meal? There's at least some logic behind the idea. For example, in cities frequented by European tourists, waitstaff can get badly hurt when foreign customers don't know the tipping conventions here in the USA. If the customer leaves little or nothing as a tip as they do back home, the waiter bears all the risk of not getting paid. Many restaurants in cities frequented by tourists tack on automatic gratuities for this very reason.
On some level I can see the value adopting the European model: just build the cost of paying the waiter into the prices of the food and be done with it. Of course, doing so would conflict with the standard practice of every other restaurant in every other city across the entire USA. It's funny how Manhattan-based journalists often get very confused and forget that outside their tiny little island is a whole country of 300 million people and 3.8m square miles--with its own firmly established dining conventions.
And of course, there are glaring gaps in the logic behind mandatory tipping. For example, one argument in favor of mandatory tipping is this: if you just put a 20% fixed charge on the dinner check, then waiters won't have to upsell diners on pricier entrees, appetizers and wines to boost their check.
Except that the 20% charge is based on the value of the dinner check, so there is still the exact same incentive to upsell the customer. A bigger check means a bigger tip, mandatory or not.
Another perfectly justifiable question: if the waiter knows she's automatically going to get 20%--no more and no less--for waiting on a table, is there an incentive to try?
Fortunately, here at CK I not only have lots of restaurant-goers among my readers, I also have quite a lot of restaurant owners, managers and waitstaff reading here too. So here's your chance to share your views: what is your take on automatic tip fees?
Related Posts:
On the True Value of a Forgotten Restaurant Meal
How Do You Define Truly Great Restaurant Service?
Cheap Eats in Honolulu: Nine Inexpensive Restaurants You Should Check Out in Waikiki
The Pros and Cons of Restaurant Calorie Labeling Laws
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
Cheap Eats in Honolulu: Nine Inexpensive Restaurants You Should Check Out in Waikiki
Now that winter is coming on in the northern part of the USA, we can't help but dream about the extended stay we were lucky enough to have nearly a year ago in the Waikiki district of Honolulu.
Unfortunately, as any visitor to Hawaii quickly discovers, it can be difficult to find affordable restaurant meals in Waikiki. But if you're willing to wander off the beaten path just a bit, you can find really good food at surprisingly reasonable prices.
With that, here are nine of the best cheap eats in Waikiki. Hopefully this post will encourage you to visit one of our favorite places in the world!
**********************************
Fanny's Chinese
464 Ena Rd
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 941-8155
This hole-in-the-wall restaurant serves Chinese food at prices ranging from $5-$8, possibly the lowest dinner prices in all of Waikiki. But go early--by 6pm, Fanny gets flooded with takeout orders and she'll shoo you away.
Phuket Thai
1960 Kapiolani Blvd
Honolulu, HI 96826
(808) 922-7960
This casual restaurant serves excellent Thai food at reasonable prices. Located just a few blocks north of Waikiki on the corner of Kapiolani and McCulley Streets.
Ramen Nakamura
2141 Kalakaua Ave
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 922-7960
Many people consider Nakamura to be the best ramen in Honolulu. The food is excellent and the prices are quite reasonable.
Ezogiku Ramen
2146 Kalakaua Ave
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 926-8616
We affectionately call this restaurant "the other ramen place" and we actually prefer it to the more popular and slightly more expensive Ramen Nakamura. The service is friendlier, the dining area is a bit bigger, and the entire experience is more casual and relaxing.
Rainbow Drive-In
3308 Kanaina Ave
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 737-0177
Just a few blocks' walk from Waikiki. The clientele at Rainbows is predominantly locals getting their fix of delicious island-style comfort food. If you want to try a traditional favorite, try the artery-clogging loco moco. My personal choice: the combination platter.
Pho Old Saigon
2270 Kuhio Ave # 1
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 922-2668
Excellent Vietnamese food. This restaurant is almost always crowded. Don't expect to be impressed with the decor (or the adult video store next door), but do expect to be impressed with the prices.
Pho My Lien
1831 Ala Moana Blvd
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 955-4009
Situated on the second floor of a run-down building, this mom and pop restaurant serves excellent home-cooked Vietnamese food at very reasonable prices.
Siam Square
408 Lewers St
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 923-5320
Exceptional Thai Food, friendly service and reasonable prices. This place is hidden away a little bit on the second floor above street level--just look for the ABC Store on the corner of Kuhio and Lewers Street, walk a few feet north on Lewers, then look up and to the left. You can't miss it.
Due Divino Pastaria
432 Ena Rd
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 955-4142
Hidden away on Ena Street, just past Hobron Street, is an excellent little family-style Italian restaurant. We were impressed with their simple yet delicious food, and we loved the comfortable and relaxed atmosphere.
Related Posts:
Hawaii and its Love Affair with SPAM
POG: The Official Drink of Hawaii
How to Prepare and Eat a Rambutan Fruit
Our New Zealand Travel Blog
On the Road with Casual Kitchen: Asheville, NC and 12 Bones Barbecue
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
Unfortunately, as any visitor to Hawaii quickly discovers, it can be difficult to find affordable restaurant meals in Waikiki. But if you're willing to wander off the beaten path just a bit, you can find really good food at surprisingly reasonable prices.
With that, here are nine of the best cheap eats in Waikiki. Hopefully this post will encourage you to visit one of our favorite places in the world!
**********************************
Fanny's Chinese
464 Ena Rd
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 941-8155
This hole-in-the-wall restaurant serves Chinese food at prices ranging from $5-$8, possibly the lowest dinner prices in all of Waikiki. But go early--by 6pm, Fanny gets flooded with takeout orders and she'll shoo you away.
Phuket Thai
1960 Kapiolani Blvd
Honolulu, HI 96826
(808) 922-7960
This casual restaurant serves excellent Thai food at reasonable prices. Located just a few blocks north of Waikiki on the corner of Kapiolani and McCulley Streets.
Ramen Nakamura
2141 Kalakaua Ave
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 922-7960
Many people consider Nakamura to be the best ramen in Honolulu. The food is excellent and the prices are quite reasonable.
Ezogiku Ramen
2146 Kalakaua Ave
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 926-8616
We affectionately call this restaurant "the other ramen place" and we actually prefer it to the more popular and slightly more expensive Ramen Nakamura. The service is friendlier, the dining area is a bit bigger, and the entire experience is more casual and relaxing.
Rainbow Drive-In
3308 Kanaina Ave
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 737-0177
Just a few blocks' walk from Waikiki. The clientele at Rainbows is predominantly locals getting their fix of delicious island-style comfort food. If you want to try a traditional favorite, try the artery-clogging loco moco. My personal choice: the combination platter.
Pho Old Saigon
2270 Kuhio Ave # 1
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 922-2668
Excellent Vietnamese food. This restaurant is almost always crowded. Don't expect to be impressed with the decor (or the adult video store next door), but do expect to be impressed with the prices.
Pho My Lien
1831 Ala Moana Blvd
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 955-4009
Situated on the second floor of a run-down building, this mom and pop restaurant serves excellent home-cooked Vietnamese food at very reasonable prices.
Siam Square
408 Lewers St
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 923-5320
Exceptional Thai Food, friendly service and reasonable prices. This place is hidden away a little bit on the second floor above street level--just look for the ABC Store on the corner of Kuhio and Lewers Street, walk a few feet north on Lewers, then look up and to the left. You can't miss it.
Due Divino Pastaria
432 Ena Rd
Honolulu, HI 96815
(808) 955-4142
Hidden away on Ena Street, just past Hobron Street, is an excellent little family-style Italian restaurant. We were impressed with their simple yet delicious food, and we loved the comfortable and relaxed atmosphere.
Related Posts:
Hawaii and its Love Affair with SPAM
POG: The Official Drink of Hawaii
How to Prepare and Eat a Rambutan Fruit
Our New Zealand Travel Blog
On the Road with Casual Kitchen: Asheville, NC and 12 Bones Barbecue
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
Seven Rules On the Value of an Experience
Since my last post on forgotten restaurant meals, I've been thinking quite a lot about the value of experiences, and I've come up with a list of rules of thumb you can apply to help you assess whether an experience will be worth the cost.
This is of course a food blog, and therefore much of this thinking is geared towards food experiences, but I think today's post could be broadly applicable across all sorts of experiences.
You'll notice the appearance of my trusty 80/20 Rule in this list, along with several other counterintuitive (and even one or two contradictory) thoughts.
One final note: My goal isn't to be prescriptive--I'm not here to tell you what to do. My goal with this post is to help you think about what gives you real value in life and thus help you think about what things are worth the extra money.
1) Money spent on experiences you don't remember is wasted money.
2) The "rememberability" of an expensive meal may have more to do with its infrequency than its absolute cost. If you have expensive dinners out several times a week, they are likely to blend together, be forgotten, and thus become a waste of money.
3) However, if you truly value expensive restaurant meals, it may be optimal to have just a few fancy and pricey restaurant meals per year. Frequency and rememberability are generally inversely proportional.
4) Rethink what paying for an experience means to you. Will you remember this experience? Will it be salient to you in a year or two? Or three? This might be a better measure of value to you than the cost.
5) At the same time, the value of an experience may be directly related to its cost, all else equal. Extremely expensive dinners tend to be more memorable, assuming they are relatively infrequent. Regular restaurant meals that you have for no reason at all will probably end up being utterly forgotten.
6) You can waste enormous sums of money on regular "forgettable" experiences.
7) By cutting out one or two weekly "forgettable" dinners out, you can save an enormous percentage of your entire food budget without sacrificing any long-term happiness whatsoever.
Readers, what would you add? And which of these do you agree with or disagree with?
Related Posts:
Spending to Save: Frugality and Expensive Food
Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
Doing Your Favorite Thing: How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration
Results of the Casual Kitchen Reader Food Spending Poll
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
This is of course a food blog, and therefore much of this thinking is geared towards food experiences, but I think today's post could be broadly applicable across all sorts of experiences.
You'll notice the appearance of my trusty 80/20 Rule in this list, along with several other counterintuitive (and even one or two contradictory) thoughts.
One final note: My goal isn't to be prescriptive--I'm not here to tell you what to do. My goal with this post is to help you think about what gives you real value in life and thus help you think about what things are worth the extra money.
1) Money spent on experiences you don't remember is wasted money.
2) The "rememberability" of an expensive meal may have more to do with its infrequency than its absolute cost. If you have expensive dinners out several times a week, they are likely to blend together, be forgotten, and thus become a waste of money.
3) However, if you truly value expensive restaurant meals, it may be optimal to have just a few fancy and pricey restaurant meals per year. Frequency and rememberability are generally inversely proportional.
4) Rethink what paying for an experience means to you. Will you remember this experience? Will it be salient to you in a year or two? Or three? This might be a better measure of value to you than the cost.
5) At the same time, the value of an experience may be directly related to its cost, all else equal. Extremely expensive dinners tend to be more memorable, assuming they are relatively infrequent. Regular restaurant meals that you have for no reason at all will probably end up being utterly forgotten.
6) You can waste enormous sums of money on regular "forgettable" experiences.
7) By cutting out one or two weekly "forgettable" dinners out, you can save an enormous percentage of your entire food budget without sacrificing any long-term happiness whatsoever.
Readers, what would you add? And which of these do you agree with or disagree with?
Related Posts:
Spending to Save: Frugality and Expensive Food
Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
Doing Your Favorite Thing: How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration
Results of the Casual Kitchen Reader Food Spending Poll
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
On the True Value of a Forgotten Restaurant Meal
I had an interesting moment of clarity about the true value of restaurant meals when I recently went through a pile of credit card receipts from a year ago. In that pile were receipts from fifteen or so restaurants we had been to in mid-2008.
These dinners were from barely a year ago, and yet I hardly remembered any of them. Heck, I couldn't even remember the names of some of the restaurants, much less what kind of food they served. And yet the aggregate cost of these culinary experiences was hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
You'd think after spending all that money I'd remember more of these experiences, but sadly, I don't. The ones that really stuck in my mind boiled down to a couple of really fancy restaurant meals we had, Laura's 40th birthday dinner, and the spectacular all-you-can-eat ribs we had last fall during our visit to Belgium. That's three or four restaurant meals--out of fifteen.
In complete contrast, I remember nearly every dinner party I've hosted at our home, going back many years. Those dinners were all truly salient and meaningful experiences, full of fun conversations, good eating (well, I did make the food after all!) and good times with friends. And yet the entire cost of all the food--for everyone--for a dinner in our home was usually far less than what Laura and I would end up spending on just ourselves for the average forgettable restaurant meal in this forgotten pile of receipts.
Readers, get ready, because here's the punchline of this article: you will completely forget most of your restaurant meals, making them an utter waste of money. Only a select few of your dinners out--the ones with particularly special circumstances--will stick in your mind.
Moreoever, you'll get more value from your experiences by going out to eat only for really, really important occasions. Otherwise eat at home. And host lots of dinner parties. You'll spend a lot less money, and you'll probably keep more meaningful and salient memories.
What is the point of spending extra money on an experience if the odds are you'll end up forgetting all about it?
Readers, what do you think about the value of forgotten experiences?
Related Posts:
The Dinner Party: 10 Tips to Make Cooking for Company Fun and Easy
Doing Your Favorite Thing: How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
A Simple Way to Beat Rising Food Prices
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
These dinners were from barely a year ago, and yet I hardly remembered any of them. Heck, I couldn't even remember the names of some of the restaurants, much less what kind of food they served. And yet the aggregate cost of these culinary experiences was hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
You'd think after spending all that money I'd remember more of these experiences, but sadly, I don't. The ones that really stuck in my mind boiled down to a couple of really fancy restaurant meals we had, Laura's 40th birthday dinner, and the spectacular all-you-can-eat ribs we had last fall during our visit to Belgium. That's three or four restaurant meals--out of fifteen.
In complete contrast, I remember nearly every dinner party I've hosted at our home, going back many years. Those dinners were all truly salient and meaningful experiences, full of fun conversations, good eating (well, I did make the food after all!) and good times with friends. And yet the entire cost of all the food--for everyone--for a dinner in our home was usually far less than what Laura and I would end up spending on just ourselves for the average forgettable restaurant meal in this forgotten pile of receipts.
Readers, get ready, because here's the punchline of this article: you will completely forget most of your restaurant meals, making them an utter waste of money. Only a select few of your dinners out--the ones with particularly special circumstances--will stick in your mind.
Moreoever, you'll get more value from your experiences by going out to eat only for really, really important occasions. Otherwise eat at home. And host lots of dinner parties. You'll spend a lot less money, and you'll probably keep more meaningful and salient memories.
What is the point of spending extra money on an experience if the odds are you'll end up forgetting all about it?
Readers, what do you think about the value of forgotten experiences?
Related Posts:
The Dinner Party: 10 Tips to Make Cooking for Company Fun and Easy
Doing Your Favorite Thing: How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
A Simple Way to Beat Rising Food Prices
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
How Do You Define Truly Great Restaurant Service?
When was the last time you went to a restaurant and had service that was so skilled that it made your dinner twice as good?
Every restaurant patron has his or her own unique preferences. Some want detailed food and wine suggestions from the server, others couldn't care less what their waiter or waitress thinks. Some people want dinner quickly, so they can get on to the next thing they have planned that night. Others want to linger.
So it's no wonder that the job of waiting tables can be difficult when customers often want arbitrary or contradictory things. But during our recent stay in Hawaii, we went out for a special dinner (it was for Laura's birthday) where our server really nailed things perfectly. I'd like to highlight a couple of seemingly minor things she did that, to me, defines truly great restaurant service.
Everybody knows the drill when the waiter runs through the evening's specials. And it's all too often that I've had the most expensive appetizer and entree pushed down my throat by an eager waiter looking for a bigger check. But when our waitress went over her specials, she added that she'd be happy to suggest a couple of specific things if we'd be interested. She gave us the option to take her suggestions--or not.
And when we did ask for her suggestions, she highlighted a cheese platter appetizer (of locally grown Maui goat cheeses) that was so good that we spent more than a half an hour slowly enjoying it.
And that's when our waitress came through again. She saw us enjoying our food so much (if I recall correctly, I was so excited that I broke out my adolescent manners and said "this is kick-ass!" to her with my mouth full), that she came back a minute later and told us something that I'll probably never hear in my life in a New York City restaurant:
"I thought you might want to take your time with the cheese platter, so I took the liberty of holding up your dinner order with the chef for a bit. Will that be all right with you?"
Once again, perfect. She gave us the option. It's a great idea if you're in lingering mode, but if you have somewhere to be, you can say, "No thanks! Please bring our entrees out right away."
It's infectious to be served by a waiter or waitress who takes obvious pleasure in his or her job, who is excited to share great food, and who offers flexible customer service like this.
This is how dining out should be. It's the kind of service that makes me recommend restaurants and makes me gladly tip more than 20%.
Readers, let me hear your thoughts! What defines great restaurant service to you?
***************************************
PS: This post wasn't meant to be a restaurant review, but I'd be remiss if I didn't give out the details of where we had this amazing dinner. If you happen to be in Hawaii, do not miss the chance to try out this restaurant. I recommend it highly. Also, our gifted server's name was Kimberly.
Indigo
Located in the Chinatown district of Honolulu:
1121 Nu'uanu Avenue
Honolulu, Hawaii 96817
808/521-2900
15 minutes by car or TheBus from Waikiki.
Reservations recommended.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
Every restaurant patron has his or her own unique preferences. Some want detailed food and wine suggestions from the server, others couldn't care less what their waiter or waitress thinks. Some people want dinner quickly, so they can get on to the next thing they have planned that night. Others want to linger.
So it's no wonder that the job of waiting tables can be difficult when customers often want arbitrary or contradictory things. But during our recent stay in Hawaii, we went out for a special dinner (it was for Laura's birthday) where our server really nailed things perfectly. I'd like to highlight a couple of seemingly minor things she did that, to me, defines truly great restaurant service.
Everybody knows the drill when the waiter runs through the evening's specials. And it's all too often that I've had the most expensive appetizer and entree pushed down my throat by an eager waiter looking for a bigger check. But when our waitress went over her specials, she added that she'd be happy to suggest a couple of specific things if we'd be interested. She gave us the option to take her suggestions--or not.
And when we did ask for her suggestions, she highlighted a cheese platter appetizer (of locally grown Maui goat cheeses) that was so good that we spent more than a half an hour slowly enjoying it.
And that's when our waitress came through again. She saw us enjoying our food so much (if I recall correctly, I was so excited that I broke out my adolescent manners and said "this is kick-ass!" to her with my mouth full), that she came back a minute later and told us something that I'll probably never hear in my life in a New York City restaurant:
"I thought you might want to take your time with the cheese platter, so I took the liberty of holding up your dinner order with the chef for a bit. Will that be all right with you?"
Once again, perfect. She gave us the option. It's a great idea if you're in lingering mode, but if you have somewhere to be, you can say, "No thanks! Please bring our entrees out right away."
It's infectious to be served by a waiter or waitress who takes obvious pleasure in his or her job, who is excited to share great food, and who offers flexible customer service like this.
This is how dining out should be. It's the kind of service that makes me recommend restaurants and makes me gladly tip more than 20%.
Readers, let me hear your thoughts! What defines great restaurant service to you?
***************************************
PS: This post wasn't meant to be a restaurant review, but I'd be remiss if I didn't give out the details of where we had this amazing dinner. If you happen to be in Hawaii, do not miss the chance to try out this restaurant. I recommend it highly. Also, our gifted server's name was Kimberly.
Indigo
Located in the Chinatown district of Honolulu:
1121 Nu'uanu Avenue
Honolulu, Hawaii 96817
808/521-2900
15 minutes by car or TheBus from Waikiki.
Reservations recommended.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
On the Road with Casual Kitchen: Belgium a Volonte
A couple of weeks ago, Laura and I visited Belgium for the very first time, and I wanted to share with you three simple food-related tips for navigating this wonderful country:
1) Drink beer,
2) Eat chocolate,
And most importantly:
3) If you see the words "à volonté" written outside a restaurant, go in.
Just as the four greatest words in the English language are "all you can eat," the two greatest words in, uh, Walloon are "à volonté." And the greatest culinary experience we had in Belgium, and indeed the greatest all-you-can-eat experience I'll ever have in my entire life (that is, until somebody invents all-you-can-eat dark chocolate) was at a little restaurant in Ghent called Amadeus.
We're not talking an overcooked $6.95 Chinese buffet here. This restaurant sold ribs--barbecued ribs--that were as good as anything I've had in the American south. And they kept bringing more, and more... and more.
I wanted to grab the waiter by the shirt and tell him that he lived in paradise, but I was unable to get out of my chair.
And then came dessert. I had a spectacular chocolate mousse that was as good as Paul Prudhomme's recipe, and Laura and our Belgian friend had the coupe dame blanche, which we call in American an "ice cream sundae." Only it sounds even more delicious in French, doesn't it?
You can't eat like this too often, for obvious reasons. But if you're a disciplined and healthy eater most of the time, it's okay, occasionally, to drop your guard once in a while and really pig out.
There were only two (minor) disappointments that evening. First, I just couldn't find an open walk-in angioplasty clinic anywhere in town. And it wasn't even that late.
Second, Laura only finished off one and a half racks of ribs. I know she could have done better.
Related Links:
Amadeus Restaurant (locations in Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp)
The Xenophobe's Guide to the Belgians
(I highly recommend this amusing mini-guidebook for anyone interested in visiting Belgium)
Related Posts:
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
The Chocolate Gene
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.
1) Drink beer,
2) Eat chocolate,
And most importantly:
3) If you see the words "à volonté" written outside a restaurant, go in.
Just as the four greatest words in the English language are "all you can eat," the two greatest words in, uh, Walloon are "à volonté." And the greatest culinary experience we had in Belgium, and indeed the greatest all-you-can-eat experience I'll ever have in my entire life (that is, until somebody invents all-you-can-eat dark chocolate) was at a little restaurant in Ghent called Amadeus.
We're not talking an overcooked $6.95 Chinese buffet here. This restaurant sold ribs--barbecued ribs--that were as good as anything I've had in the American south. And they kept bringing more, and more... and more.
I wanted to grab the waiter by the shirt and tell him that he lived in paradise, but I was unable to get out of my chair.
And then came dessert. I had a spectacular chocolate mousse that was as good as Paul Prudhomme's recipe, and Laura and our Belgian friend had the coupe dame blanche, which we call in American an "ice cream sundae." Only it sounds even more delicious in French, doesn't it?
You can't eat like this too often, for obvious reasons. But if you're a disciplined and healthy eater most of the time, it's okay, occasionally, to drop your guard once in a while and really pig out.
There were only two (minor) disappointments that evening. First, I just couldn't find an open walk-in angioplasty clinic anywhere in town. And it wasn't even that late.
Second, Laura only finished off one and a half racks of ribs. I know she could have done better.
Related Links:
Amadeus Restaurant (locations in Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp)
The Xenophobe's Guide to the Belgians
(I highly recommend this amusing mini-guidebook for anyone interested in visiting Belgium)Related Posts:
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
The Chocolate Gene
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.
Brown Rice: Dietary Penance
Just a couple of quick follow-up comments about brown rice that occured to me since I wrote up the limping dinner post. Today, I'd like to discuss two additional advantages of this simple yet wholesome food.
First, brown rice isn’t just easy to make, it's also healthy and a surprisingly well-balanced food, with protein, some fat, plenty of vitamins and minerals, and of course lots of fiber. This is in stark contrast to white rice, which, while it’s a favorite staple here at Casual Kitchen, is essentially a nutrient-free starch by comparison.
Second, brown rice can serve as a form of dietary penance.
Let me share an example: The other weekend, my sister and her husband came to visit us, and we spent their entire visit essentially eating our way across Manhattan (two amazing and wallet-busting restaurants worth mentioning: Fleur de Sel and Spice Market). Don’t get me wrong, it was a glorious time and I loved every minute of it, but by the third night I was looking around for a walk-in angioplasty clinic.
So our first meal at home after my sister left was--you guessed it--spicy brown rice. We used it to undo all the artery-clogging eating from prior few days and get back to some basic food that’s not quite so hard on our digestive systems.
That's why those macrobiotic “purifying” diets that people did in the 1980s in places like Ithaca, NY (not that I’d know anything about this of course) involved eating only brown rice for a week or more, and then gradually introducing other foods into your diet after the initial detox period.
So the next time you prepare a meal, think about including a side of brown rice instead of white rice. And the next time you have one too many heavy meals in a row and you feel like your body is crying out for an angioplasty, try a limping dinner of spicy brown rice to get your system back to normal.
Related Posts:
The Limping Dinner: Spicy Brown Rice
Why I'm a Part-Time Vegetarian
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps
First, brown rice isn’t just easy to make, it's also healthy and a surprisingly well-balanced food, with protein, some fat, plenty of vitamins and minerals, and of course lots of fiber. This is in stark contrast to white rice, which, while it’s a favorite staple here at Casual Kitchen, is essentially a nutrient-free starch by comparison.
Second, brown rice can serve as a form of dietary penance.
Let me share an example: The other weekend, my sister and her husband came to visit us, and we spent their entire visit essentially eating our way across Manhattan (two amazing and wallet-busting restaurants worth mentioning: Fleur de Sel and Spice Market). Don’t get me wrong, it was a glorious time and I loved every minute of it, but by the third night I was looking around for a walk-in angioplasty clinic.
So our first meal at home after my sister left was--you guessed it--spicy brown rice. We used it to undo all the artery-clogging eating from prior few days and get back to some basic food that’s not quite so hard on our digestive systems.
That's why those macrobiotic “purifying” diets that people did in the 1980s in places like Ithaca, NY (not that I’d know anything about this of course) involved eating only brown rice for a week or more, and then gradually introducing other foods into your diet after the initial detox period.
So the next time you prepare a meal, think about including a side of brown rice instead of white rice. And the next time you have one too many heavy meals in a row and you feel like your body is crying out for an angioplasty, try a limping dinner of spicy brown rice to get your system back to normal.
Related Posts:
The Limping Dinner: Spicy Brown Rice
Why I'm a Part-Time Vegetarian
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps
How to Be a Satisficer
Have you ever spent a lot of time agonizing over a restaurant menu, hoping to choose something truly exceptional--but when the food comes, you look over at your friend's entree with envy?
Or have you been in the grocery store looking indecisively at twenty-five different brands of sugary boxed cereal, wondering which one will lacerate the roof of your mouth the least?
Have you perused your favorite cookbooks, hoping to try a new dish, and had trouble deciding because too many things sound good to you?
One of the strangely counterintuitive truths of modern life is this: Having a lot of choices actually makes you less happy. Having a few choices is fine--but having forty choices is pure decision-making hell.
And this can be especially true with food. If you're looking at a menu with three or four choices on it, no problema. But take that menu up to 15 or 20 choices and let the agony set in.
With this issue in mind, I'd like to share with you a word first coined by Herbert Simon (the American political scientist and economist), and then popularized by Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice.
Satisficing.
This word is a somewhat ungrammatical combination of the words "satisfy" and "suffice." And the concept, when I've applied it to decision-making and choosing from a menu of options, has made me a far less miserable person.
If you're haven't heard of satisficing before, let's spend a brief moment defining it. Satisficing can be applied in almost any area of life, but today I want to talk about it mainly in the context of food.
Consider two people, The Maximizer and The Satisficer, going out with a group of friends for dinner. They sit down and begin to peruse the menu.
The Maximizer wants to order the very best thing on the menu.
The Satisficer will order the first sufficiently satisfying thing he sees on the menu.
Let's think through what happens next:
The Satisficer quickly picks something, and ends his internal mental discussion about what to order almost instantly. He can now join the conversation and have a relaxing, enjoyable evening. Because the Satisficer didn't try to order the best thing on the menu, he is unlikely to be disappointed no matter what happens. He has no attachment to the outcome of what he chose; in fact he might be in for a pleasant surprise at how good his entree is.
Not so for the Maximizer. Because he wants to get the best thing on the menu, he has to consider practically every dish. His decision-making takes significantly more time and effort. Worse, after he's made his agonizing decision, he's likely to waste energy worrying that he actually didn't order the best thing on the menu. He might even look over at the Satisficer's entree and think to himself, "dammit, his looks better than mine!"
After all of this extra effort, he unfortunately suffers the worst irony of all: he will likely end up less happy with his choice.
When I finished reading Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice,
I remember thinking how much time I wasted over the past 30-plus years just trying to make up my mind. And it's only brought me more misery.
So consider applying a little satisficing the next time you're out in a restaurant. Think of it as the Eleventh Rule for the Modern Restaurant-Goer.
And then consider other ways to apply it in cooking. It should make menu preparation and recipe selection at home far easier and far less time-consuming. And certainly when you're choosing between brands or categories of food ("Hmmm... which of these 35 kinds of cheese/ice cream/chocolate/etc., should we have with dinner tonight?"), using the satisficing approach should save you a lot of stress and decision-making time.
Related Posts:
Two Useful Cooking Lessons From Another Cheap and Easy Side Dish
The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World
Braised Pork in Guajillo Chile Sauce
How to Team Up in the Kitchen
Or have you been in the grocery store looking indecisively at twenty-five different brands of sugary boxed cereal, wondering which one will lacerate the roof of your mouth the least?
Have you perused your favorite cookbooks, hoping to try a new dish, and had trouble deciding because too many things sound good to you?
One of the strangely counterintuitive truths of modern life is this: Having a lot of choices actually makes you less happy. Having a few choices is fine--but having forty choices is pure decision-making hell.
And this can be especially true with food. If you're looking at a menu with three or four choices on it, no problema. But take that menu up to 15 or 20 choices and let the agony set in.
With this issue in mind, I'd like to share with you a word first coined by Herbert Simon (the American political scientist and economist), and then popularized by Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice.
Satisficing.
This word is a somewhat ungrammatical combination of the words "satisfy" and "suffice." And the concept, when I've applied it to decision-making and choosing from a menu of options, has made me a far less miserable person.
If you're haven't heard of satisficing before, let's spend a brief moment defining it. Satisficing can be applied in almost any area of life, but today I want to talk about it mainly in the context of food.
Consider two people, The Maximizer and The Satisficer, going out with a group of friends for dinner. They sit down and begin to peruse the menu.
The Maximizer wants to order the very best thing on the menu.
The Satisficer will order the first sufficiently satisfying thing he sees on the menu.
Let's think through what happens next:
The Satisficer quickly picks something, and ends his internal mental discussion about what to order almost instantly. He can now join the conversation and have a relaxing, enjoyable evening. Because the Satisficer didn't try to order the best thing on the menu, he is unlikely to be disappointed no matter what happens. He has no attachment to the outcome of what he chose; in fact he might be in for a pleasant surprise at how good his entree is.
Not so for the Maximizer. Because he wants to get the best thing on the menu, he has to consider practically every dish. His decision-making takes significantly more time and effort. Worse, after he's made his agonizing decision, he's likely to waste energy worrying that he actually didn't order the best thing on the menu. He might even look over at the Satisficer's entree and think to himself, "dammit, his looks better than mine!"
After all of this extra effort, he unfortunately suffers the worst irony of all: he will likely end up less happy with his choice.
When I finished reading Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice,
I remember thinking how much time I wasted over the past 30-plus years just trying to make up my mind. And it's only brought me more misery.So consider applying a little satisficing the next time you're out in a restaurant. Think of it as the Eleventh Rule for the Modern Restaurant-Goer.
And then consider other ways to apply it in cooking. It should make menu preparation and recipe selection at home far easier and far less time-consuming. And certainly when you're choosing between brands or categories of food ("Hmmm... which of these 35 kinds of cheese/ice cream/chocolate/etc., should we have with dinner tonight?"), using the satisficing approach should save you a lot of stress and decision-making time.
Related Posts:
Two Useful Cooking Lessons From Another Cheap and Easy Side Dish
The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World
Braised Pork in Guajillo Chile Sauce
How to Team Up in the Kitchen
Carolina Barbecue!
Today's post is about that uniquely American food, barbecue. Specifically Carolina Barbecue, which we lustily ate last week on the way to our vacation on the North Carolina shore.
My secret for finding solid barbecue is this: wherever we're staying, I ask the girl at the checkout desk (in this case it was the Hampton Inn in Edenton, NC--and it was quite nice and clean by the way) what her favorite barbecue place is. She told me to head over to Captain Bob's about 15 miles away in Hertford, NC.
We knew this place would be great the minute we saw the cheap chairs, formica tables and paper placemats.
Heck, my hopes started soaring the minute I saw the gravel parking lot full of American-made cars.
Sure, NYC has its BBQ places, most notably, Virgil's and Blue Smoke, but there's something deeply irritating about paying $100 for dinner for two. It just doesn't seem appropriate to charge that much for barbecue--it kind of ruins the vibe (I'm thinking about Blue Smoke specifically here, Virgil's is a bit more reasonably priced).
Better to spend $19.89 for dinner for two (okay, it was $25.00 including tip) at Cap'n Bob's for some of the best BBQ we've had in a while, complete with delicious hush puppies and of course, mooshy beans!
Keep in mind, we're now on vacation from our normal diet, which is based primarily on quasi-vegetarianism. Thus there's just nothing like sitting down to a big plate of shredded meat with a bottle of Texas Pete's in hand. Some might call this just another example of mindless eating, but I see this as more of an example of following Rule #10: Let down your guard once in a while.
And of course I can't leave out that this $25.00 dinner also included a 2,000 calorie slab of peanut butter pie. Calling it a "piece" of pie would be a gross understatement. I could tell by the glint in her eye that Laura was only going to let me have a very small taste.
My secret for finding solid barbecue is this: wherever we're staying, I ask the girl at the checkout desk (in this case it was the Hampton Inn in Edenton, NC--and it was quite nice and clean by the way) what her favorite barbecue place is. She told me to head over to Captain Bob's about 15 miles away in Hertford, NC.
We knew this place would be great the minute we saw the cheap chairs, formica tables and paper placemats.
Heck, my hopes started soaring the minute I saw the gravel parking lot full of American-made cars.
Sure, NYC has its BBQ places, most notably, Virgil's and Blue Smoke, but there's something deeply irritating about paying $100 for dinner for two. It just doesn't seem appropriate to charge that much for barbecue--it kind of ruins the vibe (I'm thinking about Blue Smoke specifically here, Virgil's is a bit more reasonably priced).
Better to spend $19.89 for dinner for two (okay, it was $25.00 including tip) at Cap'n Bob's for some of the best BBQ we've had in a while, complete with delicious hush puppies and of course, mooshy beans!
Keep in mind, we're now on vacation from our normal diet, which is based primarily on quasi-vegetarianism. Thus there's just nothing like sitting down to a big plate of shredded meat with a bottle of Texas Pete's in hand. Some might call this just another example of mindless eating, but I see this as more of an example of following Rule #10: Let down your guard once in a while.
And of course I can't leave out that this $25.00 dinner also included a 2,000 calorie slab of peanut butter pie. Calling it a "piece" of pie would be a gross understatement. I could tell by the glint in her eye that Laura was only going to let me have a very small taste.
Six Secrets to Save You from Cooking Burnout
You know the feeling: You have to cook dinner, but you sure as hell don't want to. Forget cooking with love. At best, you might obligatorily slap dinner on the table tonight.
Worse, all of your recipes seem tired and old. You're sick of all of 'em.
You're just not inspired in the kitchen.
This is cooking burnout. Everybody faces it from time to time. And yes, even at Casual Kitchen we can get really sick of cooking on occasion.
Fortunately, thanks to quite a few years in my 20s of living alone (thus the only person who was there to cook for me was… well, me), I picked up some trade secrets on the subject that I’m going to share with you today.
Read on, and never let cooking burnout bring you down again!
1) Try out a totally new cuisine…
It would be obvious to the point of worthlessness to suggest to my readers to “try some new recipes and you’ll be less burned out!” Martha Stewart might be able to get away with that, but not me.
The point here is that you are not even close to being in the mood to cook. Telling you to buck up and try some new recipes is like saying “turn that frown upside down” to a person on suicide watch. Less than helpful.
What I’m talking about is doing something much more radical. I’m talking about stretching your palate to experience types of food you’ve never tried before, or never even heard of before, and using those experiences to inspire you.
Have you ever tried Mongolian food? Or Korean? Afghani? How about Cuban food? Or Chino-Latino?
I’m sure foodie readers from major US or world cities could say “yes” (in a bored-sounding voice no less) to all of the above. But that misses the point. There has to be something (or even multiple somethings) you haven’t had before, and that’s what I want you to go out and try. Go to a restaurant that cooks a cuisine you’ve never eaten. Order something unusual as well as something ethnically typical from the menu. And while you’re eating, think about how you might cook something similar, or how it might influence your cooking.
Even if you live in a smaller city, you’ll be surprised by the diversity of food available to you. Take a good look at the restaurants section of your phonebook (I know, how deliciously quaint to use the yellow pages…) or ask any of your ethnic friends or colleagues to recommend a place. Take a quick look at the Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer for more suggestions on how to make the most of a restaurant eating experience. Finally, recall in the Ten Rules that, where possible, we want to patronize owner-operated restaurants rather than chains.
2) …And then teach yourself to cook it.
Once you’ve stretched your palate in somebody else's kitchen, let that experience inspire you to stretch your talents in your own.
How cool would it be to be able to say you can cook Cuban food or Afgani food? Go to your local bookstore or visit Bookmooch.com and find a cookbook and try it out. Again, I am not talking about making just moderately different foods. I want you to get started on a truly different cuisine that makes you stretch your mind. This is what makes cooking a voyage of discovery and a source of new experiences. And you’ll find that it’s the kind of thing that makes cooking fun again.
It was during a particularly bad period of cooking burnout in my life when I picked up Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen. I had to work through my share of cooking intimidation at first, because I needlessly assumed that Cajun and Creole food would be more difficult to make than it really was. But after several batches each of Shrimp Creole, Barbecued Shrimp, Hush Puppies and of course The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World, I've gotten pretty good at making this cuisine. Best of all, it cured a bad case of cooking burnout too.
3) Learn to cook something you’ve always dreamed of cooking.
Is there something you always dreamed of cooking but you never really got around to it? For my part, I've always dreamed of making baked bread. And I mean real baked bread, with yeast and everything. So I’ve already decided that the next time I get a case of cooking burnout, I’m going to use that as my excuse to learn how to bake bread.
And if you didn’t think I was obsessive before, you’ll think it now: For the case of cooking burnout I get after that, I’m going to learn how to cook real tamales. I already have the cookbook sitting on the shelf
, ready to go.
Clearly, I must be a real tool to plan ahead for my next two cases of cooking burnout.
Seriously though, this suggestion gets to why we cook in the first place. Cooking is at its most fun when it’s a voyage of experience and discovery. What new foods do you really and truly dream of cooking? What do you want to learn how to do? What would be really cool to be able to cook? Even just asking yourself these questions might inspire you a little bit, but the true satisfaction comes from getting into the process of learning and developing new cooking skills.
4) Get a one-year subscription to Bon Appetit Magazine.
I know this suggestion might sound just a bit too metrosexual for some of the men out there, but indulge me. I learned this trick by pure luck back in 1994, when I got browbeaten by some telemarketer into buying a subscription.
But the unexpected benefit was that in that year, I had absolutely zero experiences of cooking burnout. Not one for the entire year. Each month, when the new issue came in the mail, it would flood my mind with a whole batch of new cooking ideas, cuisines and recipes. There were quick and easy recipes, long and involved ones, examples of different types of cuisine, etc. There were always several viable new things in there that would pass the five easy questions and that I would really want to make.
And the subscription turned out to be well worth the money, because I’m still using that single year’s worth of Bon Appetit today, some 13 years (now 14 years) later. Each issue had so many recipes and ideas that it will be years to come before I'll have worked through the inventory.
5) Improve Your Cooking Mechanics.
Get faster at cooking. Learn the five easy questions so you’ll be able to choose easy meals to make. Master prep work. Learn how to find recipes that scale well into double or triple batches. And learn to rely on a group of favorite, easy, heavy rotation meals.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll have seen some of this advice presented in Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking. In that post, however, I presented that advice in the context of how to cook when you don’t have the time. Here I’m repeating the advice because it’s even more valuable when you don’t want to spend the time cooking. I encourage you to take another quick look at some of those suggestions.
Let’s say you’re of a mind to obligatorily slap dinner on the table tonight. Wouldn’t life be a lot less painful if you had made a double batch of dinner the other day so that you could just reheat it again for tonight? There’s no better cure for cooking burnout than not having to cook at all. If you can cook any meal much faster or much more efficiently, or if you can scale up a meal and get 2x the food for 1.2x the work, then by definition it will be much less of a pain in the ass to get food on the table when you're just not in the mood.
Note that this isn’t so much a cure for cooking burnout, but more of a tool to minimize your suffering. The more efficiently you can get a meal together, the less you’ll suffer the process when you’re just not up for it. Think of it as a form of pain management.
6) Quit!
No, I don’t mean quit your job--although between you and me, I'm considering making a move myself to getting a job here. And I don’t mean for you to quit cooking forever either. What I am suggesting is that you take a break from cooking for a specific time. Say, one week. Or even two weeks.
For that one or two weeks, eat out or order takeout EVERY night. In fact, you can combine this with tip #1 and try out a few exotic restaurants while you’re at it.
If you are at all used to cooking for yourself, my guess is you’ll get pretty sick of restaurant food if you take this long a break from your own kitchen. You’ll probably start to feel overwhelmed with salt, excess fats and oils--and after several days you’ll probably start to feel loagy and weighed down.
When Laura and I go on vacation for a week we’ll usually treat ourselves to a complete break from cooking. But after five or six days of eating out exclusively, we usually really start to long for our own home-cooked food. Maybe we miss the familiarity of our own kitchen, or we miss being able to control exactly what goes into our own food. Or maybe it's just that creeping, heavy, loagy, I-feel-like-I-need-an-angioplasty feeling you get after eating out too many days in a row.
Regardless of the reasons, the result is the same: after only one week, no more cooking burnout. We can’t wait to get back to our own kitchen.
So instead of waiting until your next vacation, why not create a vacation from cooking the next time you feel cooking burnout coming on? You’ll certainly save on airfare. And best of all, you’ll cure your burnout.
Note that this isn’t exactly what I’d call financially responsible advice--readers of this blog know that cooking at home typically is laughably cheap compared to eating out. But if by using this tip you cure yourself from cooking burnout--and you get back to being happy to cook in your own kitchen--then in the long run this tip can be a big money-saver for you.
*******************************
Good luck! I can't promise that you’ll never get sick of cooking ever again. Heck, I still fall into a state of mild-to-moderate cooking burnout on occasion, and I’m the one supposedly giving all the great advice here. But the next time you feel a case of cooking burnout coming on, you should be able to use these secrets to master it, rather than have it master you.
Related Posts:
Using Salt = Cheating
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Eight Tips to Make Cooking at Home Laughably Cheap
Related Links:
Tamales 101: A Beginner's Guide to Making Traditional Tamales
*
Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen*
Bon Appetit Magazine
* Full Disclosure: if you purchase any of the items via the links provided, I receive a small affiliate fee. Thank you to my readers for all of your support!
Worse, all of your recipes seem tired and old. You're sick of all of 'em.
You're just not inspired in the kitchen.
This is cooking burnout. Everybody faces it from time to time. And yes, even at Casual Kitchen we can get really sick of cooking on occasion.
Fortunately, thanks to quite a few years in my 20s of living alone (thus the only person who was there to cook for me was… well, me), I picked up some trade secrets on the subject that I’m going to share with you today.
Read on, and never let cooking burnout bring you down again!
1) Try out a totally new cuisine…
It would be obvious to the point of worthlessness to suggest to my readers to “try some new recipes and you’ll be less burned out!” Martha Stewart might be able to get away with that, but not me.
The point here is that you are not even close to being in the mood to cook. Telling you to buck up and try some new recipes is like saying “turn that frown upside down” to a person on suicide watch. Less than helpful.
What I’m talking about is doing something much more radical. I’m talking about stretching your palate to experience types of food you’ve never tried before, or never even heard of before, and using those experiences to inspire you.
Have you ever tried Mongolian food? Or Korean? Afghani? How about Cuban food? Or Chino-Latino?
I’m sure foodie readers from major US or world cities could say “yes” (in a bored-sounding voice no less) to all of the above. But that misses the point. There has to be something (or even multiple somethings) you haven’t had before, and that’s what I want you to go out and try. Go to a restaurant that cooks a cuisine you’ve never eaten. Order something unusual as well as something ethnically typical from the menu. And while you’re eating, think about how you might cook something similar, or how it might influence your cooking.
Even if you live in a smaller city, you’ll be surprised by the diversity of food available to you. Take a good look at the restaurants section of your phonebook (I know, how deliciously quaint to use the yellow pages…) or ask any of your ethnic friends or colleagues to recommend a place. Take a quick look at the Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer for more suggestions on how to make the most of a restaurant eating experience. Finally, recall in the Ten Rules that, where possible, we want to patronize owner-operated restaurants rather than chains.
2) …And then teach yourself to cook it.
Once you’ve stretched your palate in somebody else's kitchen, let that experience inspire you to stretch your talents in your own.
How cool would it be to be able to say you can cook Cuban food or Afgani food? Go to your local bookstore or visit Bookmooch.com and find a cookbook and try it out. Again, I am not talking about making just moderately different foods. I want you to get started on a truly different cuisine that makes you stretch your mind. This is what makes cooking a voyage of discovery and a source of new experiences. And you’ll find that it’s the kind of thing that makes cooking fun again.
It was during a particularly bad period of cooking burnout in my life when I picked up Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen. I had to work through my share of cooking intimidation at first, because I needlessly assumed that Cajun and Creole food would be more difficult to make than it really was. But after several batches each of Shrimp Creole, Barbecued Shrimp, Hush Puppies and of course The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World, I've gotten pretty good at making this cuisine. Best of all, it cured a bad case of cooking burnout too.
3) Learn to cook something you’ve always dreamed of cooking.
Is there something you always dreamed of cooking but you never really got around to it? For my part, I've always dreamed of making baked bread. And I mean real baked bread, with yeast and everything. So I’ve already decided that the next time I get a case of cooking burnout, I’m going to use that as my excuse to learn how to bake bread.
And if you didn’t think I was obsessive before, you’ll think it now: For the case of cooking burnout I get after that, I’m going to learn how to cook real tamales. I already have the cookbook sitting on the shelf
, ready to go.Clearly, I must be a real tool to plan ahead for my next two cases of cooking burnout.
Seriously though, this suggestion gets to why we cook in the first place. Cooking is at its most fun when it’s a voyage of experience and discovery. What new foods do you really and truly dream of cooking? What do you want to learn how to do? What would be really cool to be able to cook? Even just asking yourself these questions might inspire you a little bit, but the true satisfaction comes from getting into the process of learning and developing new cooking skills.
4) Get a one-year subscription to Bon Appetit Magazine.
I know this suggestion might sound just a bit too metrosexual for some of the men out there, but indulge me. I learned this trick by pure luck back in 1994, when I got browbeaten by some telemarketer into buying a subscription.
But the unexpected benefit was that in that year, I had absolutely zero experiences of cooking burnout. Not one for the entire year. Each month, when the new issue came in the mail, it would flood my mind with a whole batch of new cooking ideas, cuisines and recipes. There were quick and easy recipes, long and involved ones, examples of different types of cuisine, etc. There were always several viable new things in there that would pass the five easy questions and that I would really want to make.
And the subscription turned out to be well worth the money, because I’m still using that single year’s worth of Bon Appetit today, some 13 years (now 14 years) later. Each issue had so many recipes and ideas that it will be years to come before I'll have worked through the inventory.
5) Improve Your Cooking Mechanics.
Get faster at cooking. Learn the five easy questions so you’ll be able to choose easy meals to make. Master prep work. Learn how to find recipes that scale well into double or triple batches. And learn to rely on a group of favorite, easy, heavy rotation meals.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll have seen some of this advice presented in Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking. In that post, however, I presented that advice in the context of how to cook when you don’t have the time. Here I’m repeating the advice because it’s even more valuable when you don’t want to spend the time cooking. I encourage you to take another quick look at some of those suggestions.
Let’s say you’re of a mind to obligatorily slap dinner on the table tonight. Wouldn’t life be a lot less painful if you had made a double batch of dinner the other day so that you could just reheat it again for tonight? There’s no better cure for cooking burnout than not having to cook at all. If you can cook any meal much faster or much more efficiently, or if you can scale up a meal and get 2x the food for 1.2x the work, then by definition it will be much less of a pain in the ass to get food on the table when you're just not in the mood.
Note that this isn’t so much a cure for cooking burnout, but more of a tool to minimize your suffering. The more efficiently you can get a meal together, the less you’ll suffer the process when you’re just not up for it. Think of it as a form of pain management.
6) Quit!
No, I don’t mean quit your job--although between you and me, I'm considering making a move myself to getting a job here. And I don’t mean for you to quit cooking forever either. What I am suggesting is that you take a break from cooking for a specific time. Say, one week. Or even two weeks.
For that one or two weeks, eat out or order takeout EVERY night. In fact, you can combine this with tip #1 and try out a few exotic restaurants while you’re at it.
If you are at all used to cooking for yourself, my guess is you’ll get pretty sick of restaurant food if you take this long a break from your own kitchen. You’ll probably start to feel overwhelmed with salt, excess fats and oils--and after several days you’ll probably start to feel loagy and weighed down.
When Laura and I go on vacation for a week we’ll usually treat ourselves to a complete break from cooking. But after five or six days of eating out exclusively, we usually really start to long for our own home-cooked food. Maybe we miss the familiarity of our own kitchen, or we miss being able to control exactly what goes into our own food. Or maybe it's just that creeping, heavy, loagy, I-feel-like-I-need-an-angioplasty feeling you get after eating out too many days in a row.
Regardless of the reasons, the result is the same: after only one week, no more cooking burnout. We can’t wait to get back to our own kitchen.
So instead of waiting until your next vacation, why not create a vacation from cooking the next time you feel cooking burnout coming on? You’ll certainly save on airfare. And best of all, you’ll cure your burnout.
Note that this isn’t exactly what I’d call financially responsible advice--readers of this blog know that cooking at home typically is laughably cheap compared to eating out. But if by using this tip you cure yourself from cooking burnout--and you get back to being happy to cook in your own kitchen--then in the long run this tip can be a big money-saver for you.
*******************************
Good luck! I can't promise that you’ll never get sick of cooking ever again. Heck, I still fall into a state of mild-to-moderate cooking burnout on occasion, and I’m the one supposedly giving all the great advice here. But the next time you feel a case of cooking burnout coming on, you should be able to use these secrets to master it, rather than have it master you.
Related Posts:
Using Salt = Cheating
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Eight Tips to Make Cooking at Home Laughably Cheap
Related Links:
Tamales 101: A Beginner's Guide to Making Traditional Tamales
*Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen*
Bon Appetit Magazine
* Full Disclosure: if you purchase any of the items via the links provided, I receive a small affiliate fee. Thank you to my readers for all of your support!
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
Today's post isn't exactly about cooking. Instead I bring you ten rules that I hope will help you enjoy eating. Eating out, that is.
1) Go out to a really nice restaurant once in a while. It doesn’t have to be a daily thing, obviously. If you’re budget-conscious, think of it as a reward for yourself. Enjoy life a little bit by spending a little extra money once in a while for a great culinary experience.
2) Make a point of patronizing owner-operated restaurants rather than chain restaurants. Forget the Olive Gardens and the Red Lobsters and the Macaroni Grill. Does it really help the world if you give business to huge corporations like Darden Restaurants or Yum Brands? Help support a local entrepreneur in your town instead.
3) Try at least one appetizer. Or better, order two and split 'em with your dinner companion.
4) Try one of the house specials. Learn what the chef is good at. Ask the waiter or waitress "what's good here?" and make a point of ordering that dish.
5) I wish I didn't have to include this one, but it goes in anyway: Never speak on your cellphone in a restaurant. You’re just not that important. Turn your phone off for once and try and enjoy the here and now.
6) Order drinks, or try a new wine you’ve never tried before. Laura and I have a weakness for the occasional margarita (rocks, and I'm sorry but I must admit it, extra salt).
7) If the restaurant has a sommelier, use him. Yes, I know this sounds snobby, and you don't have to do this EVERY time. But it's actually kind of fun. Tell him something cryptic like "I like red" or "I like sweet wines" and let him go to work. Then write down all the information on the label--and even a jot down note or two on whether you liked it or not and why--and keep those notes somewhere. Heck, file them with your 401(k) statements--you might cheer yourself up this way.
8) Don't clean your plate. Take some of your food home with you. This will give you room to follow rule #9, which is…
9) Leave room for dessert! It's an especially good idea to ask the server for a suggestion or a favorite recommendation when it comes to dessert.
And finally,
10) Tip 20%, never less. This isn’t the 1980s anymore. Make the universe a plentiful place. We're in the era of outflow. If service is atrocious, tell the server politely (and keep an understanding and sympathetic smile on your face while telling) and still tip 15%.
I'd love to hear any additional rules that readers out there think I should include. We'll update this one as needed.
Related Topics:
Using Salt = Cheating
Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life
by Shakti Gawain
The International Sommelier Guild
1) Go out to a really nice restaurant once in a while. It doesn’t have to be a daily thing, obviously. If you’re budget-conscious, think of it as a reward for yourself. Enjoy life a little bit by spending a little extra money once in a while for a great culinary experience.
2) Make a point of patronizing owner-operated restaurants rather than chain restaurants. Forget the Olive Gardens and the Red Lobsters and the Macaroni Grill. Does it really help the world if you give business to huge corporations like Darden Restaurants or Yum Brands? Help support a local entrepreneur in your town instead.
3) Try at least one appetizer. Or better, order two and split 'em with your dinner companion.
4) Try one of the house specials. Learn what the chef is good at. Ask the waiter or waitress "what's good here?" and make a point of ordering that dish.
5) I wish I didn't have to include this one, but it goes in anyway: Never speak on your cellphone in a restaurant. You’re just not that important. Turn your phone off for once and try and enjoy the here and now.
6) Order drinks, or try a new wine you’ve never tried before. Laura and I have a weakness for the occasional margarita (rocks, and I'm sorry but I must admit it, extra salt).
7) If the restaurant has a sommelier, use him. Yes, I know this sounds snobby, and you don't have to do this EVERY time. But it's actually kind of fun. Tell him something cryptic like "I like red" or "I like sweet wines" and let him go to work. Then write down all the information on the label--and even a jot down note or two on whether you liked it or not and why--and keep those notes somewhere. Heck, file them with your 401(k) statements--you might cheer yourself up this way.
8) Don't clean your plate. Take some of your food home with you. This will give you room to follow rule #9, which is…
9) Leave room for dessert! It's an especially good idea to ask the server for a suggestion or a favorite recommendation when it comes to dessert.
And finally,
10) Tip 20%, never less. This isn’t the 1980s anymore. Make the universe a plentiful place. We're in the era of outflow. If service is atrocious, tell the server politely (and keep an understanding and sympathetic smile on your face while telling) and still tip 15%.
I'd love to hear any additional rules that readers out there think I should include. We'll update this one as needed.
Related Topics:
Using Salt = Cheating
Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life
by Shakti GawainThe International Sommelier Guild
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
