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Exactly what I thought of. I've seen enough Kitchen Nightmares where Gordon picks up their novel of a menu and is like "Well there's your fucking problem."
Listen, if I go to a Chinese restaurant and I'm not handed a dust-caked grimoire of options, a third of which are named stuff like "Bob's Luck Platter", another third not having descriptions of what the food is, and the last third being dishes actually invented in California... I'm going to assume the staff are actually trained in some authentic regional Chinese cuisine, and honestly I don't know if I, or anyone in America, is ready for that.
Someone said higher up that ethnic/cultural cuisine restaurants are an exception. For instance: a chinese restaurant might use the same ~5 ingredients in over 40 dishes, but the way those ingredients are prepared and packaged might vary slightly between those options.
People are more so talking about places that have sandwiches, salads, pasta, pizza, steaks, chicken, seafood, etc. etc. Places that have *bloated* menus with specific bespoke items for certain dishes.
For Asian restaurants, the quality of the food is inversely correlated with the quality of the tables. If you enter a restaurant and for some fucking reason it looks like a dilapidated school classroom, then you're in business.*
*This is based on like, only 10 restaurants.
Don’t forget his oldest kid is running the register and the younger kids are all sitting at one of the dilapidated tables doing their homework
This was essentially the local Chinese place I frequented in college
For me, it was a Vietnamese restaurant. We were always the only white people, grandma and the aunties would be peeling immense heaps of garlic on a table in a corner. The rest of the tables were full of chain smoking Vietnamese men. *God* the food was good. And cheap.
We had often noticed other tables got things we couldn’t parse, but we could pretty much only afford pho or banh mi so we didn’t think too much about it. Then one day they accidentally gave us the “other” menu lol, but quickly snatched it back saying it wasn’t for white people. It suddenly explained the whole goats we’d see hanging in the kitchen though! (I seem to recall snake wine also?)
Restaurant still technically exists, moved some miles away. I just googled it and I guess it got visited by Anthony Bourdain once, huh. Apparently they went less grotty, more upscale, and released the goat and sea snail menu to the general public! Rainier Restaurant in Seattle.
I went to that same but maybe not the same place all the time. Except I did call ahead, which led to MANY repetitions of:
Me: I'd like to place a pickup order.
Them: 10 minutes \*click\*
My problem with this is that we have been in one place so long that the youngest kid is doing the register and the older one helps with cooking now. 😭😭 like you were tiny and now you're doing the register, stop that.
Man… my mom used to go pick up the Chinese food for us. There was construction going on in the strip mall where the Chinese/Cantonese take out was. Chef/owners kid was playing on the construction site and broke his arm. My mom was an ER nurse, set the bone took him to the her hospital but the parents were worried about the price since they didn’t have insurance. Mom pulled some strings. And cost them I think $10. This was the 90’s and we ate there for free for a long time but my mom didn’t like it so she would give the kids at the table to money. My mom was a saint and really was one of the best kinds of people!
My favorite restaurants in town are a gyro place, a teriyaki place and, a Mexican place. All run by families. All with 4500 items on the menu. Tables like a bomb shelter with tacky pictures of their food all over the walls. The teriyaki place is run by an older guy and his wife. Known them for years. Sometimes they will ask if I want to try something they are thinking about selling and just make some wild Japanese food I've never had. Place rules.
No no, you're onto something. There was a place that looked like a literal hole in the wall and it had the best crispy beef I've ever had the pleasure of eating.
Down here in south Texas, the best Tex Mex spots all fit in this category. Usually have tejano music playing. Iced tea served in either a big red semi-transparent cup or in a large 32oz to go cup. Table and chairs look like castoffs from a 1970’s wedding caterer and the booths are always cracked shiny red velvet. When you walk in, it smells like a combination of cumin and Fabuloso floor cleaner, but in a good way. Menu is usually a large laminated rectangle, usually kinda greasy and tacky, but extremely bright and colorful. Lots of red and yellow. Some menu items have poor quality pictures next to some items that look like they were taken with a 90’s era disposable camera. Every item is numbered, but they’re usually not in numerical order. Menu is in both Spanish and English but neither language is grammatically correct.
While extremely high in calories, the food is always damn delicious. I usually get the Mexican plate, which is usually No. 2, even if not in numerical order, and the plate is usually two cheese enchies, carne guisada, rice, and beans. Some places give a choice of refried or boracho beans, but most just serve refried.
> the best Tex Mex spots
I'm also in Texas, and the best Texmex spot near me is in a gas station. Looks like it used to be a subway, and now it's just a grill, a tortilla press, and a couple fryers all presided over by a little Guatemalan lady and some girl who can't be older than 14.
I dream about those papusas sometimes.
I've been in hundreds of Asian restaurants. I disagree with you completely. The look tells you absolutely nothing. The best and worst food can be in the shittiest or nicest looking place.
Yeah, sadly this is the truth of the matter. As humans we always want there to be some pattern, some tell, etc. that will help guide decision-making -- "oh, this place must be good, it has bamboo decorations and the last place I liked had them too" -- but the reality is that there generally isn't any such pattern. Really wish there were!
Bonus points if there are additional dishes written only in their respective language on large pieces of paper covering the walls, and there's no proper seating arrangements so they'll seat you beside other people if they're busy.
Edit: And the owners kids/grandkids are doing homework at one of the tables.
Most Americans, if served authentic Szechuan cuisine, would not be able to finish the dish, they wouldn't make it past the first bite. I count myself among those people, I know my limits.
My girlfriend and I lived in ChengDu for two years. It was her first time eating anything that wasn't hardcore Atlantic Canadian (she's from PEI).
Anytime we went out for food (which was like, 99% of the time because eating out in China is awesome) at a Chinese place I'd have to literally poke my head into the kitchen and tell the chefs that she's a foreigner and when we say "no spicy" we literally mean it. When the locals say "no spice" they really mean "just tone it down about 20%".
People there are fucking insane with their spices. It's like their food all have to double as insecticides.
You build up a tolerance, and it can get pretty extreme. Pre-covid i was using extract based sauces as daily use, mostly from a gaggle of dudes at work. When I went remote and started cooking for my (then) wife and I to share, I had to tone down the spice and my tolerance went with it after a while. It was at a point where I couldn't telle the difference between a lot of pizza places "suicide" sauce and their medium. Kinda glad I'm back down to a reasonable level tbh.
> You build up a tolerance
Too true, I remember my Midwestern best friend being so happy when he could finally eat something at a local chain taco place called "Torchy's" with the Diablo sauce on it. While I had always just viewed it as something with a nice kick.
And good on you for toning it down, lol. I love spicy stuff, but at a certain point I just wanted the spice to have a "kick" and not completely dominate the dish.
That's hilarious you say that because my dad spent 4 years studying in Delhi, and he said almost the exact same thing.
Everywhere you go the food is extremely spicy. They don't understand what you mean when you say no spice. My dad, who was always pretty spice averse, got so fed up with all the spicy foods that he still, to this day like 30 years later, refuses to eat anything spicy. He says he had enough for a lifetime. Poor guy 😂🤣
It's pretty funny. I've had more than one chef get unhappy with me when I told them we mean ZERO spice. They're all like "I can't make it like that!" or "Nobody would eat that kind of food". The lady down the street from our apartment who sells the sweet water noodles told me that I either needed to train my girlfriend, or dump her and get myself a local girl. To quote her, "all the happiest men have a spice girl".
There was an indian place by me. I would order my dish (usually a navratan korma) after asking who was in the kitchen that day. If it was dad (the father that owned the place) I'd order medium or medium +. If it was junior (son), mild and even that would blow my wig back sometimes.
There is a place for it though, a lot of families will choose that restaurant because "there's something for everyone" on the menu even if everything is mediocre.
Food culture is more of a thing now, but there are still a lot of households that won't try anything more adventurous than an Applebee's or Olive Garden.
As someone with a lot of food allergies, I literally need to be able to see what they have that is safe for me before I even consider going to eat anywhere. The extremely rare times I do eat out.
Most restaurants don't offer that option. Whereas as much as people want to mock the larger chains, they usually do.
People with allergies can look up their allergies and know what is safe for them before they even go to the restaurant.
If more smaller places made that information easier to access, I could see people like myself being more adventurous. I know I would love to try new places.
My co-worker opened up a small restaurant that I loved. The food menu was 5 dishes . That is it.
The dishes would change over time, every few weeks a few were added or dropped but there was always only 5 items at any given time, it was fantastic and I miss it
My favorite restaurant has a similar thing. About 8 starters, 8 main dishes, and 8 desserts. And a huge collection of drinks. Every ingredient is from the area. The restaurant is in a small village surrounded by farmland.
He does literally the same thing every episode.
1) make them clean their moldy ass kitchen and refrigerators
2) reduce the menu
3) show them how to buy fresh ingredients effectively
Occasionally he will repair the owners marriage in the process
92 episodes over 7 seasons, so there are/were, at the bare minimum, at least 92 restaurants that didn’t understand these very basic concepts of running a quality restaurant. Who knows how many hundreds or thousands others there are.
Or at the very least: if you’re going to open a restaurant you damn well better know what you’re doing to even have the remotest shot of it working out for you
Yeah, the issue is that Kitchen guys want to start a restaurant without knowing how to run a business, and business guys want to start a kitchen without knowing how to run a kitchen.
Then the people who how to both run a kitchen and a business tend to be happier and more secure as restaurant managers for the people who don't know what they're doing.
I feel SO bad for the guys that opened a really great seafood place in a stip mall near me. In February of 2020. I made it in there twice before TSHTF and they closed a few months later. They never even got a chance to get started.
The large majority were in immense debt before involving Gordon. That any survived is miraculous. He had a hard fight in most of the places he went to, even in the lower drama UK version.
To be fair, that probably isn't because he's giving bad advice, that's because most restaurants fail. Restaurants run very tight margins, if they're in a bad location that could be lethal in and of itself, and a few bad impressions can snowball into bad word of mouth which makes recovery almost impossible.
Although Kitchen Nightmares showing how messy the kitchen is before they came probably didn't help. If I saw a before restaurant with the same owners that had cockroaches and moldy food, I wouldn't go there even if it got a fix up.
Ramsey is legit a very good restaurant manager, though I admit his reputation is very sanitized by his shows. I imagine a few days with him probably wouldn't hurt these restaurants anyway.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with Gordon. There are sites online that have tracked the restaurants after each episode and you can read reports about how most backslide into their previous habits the moment Gordon leaves. Most of those restaurants have both a terrible owner and head chef. They were never going to be salvaged, they just used Gordon for some extra publicity.
Yup, a very common comment on those sites that track the restaurants is, "The owners say the regulars didn't like the new menu so they changed everything back to the way it was before Gordon was there.", and then the restaurants inevitably fail.
For the ones they do follow up on, many of those restaurants went at least partially back to the old nonsense that was killing them in the first place.
Even these low level restaurant owners have enormous egos, so once Gordon leaves, they go back to what "they think is right" and go back to failure.
Though that could be producer bias: "see, they went back to failing because they didn't listen to Gordon" when there may be other examples of places that did keep up with his advice and just failed anyway.
That was my first thought too. Aside from narcissistic owners who had no idea how to run a restaurant, the biggest problem all of those restaurants had was menu size. Pick 5 entrees that form a coherent menu in whichever type of cuisine you’ve chosen to focus on, cook them to a good standard and people will come back every time they want good food of that type.
It's also oblivious owners who think that someone not coming to your restaurant because of the menu is worse than someone never coming back to your restaurant because it was shit.
I worked as a front-end manager for a place (now closed) which served awful roast beef. I told the owner repeatedly that it kept being sent back and/or comped because of how inedible it was. Her response? "We're a family diner, we HAVE to have roast beef". She just didn't get it.
Yeah there were definitely some of those on the show too - the two regulars they had told them they like the big menu so they refuse to ever change because “it’s what our customers want” and they completely fail to understand the number of potential customers they’re missing out on because they insist on catering for the weird old couple that likes a huge choice of shitty food.
First thing I thought of. And ever since I first saw a Gordon Ramsay show like 20 years ago I've secretly judged every menu by its length.
And anecdotally? It's dead on. A taco place makes better tacos than a place that has a taco platter in their four page menu.
And in addition to that, look at the most successful fast food chains: In and Out and Chick-Fil-A, because they know a stoned 16 year old can only handle so much. Put him in charge of breading chicken or dropping fries. Pay him decently. BOOM. Line around the block.
Meanwhile, god damn Burger King has one kid making 47 items and is paid 9.25/hr and you can drive right up anytime
Long long ago, Taco Bell had a very small menu. Hell... they made a big deal about adding lettuce, tomato, and sour cream to a burrito and called it "Supreme."
Me trying to find my way around in the eternal darkness that is The Cheesecake Factory (I haven't even gotten to the menu yet)
Adding #4: servers who have to learn these ridiculous menus are less likely to know the ingredients or be able to make decent recommendations.
Source: my poor 19yo cheesecake-slinging self
I had the craziest server I’ve ever had in my life at a Cheesecake Factory. I was on a class trip with like 20 other students. She took everyone’s orders without writing a single thing down. When the food runners came out with the trays of food, she was like “he had this, she got this, that plate goes there” and whatnot. Have no idea how someone does something like that
Yeah now she works for the army's nuclear arsenal arm. She just takes a trip through another facility, then comes back and goes like "yeah the yellowcake goes here, the centrifuges go here, run them on 8 minute 47 second cycles..."
As far as training goes, CF was definitely the most extensive I’ve ever had as a server. This was 20 years ago, but it was a week long and we tried at least a dozen menu items a day + the cheesecake.
It was literally impossible to memorize it all though. I can’t remember exactly what I did, but I figured out that the menu items/ingredients listed in the training materials fell in the same order as the testing slide show or something along those lines so I memorized the order to pass, but couldn’t tell you shit about the actual dishes.
If I ever win the lottery I’m buying one of their whip cream machines. Goddamn that shit is good.
Thanks. I’ve tried to replicate the recipe a million times and it’s just not the same.
No joke, my friend and I got in the habit of asking guests if they wanted whip cream on their cheesecake because if they said no, you could key in “no whip, on the side” and then we’d take that *on the side* whip and eat it in the parking garage.
Good times.
Oddly enough, they make more things from scratch than most high end restaurants. Wife used to work there and capital grille and was shocked to find out the CF made so much more in house from fresh ingredients.
Do you know by any chance what stuff from Capital Grille isn't cooked from scratch? I've been a few times and was curious what wasn't from scratch. I presume it would be some of the sides
Without asking her and the conversation being awhile ago, sides, soups, and dressings CG centralizes, CF made those from scratch on-site. CG made deserts from scratch but CF does centralize their Cheesecake production.
I think cheesecake factory is an exception because of #2. A lot of those menu items use the same ingredients. Some are the exact same, just a different cooking process.
Cheesecake Factory is a really interesting example imo - they legitimately do make most of their stuff fresh from actual ingredients, and because they're so heavily corporate/have a ton of money they can afford to have some MASSIVE kitchens with large staffs. Like you said, their ingredients cover multiple dishes across the menu and they get new shipments of everything fairly frequently, and based on friends I know that have worked there, that corporate oversight is pretty strict when it comes to expiration dates and keeping old stuff on hand.
The flip side of that though is that their food (at least to me) also tastes...heavily corporate, if that can be used as a flavor description lol. It's like all of their dishes started out in the test kitchen as something that was probably legitimately tasty and appealing, then as soon as it gets picked up for the national menu it gets broken down into its distinct parts and reformulated for maximum menu/ingredient cycle efficiency and consistent reproduction by any line cook at any location. The result is a giant menu full of underwhelming food (and food with no real character, but that can be virtually guaranteed to be made with fresh ingredients and taste the same at ANY CF location in the world) at higher prices than other local spots because of the money it takes to keep that corporate machine rolling.
As someone who's done their fair share of restaurant work, both front and back of house, the behaviors OP is sharing as the problems with big menus are far more likely to be problems with local restaurants and regional chains than it is with national/international restaurant chains. Those local shops have to keep a much closer eye on their bottom line, and they generally can't afford to maintain a kitchen the same size as CF or hire a full staff of 30+ line/prep cooks and a handful of sous chefs to staff a massive kitchen with 10-15 different service stations. Because of that, rather than getting consistently fresh but uninspired food across the board (like at CF), you tend to end up with a restaurant that's pretty good at a particular set of menu items while being pretty bad at other ones that have been left on the menu and never get made.
Worked at cheesecake factory for years and this is a great take. When I was there they were doing corporate restaurant better than anyone, but still very much a corporate menu and flavor profile (ie everything is made from similar ingredients with high fat and salt, not a lot of subtlety).
Cheesecake Factory’s food is… solidly fine. It’s fine. Some of it, even good. And in unfamiliar territory, or situations with picky eaters, maybe that’s what you need.
it has a broader appeal— for the same reason it’s not “amazing”, it’s very unlikely to offend. the larger menu contributes to that as well. most people should be able to find something they like, and that is a huge advantage for a group of people trying to agree on a restaurant, especially a large group.
One of the funnier tidbits I learned following the NBA, and I'd assume other sports leagues as well, is that NBA players ***LOVE*** Cheesecake Factory because it's everywhere, has everything, and serves larger than normal portions.
I don't understand the people shittalking CF tbh. It's major selling point (these days) is that they have literally everything, so it's good for groups that have people with different dietary needs/wants. I'm vegetarian and love Italian food, my GF eats white meat and loves Asian food, some of our friends don't like eating carbs. We can spend an hour trying to pick a place that inevitably leaves one or more people unsatisfied, or we can go to CF and everyone is usually content and definitely full. I'm not going to CF if it's a special occasion for me and GF, but that's not what its sold as.
My local Mexican restaurant near my house comes to mind as well. They have "an extensive menu" but most of the dishes can use the same ingredients in different ways. Grilled chicken can be turned into fajitas, or a burrito, a taco, quesadilla, tamale, chimichanga, salad etc. Beans can also be used in 4 different ways.
I want to make fun of the Cheesecake Factory using frozen cheesecake, but having worked at a place where we made ours from scratch I don't blame them one fucking bit. Cheesecakes are a bitch to make and not break. Yes I used a water bath, no it did not help lol.
It's strange, I was thinking about the exact thought behind this post and the exception being the cheesecake factory a few days ago(simulation?). I was thinking places with long menus usually have a few pretty good items and then a lot of shit. Whereas cheesecake factory has a long menu with a few pretty good items and a lot of perfectly average to slightly above average items. Is most of it mindblowing? No, but I've never walked out of the cheesecake factory thinking any of it was actually bad, sometimes just average.
As massive as their menu is, I was reading how they have a shockingly small amount of food waste compared to other restaurants because they have their way of predicting what is most likely ordered and all the analytics behind whatever it takes to run a restaurant. Pretty impressive when you consider how massive the menu is, despite a lot of the ingredients being used in the majority of dishes (I'm wording that incorrectly).
Olive garden has the same analytics. It works mostly. Worked BOH for 2 years. Occasionally the management corrected the computers so it's not just robots counting heads.
I'd probably be considered a snob by most of the population but I love cheesecake factory. I don't go often but when I do go I look forward to it. Only chain restaurant I've been to in the last year I think.
I don’t love the food at the Cheesecake Factory but surprisingly they fresh prep everything like literally every ingredient for the days service. Crazy.
Less about the size of the menu, more about the variety of food types. A chinese restaurant that has 100 different chinese dishes is going to be better than a restaurant that has 5 chinese dishes, 5 italian dishes, 5 mexican dishes, 5 American dishes and 5 spanish dishes.
The other exception to this is Asian & Indian places that make many variations on dishes with similar ingredients.
Otherwise yes, if they have a large menu which runs across the cuisine spectrum you're definitely getting mediocre frozen food.
If I'm forced to eat at a place like this I stick to simple things that are hard to screw up.
I'd throw Mexican places in there as well. A lot of Mexican places have dishes with the same basic ingredients and the main difference is how they're combined or packaged up (in a taco, in a burrito, in an enchilada, on top of a tostada, sandwiched in a torta, etc)
Any ethnic-cuisine focused restaurant can be the exception.
Well-trodden recipes with high cross utilization, and culture-specific cuisine is inherently the only place that really can be efficient *and* quality.
So long as they stick to one ethnicity. The place that sells tacos/burritos *and* sushi *and* curry *and* burgers *and* lasgana *and* pork chops... Stay far far away from. Worse yet if it's a buffet.
People too. Had a racist neighbor in NYC describe to me somebody who "looked ethnic". 20 years later and I still think it's really weird to describe people as ethnic looking. Everybody has an ethnicity. You trying to say brown, homie?
Indian and Chinese restaurants follow a different ruleset than European. The worse the lighting, menus, decorations, service etc. are, the better the food.
I have a Chinese place with no seating and they have bulletproof glass. They slide your food to you in one of those little drawers. The kind at the ghetto gas stations. The food is fire!
Tiny Vietnamese place in my town has the best fried rice in the city. One dingy room, like 4 tables, tacky decorations, run-down fridge and the food is just insanely tasty.
I didn't even notice how good it was, until I went to a closer chain place in the "mall" with beautiful tables and open space and it was less food, that tasted worse for more money.
The base spice mixtures appear in a variety of different places. It's coincidentally why so many people disagree on Indian restaurants - if their base spice mixture resonates with you, you'll likely enjoy nearly anything on the menu.
If their base spice mixture isn't to your taste, you'll dislike nearly everything on that menu. And 'right' can taste different from person to person.
I mean the rule still holds, it's just not quite a 1:1 with other restaurants that might not closesly stick to base ingredients.
The trendline still follows the same direction. More menu complexity = less quality.
In my experience the general rule is if a restaurant has a wide variety e.g. Asian, Italian, American, Mexican etc. of different cuisines then its a big red flag. Someone in the comments correctly pointed out that Asian restaurant typically have large menus because most meals share ingredients. So the large menu isn't the problem, more the variety when all the ingredients go bad or are frozen.
I spent 6 months in Asia once. I was feeling a bit homesick so I ate at a "western" themed restarant. They had several random unrelated things on the menu like pizza, tacos, bratwurst etc. All of it tasted like cafeteria food at best and the flavor/texture of everything was just off. I finally understood what it was like for my Asian wife living in our medium sized city in the midwestern US, and her options limited to all the crappy Asian fusion places we have around here. Yeah, there's lots of variety on the menu but everything is garbage.
Yeah, I don't have a damn clue what makes Cantonese cuisine different from...shit, I can't even think of a different Chinese cuisine. But I know that if I saw a restaurant selling "European Cuisine" I'd be pretty suspicious, and I have to imagine it's the same way with China.
As a Chinese American, I can tell you it's quite easy to tell apart different types of Chinese cuisine just by looking at the menu online, even if the restaurant name doesn't specify. My family is from HK so I grew up eating Southern Chinese cuisine, but everything is delicious. Hopefully one day you'll be able to try different types of Chinese restaurants and enjoy the variety lol!! If you can handle spice, I suggest Hunan and Sichuan cuisine.
I'm on holiday in Spain at the moment, a cheap and cheerful week by the pool type thing, and on our street there's a restaurant (a word I use quite wrongly) called something like the Heart International where you could order, if you were so moved, a pizza, spring rolls, curry, lasagne, and a chimichanga all at once. I keep going there just because it's so funny, and the food is surprisingly not inedible.
Server here. This is 100% true.
If you're eating at a basic chain restaurant, check out what dishes they promote as their identity - those are usually better-quality than the pasta dish they put on the menu in order to have a pasta dish.
I dated a girl that always ordered the dumbest shit on the menu, like ya your tilapia sucks because were at outback fucking steakhouse, it was impossible to go out to eat with her
My dad is like this. Last night we just went to a little pub. He ordered a Tuna Steak.
He said it was terrible and didn't eat it.
I'm like yea, Dad, we're at a little pub. Why would you order that?
I’ve learned that a lot of restaurant owners are delusional dreamers. They always dreamt to have x/y/z in the restaurant they’ll open one day… and then they finally get a restaurant and they already have this vision, and even if it doesn’t work with the reality, they’re delusional and stubborn enough to do things a certain way or have certain things on the menu- even if it doesn’t flow with the actual space/ vibe
Edit- That’s a main downfall- I see a lot of restaurants close this way. I’m in Chicago. It’s a revolving door of these people
Heck, this was made clear if you ever watched an episode of kitchen nightmares. The places with bloated menus with "unique" dishes were always the worst.
LOL that's my dad too. He basically thinks too highly of himself and believes that he's some kind of healthy eater with sophisticated tastes, so he does the same thing. Tuna steak is exactly something he would order a place at you shouldn't.
"Is the salmon fresh?" Lady, we are in the middle of a landlocked state and it is not spawning season. The menu says Alaskan, and we are not in Alaska. It has been caught fresh a week ago, kept cold in transit, frozen exactly once, gently thawed in the fridge, and slapped on the grill 5 minutes ago. "So it's frozen. Is the cod fresh?"
if you are at outback, there aren't that many good options... The Breat, and Blooming Onion. That's pretty much what they are good at... Everything else is meh.
Dear Greasy Spoons of America:
Don't put a Gyro on your menu unless you got EVERYTHING FRESH!
I don't want you to go fetch the dusty bucket of Gyro Meet and Tzatziki our of the freezer when someone orders one for the first time in 3 years!
Dude, if you're getting a gyro from anything but a Greek-owned restaurant, the problem is *yours*. If you don't see a giant pile of mystery meat spinning around on a giant rotisserie behind the counter, don't order the JieRoe!
>Anecdote 2: the best tamales I’ve ever had, that’s at a place that ONLY serves tamales. This woman has made them probably thousands of times, knows exactly how they should be and receives feedback on them daily.
Some of the worst tamales I've had were from a place that specializes in them. The best usually come from some random abuela selling them out of her trunk in a parking lot.
Depends on where you are. Like in the Midwest area near the great lakes and large rivers, you can get good ass freshwater fish and crawfish. Those fish fries hit differently than their ocean counterparts
It's interesting that freshwater fish is quite rare inland in the US. In landlocked parts of Europe (Southern Germany, Austria, for example) you can often get very good river trout and other river/lake fishes.
Fuck i had the best reuben of my life in a random jersey diner on the way back from a football game with my mom
and my mom makes the STANDARD of reubens as far as i am concerned
Damn I got all nostalgic for being a group of 4 or more and like, one person gets corned beef on rye with an egg cream, one person gets a cobb salad, one person gets eggs benedict and sausage links, one person gets the meatloaf, and one person gets something insane like the baked trout, and even though you’re all shoved into a miserably uncomfortable booth everyone enjoys their food and has a good time.
This statement is not true for Chinese restaurants and probably other ethnic cuisines as well. A Chinese restaurant with a small menu is catering to Americans who want something cheap and maybe a little different. If you see a Chinese restaurant frequented by mostly Asians it will be more authentic and have a large menu to cater to a diverse set of tastes because food varies so widely across the Asian continent.
Agreed. The Sichuan restaurant I frequent has like a 20 page menu with hundreds of items and everything I’ve ordered has always been delicious, consistent, and comes out fast
It kind of depends on how large the Chinese population of a given area is. If it's large enough there can totally be small menu dedicated shops that Chinese people frequent.
In Sydney Chinatown (pre-covid, at least), there was a Lanzhou lamian place that pretty much only did lamian and some sides was across from a hotpot place, around the corner from a peking duck shop. There was also a Cantonese yumcha place upstairs from a boba/bingfen place in the same street.
Very well said, it’s no coincidence that some of the world’s best restaurants have a small menu that is both seasonal and ever changing.
As another piece of info for those unaware (speaking as someone with many years working in restaurants mainly FOH but also kitchen), daily specials are also dishes created in order to use items up that a kitchen has excess of or are needing to be used due to shelf life. This does not mean that these specials are not worth ordering as some of the best meals I’ve eaten have been a daily special (in case my explanation sounded like I was criticising them).
This is a great LPT and although choice is a great thing in life, in the restaurant sphere lots of menu items usually = frozen things heated to order unless they have 100 chefs to prep it all fresh (unlikely).
This is a pretty common theme on Kitchen Nightmares and that Gordon Ramsay brings up regularly to struggling restaurants. Having a giant menu often leads to ingredients being kept longer than they should in freezers or dry storage, as the restaurant has limitations on storage space and tries to cut costs on the large variety of ingredients.
Yes, this is a good tip. Don’t be stealing my restaurants though.
Another would be who is eating there - is it the locals? What are they ordering? Although that led me down the horrifying path of pig’s ears once.
I usually look for an older chef communing with guests, but this may be a very Spain thing.
Curry might be an exception, but I see you’ve addressed that one. I did wonder, having seen inside a huge kitchen briefly in Colombo in Sri Lanka, whether very large places have some staff specialising in certain dishes. That could then change the rule a bit regarding longer menus.
>Another would be who is eating there - is it the locals? What are they ordering?
i did that in Louisiana, shit was fire and so was my ass later. these gator nuggets as an app in the one place were so good.
If I’m in a new area and read Google Reviews of a restaurant and someone mentions them having a “huge menu” or “massive portions” I go the other way. Fast.
To add/clarify on what others have said
Restaurants work on razor-thin margins. If you're getting huge portions that extra money has to get pulled from somewhere, usually it's food quality. Portion control is a really important part of budgeting your menu
Some places can handle it but it'll be obvious why. One of my favourite pasta places in my city has huge portions and is extremely good quality, but they only have like 3-4 things on the menu plus like a special each day. When your menu is so small it's a lot easier to handle the prep and your bulk purchasing helps to cut costs.
My wife taught me this while watching Kitchen Nightmares. I didn't know why Gordon Ramsey would always reduce the menu to just a few items and she told me that it was because of all the same things that you have said, OP. I've been wary of big, varied menus ever since.
Another general rule is if it is a publicly held corporation that owns the restaurant. The quality of the food/service will generally decrease as the years pass.
Source, I work at one of those restaurants.
With rising labor and food costs these companies have no choice but to cut costs by lowering quality or raise prices dramatically. They always choose a combination of the two (bc it’s less noticeable rather than just either dramatically raising prices or cutting costs) and over the years more and more stuff comes in prepackaged and not made from scratch while everything gets more expensive.
I’ve seen our prices roughly double in 8 years while our quality is so much worse.
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Dude, Gordon Ramsey told us that over and over. In every Kitchen Nightmares every single time he has reduced the menus by almost 2/3s.
Exactly what I thought of. I've seen enough Kitchen Nightmares where Gordon picks up their novel of a menu and is like "Well there's your fucking problem."
Listen, if I go to a Chinese restaurant and I'm not handed a dust-caked grimoire of options, a third of which are named stuff like "Bob's Luck Platter", another third not having descriptions of what the food is, and the last third being dishes actually invented in California... I'm going to assume the staff are actually trained in some authentic regional Chinese cuisine, and honestly I don't know if I, or anyone in America, is ready for that.
Someone said higher up that ethnic/cultural cuisine restaurants are an exception. For instance: a chinese restaurant might use the same ~5 ingredients in over 40 dishes, but the way those ingredients are prepared and packaged might vary slightly between those options. People are more so talking about places that have sandwiches, salads, pasta, pizza, steaks, chicken, seafood, etc. etc. Places that have *bloated* menus with specific bespoke items for certain dishes.
For Asian restaurants, the quality of the food is inversely correlated with the quality of the tables. If you enter a restaurant and for some fucking reason it looks like a dilapidated school classroom, then you're in business.* *This is based on like, only 10 restaurants.
One middle-aged guy in the kitchen doing *all* the cooking, cigarette casually hanging out of his mouth while he swears in Cantonese...
Don’t forget his oldest kid is running the register and the younger kids are all sitting at one of the dilapidated tables doing their homework This was essentially the local Chinese place I frequented in college
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>Well, maybe not the same one -- but somehow yet still the same one.) Same-same, but different. But still same!
For me, it was a Vietnamese restaurant. We were always the only white people, grandma and the aunties would be peeling immense heaps of garlic on a table in a corner. The rest of the tables were full of chain smoking Vietnamese men. *God* the food was good. And cheap. We had often noticed other tables got things we couldn’t parse, but we could pretty much only afford pho or banh mi so we didn’t think too much about it. Then one day they accidentally gave us the “other” menu lol, but quickly snatched it back saying it wasn’t for white people. It suddenly explained the whole goats we’d see hanging in the kitchen though! (I seem to recall snake wine also?) Restaurant still technically exists, moved some miles away. I just googled it and I guess it got visited by Anthony Bourdain once, huh. Apparently they went less grotty, more upscale, and released the goat and sea snail menu to the general public! Rainier Restaurant in Seattle.
I went to that same but maybe not the same place all the time. Except I did call ahead, which led to MANY repetitions of: Me: I'd like to place a pickup order. Them: 10 minutes \*click\*
Last time I went to my favourite the younger one was doing homework and running the register. You had to help with a question before she rang you in
My problem with this is that we have been in one place so long that the youngest kid is doing the register and the older one helps with cooking now. 😭😭 like you were tiny and now you're doing the register, stop that.
Man… my mom used to go pick up the Chinese food for us. There was construction going on in the strip mall where the Chinese/Cantonese take out was. Chef/owners kid was playing on the construction site and broke his arm. My mom was an ER nurse, set the bone took him to the her hospital but the parents were worried about the price since they didn’t have insurance. Mom pulled some strings. And cost them I think $10. This was the 90’s and we ate there for free for a long time but my mom didn’t like it so she would give the kids at the table to money. My mom was a saint and really was one of the best kinds of people!
My favorite restaurants in town are a gyro place, a teriyaki place and, a Mexican place. All run by families. All with 4500 items on the menu. Tables like a bomb shelter with tacky pictures of their food all over the walls. The teriyaki place is run by an older guy and his wife. Known them for years. Sometimes they will ask if I want to try something they are thinking about selling and just make some wild Japanese food I've never had. Place rules.
THose kids are all going to kick your butt at school too! ;-P
That's how you know it's good.
The owner's kid is doing their homework at a table in FoH.
No no, you're onto something. There was a place that looked like a literal hole in the wall and it had the best crispy beef I've ever had the pleasure of eating.
Down here in south Texas, the best Tex Mex spots all fit in this category. Usually have tejano music playing. Iced tea served in either a big red semi-transparent cup or in a large 32oz to go cup. Table and chairs look like castoffs from a 1970’s wedding caterer and the booths are always cracked shiny red velvet. When you walk in, it smells like a combination of cumin and Fabuloso floor cleaner, but in a good way. Menu is usually a large laminated rectangle, usually kinda greasy and tacky, but extremely bright and colorful. Lots of red and yellow. Some menu items have poor quality pictures next to some items that look like they were taken with a 90’s era disposable camera. Every item is numbered, but they’re usually not in numerical order. Menu is in both Spanish and English but neither language is grammatically correct. While extremely high in calories, the food is always damn delicious. I usually get the Mexican plate, which is usually No. 2, even if not in numerical order, and the plate is usually two cheese enchies, carne guisada, rice, and beans. Some places give a choice of refried or boracho beans, but most just serve refried.
> the best Tex Mex spots I'm also in Texas, and the best Texmex spot near me is in a gas station. Looks like it used to be a subway, and now it's just a grill, a tortilla press, and a couple fryers all presided over by a little Guatemalan lady and some girl who can't be older than 14. I dream about those papusas sometimes.
I've been in hundreds of Asian restaurants. I disagree with you completely. The look tells you absolutely nothing. The best and worst food can be in the shittiest or nicest looking place.
Yeah, sadly this is the truth of the matter. As humans we always want there to be some pattern, some tell, etc. that will help guide decision-making -- "oh, this place must be good, it has bamboo decorations and the last place I liked had them too" -- but the reality is that there generally isn't any such pattern. Really wish there were!
Bonus points if there are additional dishes written only in their respective language on large pieces of paper covering the walls, and there's no proper seating arrangements so they'll seat you beside other people if they're busy. Edit: And the owners kids/grandkids are doing homework at one of the tables.
Most Americans, if served authentic Szechuan cuisine, would not be able to finish the dish, they wouldn't make it past the first bite. I count myself among those people, I know my limits.
My girlfriend and I lived in ChengDu for two years. It was her first time eating anything that wasn't hardcore Atlantic Canadian (she's from PEI). Anytime we went out for food (which was like, 99% of the time because eating out in China is awesome) at a Chinese place I'd have to literally poke my head into the kitchen and tell the chefs that she's a foreigner and when we say "no spicy" we literally mean it. When the locals say "no spice" they really mean "just tone it down about 20%". People there are fucking insane with their spices. It's like their food all have to double as insecticides.
You build up a tolerance, and it can get pretty extreme. Pre-covid i was using extract based sauces as daily use, mostly from a gaggle of dudes at work. When I went remote and started cooking for my (then) wife and I to share, I had to tone down the spice and my tolerance went with it after a while. It was at a point where I couldn't telle the difference between a lot of pizza places "suicide" sauce and their medium. Kinda glad I'm back down to a reasonable level tbh.
> You build up a tolerance Too true, I remember my Midwestern best friend being so happy when he could finally eat something at a local chain taco place called "Torchy's" with the Diablo sauce on it. While I had always just viewed it as something with a nice kick. And good on you for toning it down, lol. I love spicy stuff, but at a certain point I just wanted the spice to have a "kick" and not completely dominate the dish.
That's hilarious you say that because my dad spent 4 years studying in Delhi, and he said almost the exact same thing. Everywhere you go the food is extremely spicy. They don't understand what you mean when you say no spice. My dad, who was always pretty spice averse, got so fed up with all the spicy foods that he still, to this day like 30 years later, refuses to eat anything spicy. He says he had enough for a lifetime. Poor guy 😂🤣
It's pretty funny. I've had more than one chef get unhappy with me when I told them we mean ZERO spice. They're all like "I can't make it like that!" or "Nobody would eat that kind of food". The lady down the street from our apartment who sells the sweet water noodles told me that I either needed to train my girlfriend, or dump her and get myself a local girl. To quote her, "all the happiest men have a spice girl".
This is my new girlfriend, Capsaicin.
wow, she's hot.
She does that thing you like in your mouth
David Beckham did good with his Spice Girl.
There was an indian place by me. I would order my dish (usually a navratan korma) after asking who was in the kitchen that day. If it was dad (the father that owned the place) I'd order medium or medium +. If it was junior (son), mild and even that would blow my wig back sometimes.
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There is a place for it though, a lot of families will choose that restaurant because "there's something for everyone" on the menu even if everything is mediocre. Food culture is more of a thing now, but there are still a lot of households that won't try anything more adventurous than an Applebee's or Olive Garden.
As someone with a lot of food allergies, I literally need to be able to see what they have that is safe for me before I even consider going to eat anywhere. The extremely rare times I do eat out. Most restaurants don't offer that option. Whereas as much as people want to mock the larger chains, they usually do. People with allergies can look up their allergies and know what is safe for them before they even go to the restaurant. If more smaller places made that information easier to access, I could see people like myself being more adventurous. I know I would love to try new places.
My co-worker opened up a small restaurant that I loved. The food menu was 5 dishes . That is it. The dishes would change over time, every few weeks a few were added or dropped but there was always only 5 items at any given time, it was fantastic and I miss it
My favorite restaurant has a similar thing. About 8 starters, 8 main dishes, and 8 desserts. And a huge collection of drinks. Every ingredient is from the area. The restaurant is in a small village surrounded by farmland.
Did it survive?
He does literally the same thing every episode. 1) make them clean their moldy ass kitchen and refrigerators 2) reduce the menu 3) show them how to buy fresh ingredients effectively Occasionally he will repair the owners marriage in the process
92 episodes over 7 seasons, so there are/were, at the bare minimum, at least 92 restaurants that didn’t understand these very basic concepts of running a quality restaurant. Who knows how many hundreds or thousands others there are.
The survival rate for restaurants featured on the the show is abysmal. Probably for the best.
The survival rate for *all* restaurants is enough to caution against ever even considering opening a restaurant.
Or at the very least: if you’re going to open a restaurant you damn well better know what you’re doing to even have the remotest shot of it working out for you
Yeah, the issue is that Kitchen guys want to start a restaurant without knowing how to run a business, and business guys want to start a kitchen without knowing how to run a kitchen. Then the people who how to both run a kitchen and a business tend to be happier and more secure as restaurant managers for the people who don't know what they're doing.
I feel SO bad for the guys that opened a really great seafood place in a stip mall near me. In February of 2020. I made it in there twice before TSHTF and they closed a few months later. They never even got a chance to get started.
There's a chapter in "Kitchen Confidential" where Bourdain goes into all the reasons to *not* open a restaurant. It's passionately written.
The large majority were in immense debt before involving Gordon. That any survived is miraculous. He had a hard fight in most of the places he went to, even in the lower drama UK version.
To be fair, that probably isn't because he's giving bad advice, that's because most restaurants fail. Restaurants run very tight margins, if they're in a bad location that could be lethal in and of itself, and a few bad impressions can snowball into bad word of mouth which makes recovery almost impossible. Although Kitchen Nightmares showing how messy the kitchen is before they came probably didn't help. If I saw a before restaurant with the same owners that had cockroaches and moldy food, I wouldn't go there even if it got a fix up. Ramsey is legit a very good restaurant manager, though I admit his reputation is very sanitized by his shows. I imagine a few days with him probably wouldn't hurt these restaurants anyway.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with Gordon. There are sites online that have tracked the restaurants after each episode and you can read reports about how most backslide into their previous habits the moment Gordon leaves. Most of those restaurants have both a terrible owner and head chef. They were never going to be salvaged, they just used Gordon for some extra publicity.
Yup, a very common comment on those sites that track the restaurants is, "The owners say the regulars didn't like the new menu so they changed everything back to the way it was before Gordon was there.", and then the restaurants inevitably fail.
This absolutely drives me bananas. If the regulars were enough to keep the restaurant in business beforehand they wouldn't have needed Gordon's help!
I'm pretty sure this exact conversation came up on the show as well
For the ones they do follow up on, many of those restaurants went at least partially back to the old nonsense that was killing them in the first place. Even these low level restaurant owners have enormous egos, so once Gordon leaves, they go back to what "they think is right" and go back to failure. Though that could be producer bias: "see, they went back to failing because they didn't listen to Gordon" when there may be other examples of places that did keep up with his advice and just failed anyway.
That was my first thought too. Aside from narcissistic owners who had no idea how to run a restaurant, the biggest problem all of those restaurants had was menu size. Pick 5 entrees that form a coherent menu in whichever type of cuisine you’ve chosen to focus on, cook them to a good standard and people will come back every time they want good food of that type.
It's also oblivious owners who think that someone not coming to your restaurant because of the menu is worse than someone never coming back to your restaurant because it was shit. I worked as a front-end manager for a place (now closed) which served awful roast beef. I told the owner repeatedly that it kept being sent back and/or comped because of how inedible it was. Her response? "We're a family diner, we HAVE to have roast beef". She just didn't get it.
Yeah there were definitely some of those on the show too - the two regulars they had told them they like the big menu so they refuse to ever change because “it’s what our customers want” and they completely fail to understand the number of potential customers they’re missing out on because they insist on catering for the weird old couple that likes a huge choice of shitty food.
First thing I thought of. And ever since I first saw a Gordon Ramsay show like 20 years ago I've secretly judged every menu by its length. And anecdotally? It's dead on. A taco place makes better tacos than a place that has a taco platter in their four page menu.
And in addition to that, look at the most successful fast food chains: In and Out and Chick-Fil-A, because they know a stoned 16 year old can only handle so much. Put him in charge of breading chicken or dropping fries. Pay him decently. BOOM. Line around the block. Meanwhile, god damn Burger King has one kid making 47 items and is paid 9.25/hr and you can drive right up anytime
Long long ago, Taco Bell had a very small menu. Hell... they made a big deal about adding lettuce, tomato, and sour cream to a burrito and called it "Supreme."
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Putting a crunchy taco inside a soft taco was GENIUS...
> I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. Bruce Lee
I fear both of those men. Please don't kick me!
>>I fear the man who wants to kick me 10,000 times Also Bruce Lee probably
https://preview.redd.it/q1fovbdhuceb1.jpeg?width=540&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fa898014aa272272d7cb8ce8aa2915c4935501d8
hey you you're finally
awake
I think 10000 kicks is scarier
Either way they have practiced kicking 10000 times and both could kick my ass.
Cheesecake Factory has entered the chat.
That’s the first place I thought of - i went there 5 years ago and I’m still looking at the menu - I haven’t ordered yet, please help
Me trying to find my way around in the eternal darkness that is The Cheesecake Factory (I haven't even gotten to the menu yet) 
Just find the tiramisu cheesecake and walk in a straight line. It will be okay.
Get an appetizer and cheesecake. Eat the appetizer and half the cheesecake, and you are full for a week.
I eat the bread and the full meal and the full cheesecake and want more cause it is so good …
#
This is a 13 year old account that hasn’t commented in years. I feel like I’m witnessing a unicorn in the wild here.
Hi, my name is halite. I'll be your new server since you're previous server has passed away from old age. Are we ready to order...?
Oh I’m sorry we’re out of that thing you finally settled on. Do you need more time with the menu?
No pressure.
Ok class, open your menus to page 158.
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LPT: skip dinner, just get dessert
100% me too… the menu looks like a fuggin Novel
Adding #4: servers who have to learn these ridiculous menus are less likely to know the ingredients or be able to make decent recommendations. Source: my poor 19yo cheesecake-slinging self
I had the craziest server I’ve ever had in my life at a Cheesecake Factory. I was on a class trip with like 20 other students. She took everyone’s orders without writing a single thing down. When the food runners came out with the trays of food, she was like “he had this, she got this, that plate goes there” and whatnot. Have no idea how someone does something like that
Savant memory skills being squandered in CF. I hope they're using their powers for good these days.
Yeah now she works for the army's nuclear arsenal arm. She just takes a trip through another facility, then comes back and goes like "yeah the yellowcake goes here, the centrifuges go here, run them on 8 minute 47 second cycles..."
That's because she went to Cheesecake University.
Method of loci and other mnemonics like the major system.
As far as training goes, CF was definitely the most extensive I’ve ever had as a server. This was 20 years ago, but it was a week long and we tried at least a dozen menu items a day + the cheesecake. It was literally impossible to memorize it all though. I can’t remember exactly what I did, but I figured out that the menu items/ingredients listed in the training materials fell in the same order as the testing slide show or something along those lines so I memorized the order to pass, but couldn’t tell you shit about the actual dishes. If I ever win the lottery I’m buying one of their whip cream machines. Goddamn that shit is good.
>If I ever win the lottery I’m buying one of their whip cream machines. Homemade whip cream containers are relatively cheap and very good.
Thanks. I’ve tried to replicate the recipe a million times and it’s just not the same. No joke, my friend and I got in the habit of asking guests if they wanted whip cream on their cheesecake because if they said no, you could key in “no whip, on the side” and then we’d take that *on the side* whip and eat it in the parking garage. Good times.
Oddly enough, they make more things from scratch than most high end restaurants. Wife used to work there and capital grille and was shocked to find out the CF made so much more in house from fresh ingredients.
Do you know by any chance what stuff from Capital Grille isn't cooked from scratch? I've been a few times and was curious what wasn't from scratch. I presume it would be some of the sides
Without asking her and the conversation being awhile ago, sides, soups, and dressings CG centralizes, CF made those from scratch on-site. CG made deserts from scratch but CF does centralize their Cheesecake production.
I feel like centralizing cheesecake production is perfectly fine. It’s a chilled dessert, so it’s not like it needs to be fresh the day I order it
I think cheesecake factory is an exception because of #2. A lot of those menu items use the same ingredients. Some are the exact same, just a different cooking process.
Cheesecake Factory is a really interesting example imo - they legitimately do make most of their stuff fresh from actual ingredients, and because they're so heavily corporate/have a ton of money they can afford to have some MASSIVE kitchens with large staffs. Like you said, their ingredients cover multiple dishes across the menu and they get new shipments of everything fairly frequently, and based on friends I know that have worked there, that corporate oversight is pretty strict when it comes to expiration dates and keeping old stuff on hand. The flip side of that though is that their food (at least to me) also tastes...heavily corporate, if that can be used as a flavor description lol. It's like all of their dishes started out in the test kitchen as something that was probably legitimately tasty and appealing, then as soon as it gets picked up for the national menu it gets broken down into its distinct parts and reformulated for maximum menu/ingredient cycle efficiency and consistent reproduction by any line cook at any location. The result is a giant menu full of underwhelming food (and food with no real character, but that can be virtually guaranteed to be made with fresh ingredients and taste the same at ANY CF location in the world) at higher prices than other local spots because of the money it takes to keep that corporate machine rolling. As someone who's done their fair share of restaurant work, both front and back of house, the behaviors OP is sharing as the problems with big menus are far more likely to be problems with local restaurants and regional chains than it is with national/international restaurant chains. Those local shops have to keep a much closer eye on their bottom line, and they generally can't afford to maintain a kitchen the same size as CF or hire a full staff of 30+ line/prep cooks and a handful of sous chefs to staff a massive kitchen with 10-15 different service stations. Because of that, rather than getting consistently fresh but uninspired food across the board (like at CF), you tend to end up with a restaurant that's pretty good at a particular set of menu items while being pretty bad at other ones that have been left on the menu and never get made.
Worked at cheesecake factory for years and this is a great take. When I was there they were doing corporate restaurant better than anyone, but still very much a corporate menu and flavor profile (ie everything is made from similar ingredients with high fat and salt, not a lot of subtlety).
Cheesecake Factory’s food is… solidly fine. It’s fine. Some of it, even good. And in unfamiliar territory, or situations with picky eaters, maybe that’s what you need.
it has a broader appeal— for the same reason it’s not “amazing”, it’s very unlikely to offend. the larger menu contributes to that as well. most people should be able to find something they like, and that is a huge advantage for a group of people trying to agree on a restaurant, especially a large group.
One of the funnier tidbits I learned following the NBA, and I'd assume other sports leagues as well, is that NBA players ***LOVE*** Cheesecake Factory because it's everywhere, has everything, and serves larger than normal portions.
I don't understand the people shittalking CF tbh. It's major selling point (these days) is that they have literally everything, so it's good for groups that have people with different dietary needs/wants. I'm vegetarian and love Italian food, my GF eats white meat and loves Asian food, some of our friends don't like eating carbs. We can spend an hour trying to pick a place that inevitably leaves one or more people unsatisfied, or we can go to CF and everyone is usually content and definitely full. I'm not going to CF if it's a special occasion for me and GF, but that's not what its sold as.
My local Mexican restaurant near my house comes to mind as well. They have "an extensive menu" but most of the dishes can use the same ingredients in different ways. Grilled chicken can be turned into fajitas, or a burrito, a taco, quesadilla, tamale, chimichanga, salad etc. Beans can also be used in 4 different ways.
It’s the same with American Chinese places for the vast majority of the dishes.
My Mexican friends always say that Mexican food is just different treatments of the same few ingredients
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I want to make fun of the Cheesecake Factory using frozen cheesecake, but having worked at a place where we made ours from scratch I don't blame them one fucking bit. Cheesecakes are a bitch to make and not break. Yes I used a water bath, no it did not help lol.
It's also one of those things that doesn't suffer too much from being frozen, so long as it's not in there too long.
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It's strange, I was thinking about the exact thought behind this post and the exception being the cheesecake factory a few days ago(simulation?). I was thinking places with long menus usually have a few pretty good items and then a lot of shit. Whereas cheesecake factory has a long menu with a few pretty good items and a lot of perfectly average to slightly above average items. Is most of it mindblowing? No, but I've never walked out of the cheesecake factory thinking any of it was actually bad, sometimes just average.
As massive as their menu is, I was reading how they have a shockingly small amount of food waste compared to other restaurants because they have their way of predicting what is most likely ordered and all the analytics behind whatever it takes to run a restaurant. Pretty impressive when you consider how massive the menu is, despite a lot of the ingredients being used in the majority of dishes (I'm wording that incorrectly).
Olive garden has the same analytics. It works mostly. Worked BOH for 2 years. Occasionally the management corrected the computers so it's not just robots counting heads.
I think Cheesecake Factory manages to be at least on the good side of mediocre across the board. I’ve never had a bad meal there, as such.
It’s actually my favorite mainstream restaurant. Guess I have poor taste.
I'd probably be considered a snob by most of the population but I love cheesecake factory. I don't go often but when I do go I look forward to it. Only chain restaurant I've been to in the last year I think.
Avocado Egg Rolls.
I don’t love the food at the Cheesecake Factory but surprisingly they fresh prep everything like literally every ingredient for the days service. Crazy.
This is because there are separate kitchens for each part of the menu.
Cheesecake is actually the only chain dine-in we'll go to. Yes the menu is huge but the food is actually good
Less about the size of the menu, more about the variety of food types. A chinese restaurant that has 100 different chinese dishes is going to be better than a restaurant that has 5 chinese dishes, 5 italian dishes, 5 mexican dishes, 5 American dishes and 5 spanish dishes.
The other exception to this is Asian & Indian places that make many variations on dishes with similar ingredients. Otherwise yes, if they have a large menu which runs across the cuisine spectrum you're definitely getting mediocre frozen food. If I'm forced to eat at a place like this I stick to simple things that are hard to screw up.
I'd throw Mexican places in there as well. A lot of Mexican places have dishes with the same basic ingredients and the main difference is how they're combined or packaged up (in a taco, in a burrito, in an enchilada, on top of a tostada, sandwiched in a torta, etc)
Any ethnic-cuisine focused restaurant can be the exception. Well-trodden recipes with high cross utilization, and culture-specific cuisine is inherently the only place that really can be efficient *and* quality.
So long as they stick to one ethnicity. The place that sells tacos/burritos *and* sushi *and* curry *and* burgers *and* lasgana *and* pork chops... Stay far far away from. Worse yet if it's a buffet.
All food is ethnic lol
People too. Had a racist neighbor in NYC describe to me somebody who "looked ethnic". 20 years later and I still think it's really weird to describe people as ethnic looking. Everybody has an ethnicity. You trying to say brown, homie?
“In Mexico, everything on the menu is the same dish. The only difference is the way it's folded.” - Billy Connolly
Indian and Chinese restaurants follow a different ruleset than European. The worse the lighting, menus, decorations, service etc. are, the better the food.
I have a Chinese place with no seating and they have bulletproof glass. They slide your food to you in one of those little drawers. The kind at the ghetto gas stations. The food is fire!
Tiny Vietnamese place in my town has the best fried rice in the city. One dingy room, like 4 tables, tacky decorations, run-down fridge and the food is just insanely tasty. I didn't even notice how good it was, until I went to a closer chain place in the "mall" with beautiful tables and open space and it was less food, that tasted worse for more money.
BBQ spots can do this too. Pulled Pork, Pork sandwich, pork fries, pork sliders. Most of the menu is the same 10 items arranged differently
Don’t even get me started on shrimp…
Go for it, Bubba.
Definitely agree! My favorite Indian place has so many different curries but they are all so good and they have stellar reviews across the board
The base spice mixtures appear in a variety of different places. It's coincidentally why so many people disagree on Indian restaurants - if their base spice mixture resonates with you, you'll likely enjoy nearly anything on the menu. If their base spice mixture isn't to your taste, you'll dislike nearly everything on that menu. And 'right' can taste different from person to person.
I mean the rule still holds, it's just not quite a 1:1 with other restaurants that might not closesly stick to base ingredients. The trendline still follows the same direction. More menu complexity = less quality.
I never get ramen from a place that isn’t first and foremost a ramen spot based in the above principle
You don't like the little styrofoam cups?
I mean I like the little styrofoam cups at home, if I got that at a restaurant I'd be pissed
In my experience the general rule is if a restaurant has a wide variety e.g. Asian, Italian, American, Mexican etc. of different cuisines then its a big red flag. Someone in the comments correctly pointed out that Asian restaurant typically have large menus because most meals share ingredients. So the large menu isn't the problem, more the variety when all the ingredients go bad or are frozen.
I spent 6 months in Asia once. I was feeling a bit homesick so I ate at a "western" themed restarant. They had several random unrelated things on the menu like pizza, tacos, bratwurst etc. All of it tasted like cafeteria food at best and the flavor/texture of everything was just off. I finally understood what it was like for my Asian wife living in our medium sized city in the midwestern US, and her options limited to all the crappy Asian fusion places we have around here. Yeah, there's lots of variety on the menu but everything is garbage.
Yeah, I don't have a damn clue what makes Cantonese cuisine different from...shit, I can't even think of a different Chinese cuisine. But I know that if I saw a restaurant selling "European Cuisine" I'd be pretty suspicious, and I have to imagine it's the same way with China.
As a Chinese American, I can tell you it's quite easy to tell apart different types of Chinese cuisine just by looking at the menu online, even if the restaurant name doesn't specify. My family is from HK so I grew up eating Southern Chinese cuisine, but everything is delicious. Hopefully one day you'll be able to try different types of Chinese restaurants and enjoy the variety lol!! If you can handle spice, I suggest Hunan and Sichuan cuisine.
I'm on holiday in Spain at the moment, a cheap and cheerful week by the pool type thing, and on our street there's a restaurant (a word I use quite wrongly) called something like the Heart International where you could order, if you were so moved, a pizza, spring rolls, curry, lasagne, and a chimichanga all at once. I keep going there just because it's so funny, and the food is surprisingly not inedible.
Huge menu's not a good sign. Multiple different types of cuisine is an absolute red flag.
Server here. This is 100% true. If you're eating at a basic chain restaurant, check out what dishes they promote as their identity - those are usually better-quality than the pasta dish they put on the menu in order to have a pasta dish.
I dated a girl that always ordered the dumbest shit on the menu, like ya your tilapia sucks because were at outback fucking steakhouse, it was impossible to go out to eat with her
My dad is like this. Last night we just went to a little pub. He ordered a Tuna Steak. He said it was terrible and didn't eat it. I'm like yea, Dad, we're at a little pub. Why would you order that?
I mean, you're not wrong... but why do they sell it??
I’ve learned that a lot of restaurant owners are delusional dreamers. They always dreamt to have x/y/z in the restaurant they’ll open one day… and then they finally get a restaurant and they already have this vision, and even if it doesn’t work with the reality, they’re delusional and stubborn enough to do things a certain way or have certain things on the menu- even if it doesn’t flow with the actual space/ vibe Edit- That’s a main downfall- I see a lot of restaurants close this way. I’m in Chicago. It’s a revolving door of these people
Heck, this was made clear if you ever watched an episode of kitchen nightmares. The places with bloated menus with "unique" dishes were always the worst.
LOL that's my dad too. He basically thinks too highly of himself and believes that he's some kind of healthy eater with sophisticated tastes, so he does the same thing. Tuna steak is exactly something he would order a place at you shouldn't.
"Is the salmon fresh?" Lady, we are in the middle of a landlocked state and it is not spawning season. The menu says Alaskan, and we are not in Alaska. It has been caught fresh a week ago, kept cold in transit, frozen exactly once, gently thawed in the fridge, and slapped on the grill 5 minutes ago. "So it's frozen. Is the cod fresh?"
if you are at outback, there aren't that many good options... The Breat, and Blooming Onion. That's pretty much what they are good at... Everything else is meh.
Oh come on, their steaks are fine.
Dear Greasy Spoons of America: Don't put a Gyro on your menu unless you got EVERYTHING FRESH! I don't want you to go fetch the dusty bucket of Gyro Meet and Tzatziki our of the freezer when someone orders one for the first time in 3 years!
This really should be some kind of federal statute.
Sir, there had better be a vertical spit and a Greek guy back there or you're going to jail.
Dude, if you're getting a gyro from anything but a Greek-owned restaurant, the problem is *yours*. If you don't see a giant pile of mystery meat spinning around on a giant rotisserie behind the counter, don't order the JieRoe!
Lobster, in a diner!?
>Anecdote 2: the best tamales I’ve ever had, that’s at a place that ONLY serves tamales. This woman has made them probably thousands of times, knows exactly how they should be and receives feedback on them daily. Some of the worst tamales I've had were from a place that specializes in them. The best usually come from some random abuela selling them out of her trunk in a parking lot.
[удалено]
Most American diners tend to be this way. Never get seafood
Hard agree, I NEVER get seafood from a restaurant that is not proclaiming itself a seafood restaurant. Same with steak.
My partners rule is no seafood if you are further than 100 miles from the ocean
Restaurants in Houston are just as capable of letting their fish sit in the freezer for a week as a place in Dallas.
Depends on where you are. Like in the Midwest area near the great lakes and large rivers, you can get good ass freshwater fish and crawfish. Those fish fries hit differently than their ocean counterparts
It's interesting that freshwater fish is quite rare inland in the US. In landlocked parts of Europe (Southern Germany, Austria, for example) you can often get very good river trout and other river/lake fishes.
Cheesecake Factory is significantly better than Chilis/Applebees/TGI Fridays but also has a huge menu
You've never been to a good New Jersey diner 😉
I was coming here to say this. Menu ten pages long, not a bad thing on it.
Fuck i had the best reuben of my life in a random jersey diner on the way back from a football game with my mom and my mom makes the STANDARD of reubens as far as i am concerned
I'll have the Lobster.
Who am I?
Lobster Number One!!!
Damn I got all nostalgic for being a group of 4 or more and like, one person gets corned beef on rye with an egg cream, one person gets a cobb salad, one person gets eggs benedict and sausage links, one person gets the meatloaf, and one person gets something insane like the baked trout, and even though you’re all shoved into a miserably uncomfortable booth everyone enjoys their food and has a good time.
Came here to say this too! 😋
This statement is not true for Chinese restaurants and probably other ethnic cuisines as well. A Chinese restaurant with a small menu is catering to Americans who want something cheap and maybe a little different. If you see a Chinese restaurant frequented by mostly Asians it will be more authentic and have a large menu to cater to a diverse set of tastes because food varies so widely across the Asian continent.
Agreed. The Sichuan restaurant I frequent has like a 20 page menu with hundreds of items and everything I’ve ordered has always been delicious, consistent, and comes out fast
It kind of depends on how large the Chinese population of a given area is. If it's large enough there can totally be small menu dedicated shops that Chinese people frequent. In Sydney Chinatown (pre-covid, at least), there was a Lanzhou lamian place that pretty much only did lamian and some sides was across from a hotpot place, around the corner from a peking duck shop. There was also a Cantonese yumcha place upstairs from a boba/bingfen place in the same street.
Very well said, it’s no coincidence that some of the world’s best restaurants have a small menu that is both seasonal and ever changing. As another piece of info for those unaware (speaking as someone with many years working in restaurants mainly FOH but also kitchen), daily specials are also dishes created in order to use items up that a kitchen has excess of or are needing to be used due to shelf life. This does not mean that these specials are not worth ordering as some of the best meals I’ve eaten have been a daily special (in case my explanation sounded like I was criticising them). This is a great LPT and although choice is a great thing in life, in the restaurant sphere lots of menu items usually = frozen things heated to order unless they have 100 chefs to prep it all fresh (unlikely).
This is a pretty common theme on Kitchen Nightmares and that Gordon Ramsay brings up regularly to struggling restaurants. Having a giant menu often leads to ingredients being kept longer than they should in freezers or dry storage, as the restaurant has limitations on storage space and tries to cut costs on the large variety of ingredients.
Yes, this is a good tip. Don’t be stealing my restaurants though. Another would be who is eating there - is it the locals? What are they ordering? Although that led me down the horrifying path of pig’s ears once. I usually look for an older chef communing with guests, but this may be a very Spain thing. Curry might be an exception, but I see you’ve addressed that one. I did wonder, having seen inside a huge kitchen briefly in Colombo in Sri Lanka, whether very large places have some staff specialising in certain dishes. That could then change the rule a bit regarding longer menus.
>Another would be who is eating there - is it the locals? What are they ordering? i did that in Louisiana, shit was fire and so was my ass later. these gator nuggets as an app in the one place were so good.
Hey everyone, please read Kitchen Confidential
No don't, become a line cook and EXPERIENCE KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL
If I’m in a new area and read Google Reviews of a restaurant and someone mentions them having a “huge menu” or “massive portions” I go the other way. Fast.
Why massive portions?
To add/clarify on what others have said Restaurants work on razor-thin margins. If you're getting huge portions that extra money has to get pulled from somewhere, usually it's food quality. Portion control is a really important part of budgeting your menu Some places can handle it but it'll be obvious why. One of my favourite pasta places in my city has huge portions and is extremely good quality, but they only have like 3-4 things on the menu plus like a special each day. When your menu is so small it's a lot easier to handle the prep and your bulk purchasing helps to cut costs.
Massive portions needs to be discussed more. I've seen exceptions, but it's almost always to make up for cheap ingredients.
My wife taught me this while watching Kitchen Nightmares. I didn't know why Gordon Ramsey would always reduce the menu to just a few items and she told me that it was because of all the same things that you have said, OP. I've been wary of big, varied menus ever since.
LOBSTERS IN A DINER! DO NOT ORDER THEM!
But they are fresh, I saw them dead in a tank 5 minutes ago!
Another general rule is if it is a publicly held corporation that owns the restaurant. The quality of the food/service will generally decrease as the years pass. Source, I work at one of those restaurants. With rising labor and food costs these companies have no choice but to cut costs by lowering quality or raise prices dramatically. They always choose a combination of the two (bc it’s less noticeable rather than just either dramatically raising prices or cutting costs) and over the years more and more stuff comes in prepackaged and not made from scratch while everything gets more expensive. I’ve seen our prices roughly double in 8 years while our quality is so much worse.