We’re easy to disappoint when we dine out
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- July 18, 2018
- 1298
Once, when New Towne Mall in New Philadelphia smelled of new construction and the bloom of promising commerce ahead, there was a great little restaurant inside the main entrance. I don’t remember the name, but it was an Italian place with a wood-fired pizza oven, red-checked tablecloths and snappy service.
The little pizzas were crusty, charred things with fresh Roma tomato slices, olive oil and globs of cheese. The pasta had a sauce that seemed made in the kitchen on the spot. The salads were dotted with chickpeas and shaved red onion with a house dressing to die for. The tables were always full, and the joint was usually hopping.
Then, slowly and for reasons unknown to anyone outside the lovely little restaurant inside the shiny new mall, the menu slowly removed the things that made it great. Gone were those fresh salads, ingredients were cheapened and the place went empty.
It is a very difficult hat trick to bring a family back into an eatery once they’ve paid for disappointment there. You get, at most, one more crack at it. Eventually, if you’re lucky, they’ll get another craving for the delicious things they remember. Screw up that visit, and you’ll likely never see them again. And as has been said often, most customers won’t complain. They’ll smile and say, “Yes, everything was fine,” and never come back.
I have absolutely no experience in managing a restaurant, so I am as mystified as you are in finding that a favorite place has changed out popular menu items for something worse or made obvious moves to cut corners. I suspect it may often have to do with a new head chef wanting to make changes, which is fine as long as standards go upscale rather than down market.
You can freshen a menu or even change things out completely, but you’d better deliver great food. This happens infrequently enough to represent a peek into the difficulty of finding a good head chef.
Some really amazing food comes out of my kitchen at home, and that cannot be compared to restaurant fare. At home you can take the time to fuss and dawdle, and the result is fantastic eating. But there’s a downside to taking food and cooking very seriously: It’s easy to be disappointed when you go out someplace to eat, knowing you could have cooked something better yourself, in jammies to boot.
As you may guess by now, I had a disappointing experience at a favorite restaurant recently. It had been a few months since we were able to visit, and I looked forward to the Friday night fish and chips special all week.
The fish at this favorite spot had always been, or so it seemed, freshly battered and fried to order with a mahogany, crispy crust filled with big pieces of plump whitefish. The fries on the side used to be crispy and well seasoned.
Our noses told us on arrival that the fish was undergoing a different treatment. And when it arrived too quickly to have been made fresh, the perfectly distributed black flecks on the thin blonde coating confirmed it had been battered and frozen elsewhere and dropped into a fryer out of a bag in the kitchen.
We’ve been leaving uneaten french fries behind so frequently lately we rarely order them anymore, and these were among the worst. A single fry in too-cool oil left them a stuck-together mound of pale grease. Did we speak up? I’m sorry to say no, we didn’t. I dislike conflict as much as you do. We went home and made late-night Asian tacos.
But we’ll go back, try other things and have high hopes.