The bottom line: restaurants are fundamentally a waste of money. Food is cheap, restaurants = cheap food, expensive preparation, expensive location, expensive service — cheap food becomes expensive.
Starting there, I am looking for one of three things out of a restaurant. Either, I’m looking for food that I can’t make at home because of lack of expertise (Indian food), time (Chinese food), or lack of access to the right ingredients/technique (Japanese food).
The kinds of place I patronize then fall into three different categories. Spectacular cheap food, like the beef rolls and 101 Noodle Express or the pupusa at Pupuseria del Valle. I’m talking zero ambiance, but less than five dollars for great food. That’s plentiful in Los Angeles.
The second kind of restaurant I go to is the one with spectacular ingredients. Providence comes to mind. Whether it’s white or black truffles from France, or duck from a specialty farmer, you know that the best ingredients were sought out, and a dish that would be mundane at one restaurant can be spectacular at the next.
The last restaurant I like to go to is the one Adam hates - the new, hip place. We’re talking100% scene from the moment you pull up to the valet until you sip your overpriced after dinner drinks while watching teen aged starlets act crazy for the paparazzi. These places are fun, and the food, frankly, is secondary. It’s inevitably overpriced, over-salted, and overcooked.
Absent these, I’d rather be home cooking. Lately, however, clients and colleagues of Adam want to go out to restaurants that I hate. There are two main categories - steak places and chain restaurants. Are you kidding. I’m going to pay money for an over-sized slab of beef? I don’t ever have beef at home and can’t imagine paying for the most over-processed, tasteless meat in America. When a food is an entire agribusiness, you can be sure the taste was leeched out somewhere in that process. The prices at these places are astronomical, and they they want you to pay extra for calorie laden sides.
Then there are the chains. Not quite as bad as Applebees, but getting there. Every meal on these menus seems to start at twenty dollars for huge portions of sweet/salty badness. Not to mention the deep fried appetizer, the syrupy sweet chocolate dessert, and expensive low grade alcohol. Save me from it all.
As you know from reading this blog, I’ve recently lost a lot of weight. I’m now down to a svelte 138 (and falling). This means I’m only allotted a certain number of calories per day. The less food you can eat, the pickier you get about what goes into your mouth. The last thing I want is to be sweating it out on the treadmill over someone else’s poor food choices.
Perhaps, France ruined me, but I’d like smaller portions of good food, please. And if that means I have to eat alone, then so be it.
