My husband and I have been going to restaurants together since we started dating — approximately seven years ago. Because that’s what you do with humans you like spending time with: You eat out at restaurants and treat yourselves to steaks and veggie burgers and nachos and lo mein and maybe even adult beverages if that’s the kind of mood you’re in, and you enjoy each other’s company. (Or maybe you are much, much more fiscally responsible than I am and you cook at home, and if that’s the case, I salute you; you’re going to be a millionaire much sooner than I am.)
But. Going to restaurants with family and friends versus going out to eat with my lovely husband are two very different experiences.
When you go out with your parents, or your BFF, or even a co-worker, they might scrutinize the food they ordered. They might send back their salad because the arugula seems, ugh, I don’t know, flaccid. They might be like, “This avocado toast is just OK, but I kind of want my $16 back, you know?” But the level of scrutiny from friends and family does not match the level of scrutiny from a professional chef who is, by nature, a food snob.
Going out to eat with a professional chef you may or may not be married to is the worst. It’s not the experience that’s ruined — but the food. Sorry, husband, if you’re reading this. I still love you.
For 20+ years, my husband has cooked food on a monstrous scale. He’s been behind the scenes. He knows the secrets of cooks that we regular restaurant go-ers do not know. He has ordered millions of dollars worth of food for millions of hungry people. He is on first-name bases with the people who deliver produce in big cardboard boxes you normally only see when you buy a refrigerator, and part of his many jobs has been to inspect the food that’s delivered to make sure it’s fresh and doesn’t look like crap before it gets cooked.
Whatever, you get it: He knows food. It’s what he gets paid to know.
So when we go out to eat at a restaurant, he can spot imperfections and shortcuts gone wrong, and it’s annoying sometimes, but the intel is also useful. If you’re still reading this, then I assume you wanna know it, too. Let’s begin with the many ways going out to eat has been destroyed forever for me (and now you, sorry about that).
1. I now know when French fries are actually homemade.
“Homemade” is such a loosey-goosey term thrown around in the food and bev world. If something is ACTUALLY homemade, the cook has truly created the type of food from scratch, not using (or barely using) anything pre-made.
Judging by just the shape of fries, my husband will know if they were made in-house or not.
If the fries are, they’re usually unevenly shaped and don’t look like a machine sliced them. For me, fries are fries, and they are delicious, and I will stuff my face with all the fries, regardless of where they came from. But now ya know the truth.
2. In fact, he knows whether the store-bought French fries are cheap, or if the restaurant splurged for the “good” kind. This goes for onion rings, too.
Cheap onion rings are battered versus the pricier ones, which are breaded.
3. When your burger patty is almost flower-shaped, as in, it has small, scalloped edges, it’s pre-made. Same with if the patty is perfectly round and flat, as though…a machine…flattened…it.
4. He’ll know if fish is fresh or frozen. And no, most places won’t admit their fish comes in frozen.
Usually frozen fish is uniform in size and more watery. It usually tastes the same as fresh, so *shrug*.
5. I’ve learned that you don’t order the special if it involves seafood.
Specials is (generally) code for “we have a ton of stuff left over from our last order, and we don’t want to waste food, so we came up with an entree or two that utilize these on-the-cusp-of-going-bad ingredients.”
Which is usually fine for most food — except maybe not seafood.
Technically, the fish is OK to eat. But it’s on its last legs (fins?). It has maybe one more day until it could be poison and give you a tummy ache. It’s also not fresh by that point — it’s been frozen. So, hey, it’s your life. I’m just sayin’.
6. And that you don’t order seafood on a Monday. No. Fish. On. A. Monday. Remember that.
The next order doesn’t come in until later on Monday, so don’t count on having fresh fish that day — it’s the same fish they had delivered on Friday.
7. He’ll suss out whether a sauce is pre-made in like one second.
I don’t know how, but he can tell when a sauce isn’t made from scratch.
8. Or whether your mac ‘n cheese, French onion soup, or lasagna has been hanging out in the freezer for awhile before getting baked, or worse, re-heated.
And this is something I actually learned while serving for a few years in college.
A lot of plates are actually made way ahead of time, because making dishes like mac ‘n cheese in bulk is the only way to feed people en masse.
Only thing is that if the dish is too old, or if it’s already been heated, the cheese starts to break.
9. This is gross: I now know whether the restaurant has switched out their soda machine nozzles recently.
If your soda tastes weird, it could be because the nozzles haven’t been cleaned (when I worked at Panera in high school, we had to send them through the dishwasher *every* night).
Not cleaning soda nozzles daily = bacterial growth!
This can also get you sick, so be careful out there, fam.
10. Or whether they’re switching out their ice. Off-tasting soda = old ass ice.
Same idea. A restaurant or hotel or wherever that has an ice machine should be cleaning out their ice.
Otherwise you’ll get gross ice that does not taste like ice.
Ideally, you don’t want your ice to taste like anything, right?
12. This might be due to his own preference, but he’ll know whether a restaurant’s ketchup is Heinz or generic in .5 seconds.
13. Even if the coffee tastes okay, he knows whether it’s fresh or not.
Watch the coffee as you pour your milk/creamer in.
Does it swirl?
Or does the coffee just immediately turn a lighter color of brown? You’ll know what I mean.
14. Store bought desserts? He can detect the difference just on first glance.
New York-style cheesecake and tiramisu from a cafe that doesn’t specialize in dessert (or really have the capacity) is most likely not made in-house.
It’s ordered from a bakery or a food distribution company like Sysco.
15. Even SILVERWARE. He will know how much a restaurant has paid for it.
If you care about such things.
He did catering for awhile, so he knows all the prices for silverware, plates, tablecloths, table runners, etc.
16. I now know if my scrambled eggs were actually scrambled, or if the cook took a shortcut and cracked a bunch of eggs on a skillet and scrambled them already in the pan.
There’s a huge difference. When someone has cracked eggs into a bowl and whisked, you’ll get an even texture and color (light, light yellow, preferably fluffy).
When you crack eggs onto a pan and mix them around with a spatula, you get uneven eggs that have splotches of bright yellow from the yolk, and they just don’t have that je ne sais quoi, that consistency that a plate of good, scrambled eggs do.
Can you tell that I love scrambled eggs? I do.
17. Or even worse: Those eggs came in powder-form or pre-scrambled.
That’s gross and not common because, ew.
That’s worse than instant potatoes (he knows the difference between NICE instant potatoes because those generally will have bits of potato skin mixed in, and cheap instant potatoes, which are more bland and powder-y), IMO, because there’s actually something about instant potatoes I secretly like (don’t tell anyone, especially my hub).
