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Food Bloggers Giving Restaurant Owners Heartburn
crimeandpunishment writes "Call it the invasion of the pasta paparazzi. Food bloggers are so excited about sharing their experiences, especially at trendy, popular restaurants, that they're too busy taking pictures and video to enjoy the food when it's at its best. Many signature dishes come out at the perfect temperature ... take a few minutes to capture what it looks like, and your palate won't be nearly as pleased. Some restaurants have taken the step of banning cameras, or at least have established a 'no flash' rule. Others just want to make sure enthusiastic reviewers are still enthused after eating their food."
Actually how it looks is just as important as taste and smell. When you eat a meal, the first part of your body that perceives the meal is your eyes. Most people will not eat food that looks unappetizing. Next is your nose (which strongly correlates with your taste buds). Many more people will not eat food that smells unappetizing. Only then does taste play a role. Almost no one will eat food that tastes unappetizing.
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Perhaps the real problem is that all the flash lights disturb the other guests in the restaurant.
Take the diner who recently ordered a signature dish, Hot Potato-Cold Potato, in which a marble-sized sphere of piping hot Yukon Gold is dropped into a bowl of 40-degree potato soup at the pull of a pin. Eating it at the proper temperature is key to the experience.
Desserts with something fresh out of the oven and ice cream on top are similar- wait even 5 minutes and the melting ice cream hurts the taste and texture noticeably. Now, if they were talking about typical dishes without built-in temperature differences, I might agree with you.
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...a few minutes? What is this, the 1840's?
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Even if they did, they are expected to hold their taste long enough for them to be, you know, eaten?
Which, if you do it right, can take some time. Divide into bite-sized portions, not too big, convey to mouth, chew *thoroughly*, then and only then swallow. Then take a sip of your drink, probably engage in conversation for a minute, before repeating.
If taking a minute at the beginning of the meal to take pictures degrades the taste, then the taste will be degraded horribly by the time the diner finishes the plate. And people who take a moment to close their eyes and thank $deity for their food would be ruining it too. It's a bunch of nonsense.
Flash photography can be distracting and annoying, however.
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Many signature dishes come out at the perfect temperature
No they don't. Get over yourselves.
You sir, obviously haven't experienced the finer art of cooking. Last week I made a lasagna that needed to be served at the perfect temperature in order to be optimally satisfying. It needed to be so hot that it would scorch the taste buds right off of your tongue, or else you would be unable to stand the taste.
DE-LI-CIOUS! Hmmm. Nothing beats homemade cooking.
No, the point of food is to maintain health and strength. Whether you enjoy eating it is secondary to that.
I don't know about anyone else, but when I have to wait at a restaurant to get seated and then wait for food, the only thing on my mind when that food appears is eating it. Sure I'll talk about how good it tastes and how great it looks, but that's gonna happen while eating it. I'm not going to go "Sweet! That's EXACTLY what I wanted and I'm starving, oh it smells so good I'm just going to whip out my iPhone and start blogging about it." No, I'm hungry gosh darn it, GET IN MY BELLY!
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I always though geeks were into cooking? First impressions matter. The first bite cements a flavor memory, that sticks with you as your food cools. Miss the window of opportunity and a great dish just becomes good or even meh. This is also why good food is generally served in small portions. Its like your first sip of coffee in the morning, if you waited tell it was cold or left it in the pot to burn you might just spit it out. But if you had a few drinks before waiting tell its past its prime you might just finish off that last gulp or two without any problem. Same thing.
Most people will not eat food that looks unappetizing.
Obviously you're not from Rochester, NY. Our best known local dish not only looks ugly, but it has an ugly name as well. Then again, Nick Tahou's makes some delicious Garbage Plates.
There's food the basic resource, and food the product of the art of cooking. If you are going out to a restaurant, you are paying for the latter kind of food. In developed countries, your definition rarely applies, as shown by many people choosing food for taste and ignoring the health part.
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And the incessant whining from RMS about restaurants that don't publish their recipes.
Somehow I think the hunter gatherers would prefer the big macs too.
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To be honest, I keep flirting with taking a contrarian position, and insisting that people should stop worrying about whether food tastes good, much less whether it looks good. There seem to be so many problems with people eating unhealthy food, or eating too much food, and wasting food, and so on, that I sometimes wish people would just take a utilitarian attitude towards food.
I have no sense of smell, you insensitive clod! *
*That's not a joke.
While on one of my long distance hikes, I would occasionally pass a country store and purchase a 24 oz can of a never before heard of brand of beef stew. I would pour this into my pot, add a cup of minute rice and some beef bouillon and top with a cup of water. Heated, this made a quart and a half of murky grayish brown gruel. It was a real treat and the pot was licked clean.
At home, I can not even look at a plate of this concoction, much less eat it.
Nothing like the ambiance of the mountains, day after day of dehydrated crud for food to make anything different a tasty feast fit for the gods.
Obviously. First, a good restaurant chef will time things so that they get done as close to each other as possible. Second, some of the dishes will come off of the stove or out of the oven a bit hotter than the perfect temperature and need a minute or two to cool down; generally, those are plated first, so that by the time everything else is done, they're Just Right.
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Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but whipping out your camera at a nice restaurant seems decidedly tacky. Flashes could also disturb fellow diners.
If taking a minute at the beginning of the meal to take pictures degrades the taste, then the taste will be degraded horribly by the time the diner finishes the plate.
The thing is, in restaurants expensive enough to be visited by people who review food, you barely get more than a few bites worth of food on your plate to start with.
Food bloggers are simply braggarts. "Look at me and the wonderful food I'm enjoying! Aren't I just precious?" This is the sub-text of almost every food blog. It's even more obnoxious than disturbing the fellow diners.
You are obviously someone who has never had a good meal in his life.
Where is this epicurean desert that you live in that I can avoid it?
Given the choice between some good labor intensive peasant food (I'm Polish) and "utilitarian food," I'm going to be loading the plate up with some pierogis thanks.
Saying that eating should only be for nutrition is like saying sex should only be for reproduction. I reject your outlook. It is without enjoyment. It is spartan for the sole reason of utility. It is a dour, rainy day in late November.
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I dunno. Healthy foods can taste *really* good, and look good too, with their vibrant colors. Unhealthy food only really tastes comfortable, and of course there's the slight bump from the fats and sugars that were once scanty in our pre-civilization diet.
It's also more expensive, though, which I think is the real problem. An overdone ground-beef patty, mayonnaise, some wilty lettuce and a slice of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils with some fat-soaked potato slices and tomato & corn syrup preserves on the side is not only cheap to produce, but the ingredients store well for long periods unrefrigerated.
I'm not convinced "taxing it" is the answer either, as then this comfortable, unhealthy mix will be unavailable to the poor, but they won't magically be able to afford healthy food as a result...
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Look, if you think $12 a plate (e.g. Applebees) is high end, you're not going to the kind of restaurant where timing is critical (although applebees does still make an attempt to come out at the same time...). Not coincidentally, you're also not going to the kind of restaurant where people would consider taking a picture of the food.
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I have no sense of smell, you insensitive clod! *
*That's not a joke.
Why is this modded "Troll"? I know someone with no sense of smell, and it seems to be a minor handicap.
I've also met far too many people with no sense of taste!
Have you ever been to the middle or far east? There's a whole lot of amazingly delicious foods that look, and sometimes smell, roughly like someone has already eaten them.
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Nothing like the ambiance of the mountains, day after day of dehydrated crud for food to make anything different a tasty feast fit for the gods.
The taste of food is intrinsically linked to how much your body needs it. And it even goes down in more detail as to what kind of food your body needs. It is fascinating really. Especially how quickly the taste adepts once you get the needed mineral/vitamin into your system.
Without a sense of smell, you hardly taste anything... including if something is or might be poisonous, either because of its nature, or because its spoiled. You can't smell smoke, which is an early indicator of fire, and you can't smell a gas leak. Smell is pretty friggin' important to actual survival, so I'm not sure I'd classify it as minor.
Here was I thinking it was because they fear nobody's going to go to a restaurant serving a tiny portion size. The more the cook fancies himself as a great chef, the less you'll get on your plate.
Middle class worry if it's tasty.
Poor people worry if there is enough.
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Serious Foods: RE: Resting a Steak
Presented to you is actual photographic evidence for the reason for "resting a steak".
Now, to point, if you rest a steak and the person gets it cold, then they fucked up. Using the argument of "resting a steak" is not a proper reason for a cold steak.
Rather the myth should be that resting a steak means letting it go cold. This later one would be the mark of a bad chef.
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