Tess

I completely respect a restaurant that runs out of stuff. Something like a seafood restaurant that never runs out of any kind of fish and shellfish is really scary to me. If you run out it means you're working with what's available in good quality and you're not risking wasting a lot as you would be if you had enough stuff to never run out. I was only in food service for one summer and don't recall much about it, but these dumb questions people ask remind me of when I owned a small business (and remind me not to do that again any time soon).

I liked tuna seared and raw, and I don't mind it cooked, although I agree that if it's high grade it's a waste to cook it. One thing that does bug me about the searing craze is that it leads to some places serving "seared" tuna that's left on too long so that it's fully cooked in the outer two thirds and raw on the inside. Not like cooked tuna with pink in the middle (which would be OK), but something striped so that it looks like a piece of bacon and is partly fully cooked and partly raw. The cooked part tastes very blah and it's a weird combination of tastes and textures. At this point, I never order fish seared unless I am absolutely sure the place means it when they say "seared."

That strikes me as being just about exactly right!

And that's a co-worker, not a customer. A customer has every reason to take that question at face value. I'm in the middle on this issue. Personally, I don't complain unless food is uncooked or burned or clearly different from the way it was described on the menu, i.e. unless it seems like there was really some kind of mistake. If a dish I liked seemed to be different all of a sudden, I might ask, "Have you changed the way you make this?" as a matter of interest, not as a complaint. (I want to know if I should order it again.) But I don't get what seems to be the idea that because chefs are professionals and their job is challenging, they shouldn't be questioned. What professional in this world has a job where his or her work is never under scrutiny from customers? And, yes, you do know more about your field than the average customer, but the customer is paying you. You're not in the business as a favor to the customer.

I don't think the original poster suggested anything about malicious intent. Didn't she say she understood the hostess was trying to please her but it didn't work out? I think she was pretty careful to spell out that this was her personal reaction.

markk, I had a somewhat similar experience in a London restaurant. I felt it was mainly a matter of miscommunication in our case. Someone in our party said something like, "Is this meat usually so well-done?" It was a matter of the dish not seeming as it was described on the menu, and it was a question, not a complaint. The response seemed to escalate very fast, with three different people coming out to argue with us, saying things like, "No one's complained about this dish before." As soon as we saw how upset this was making them, we tried to say "Never mind, it's not a problem," but it was too late and it was just a bad scene. In my opinion, they were horrified by the idea not just of complaints but even of questions.

I agree with you that anonymity or not isn't especially relevant in this case. I know where they get the idea, though. Sites like Amazon have had a lot of problems with people using anonymity to shill or to stack negative reviews against someone. I think usually the anonymous hatchet jobs have a certain obvious tone to them and are often the work of hit-and-split posters using throwaway names. I don't think that applies here at all, but people are understandably touchy about it.

I'm guessing from your spelling that you're based in UK. This is not a value judgment, just a comparison. I live (like the original poster, I think) in the US and have traveled in UK. My impression is that over there, it is somewhat more common for customer complaints to be met with some sort of response or rebuttal from a chef, manager or whatever. It may also be a little less expected for customers to complain; I'm not sure. In the US, the chef's behavior as described by the poster is considered fairly unusual, I think.

Thank you, Ronnie. That's always my boyfriend's first question about a place. He'll be reassured.

About how casually can you dress in there on a weeknight?

One of the best things I've seen done with skate was at a restaurant (Retro Bistro in the Chicago suburbs) where they breaded it with black rice flour and fried it. The coating was incredibly crispy. The fish also looks nice with the black coating. Skate does seem to be an ideal thing to cook in lots of butter, but I've also found you can cook it with minimal oil, lemon juice and capers and it's still very tasty.

Cool! I'll do that from now on. Thanks!

Thanks for the explanation. Whenever I see it in the stores, it is all trimmed and skinned. For what it's worth, I always seem to manage to flatten it out using the spatula without too much trouble and plate it looking normal. However, I only cook one piece at a time and I can't imagine trying to flatten out a number of them at once.

Edited to add: Now, how did I manage to bump such an old thread? Sorry, everyone. It surprises me that anyone would see that as a problem. Quite a few typical kids' meals in the US are meatless and probably have less protein than what I see in that picture. Peanut butter and jelly, anyone? Grilled cheese and tomato soup? I too was vegetarian for about 10 years, starting in high school, with breaks for living with a foreign family and that sort of thing. Some experience made me react against the idea of eating meat, but it was never really a well-developed moral or ecological concept with me and if I was at someone's home I would just suck it up, so to speak. Both my sisters and a lot of my friends have been largely vegetarian for a long time and I've never seen any of them act like a jackass about it. I certainly feel as if I see meatless meals around all over the place, especially lunches. I do notice a lack of meatless meals for dinner at good restaurants. Although not a vegetarian ny more, especially when I go out, I do tend to reflexively check and it's amazing how few and repetitive the offerings are.

My boyfriend left a copy of the review on my desk this morning, which presumably means he wants to go now. (He has to be dragged kicking and screaming anywhere new, and then wants to go once a week until I'm sick of it. He probably though the name meant it was vegetarian.) I'll be interested to see how the menu changes for summer.

I like Hawaiian potato chips-- especially Maui onion flavor-- but I only seem to buy them when I'm in Hawaii. On the mainland I almost always go for Terra chips (or sticks) of some kind. I recently got some onion-parmesan ones which turned out to be lower-fat but were still very good.

One thing I've found really useful is to press slices of tofu before marinating them. I just put them between two plates and weigh the top plate down with some cans. Putting a clean dish towel between the tofu and the lower plate helps extract some water. Marinating is definitely good. I recently used some miso-sake-mirin marinade, the type you use for fish, and pan-fried it. It got a very nice glaze on it.

Same thing happens to me no matter what the stuff is coated with. I don't know why. I might suspect that the heat was too high, but it always seems to be cooked just about right. Maybe it's the different-length fibers shrinking- although there doesn't seem to me to be that much shrinkage. Anyway, I've found that if I press down on it gently with the spatula I can straighten it out and get it to come out flat. We were just talking about skate on another thread, and someone suggested doing a breaded "oven-fried" version. I'll have to see if it curls up in the oven too.

I'd like to see more Russian and (especially) Polish food in Chicago, including on an upscale level or at least Lettuce Entertain You level. Not going to happen, though, I don't think.

When we serve pigs in blankets, cheese puffs and other retro hors d'oeuvres, the get snapped up fast.

Desserts you soak in booze and set on fire. Crepes Suzette, cherries jubilee. Baked Alaska.

One of my grandmothers was a great cook. The other one, I didn't see cooking that often but whenever I did it was scary. I remember her trying to get a toaster pastry out of the toaster by sticking a fork in while the thing was still plugged in. Another early memory was of her making stuffed potatoes by baking potatoes, scooping them out and throwing the scooped-out part away, and then filling the skins with mashed potatoes out of a box. She also happened to have a way of talking about unappetizing subjects (I'll spare everyone exact descriptions) during meals, thus making it difficult to eat even decent food. My father picked that habit-- along with bad cooking-- up from her. I've heard people say "Please don't talk about that while I'm eating!" to him. He always looks kind of puzzled, like, "People don't want to hear about [fill in the most disgusting thing you can think of] over dinner?" My father's cooking-- blech. This was a person who would serve milk that had gone off, chicken that was bloody and eggs that were rotten, and not seem to have the faintest idea anything was wrong. My mother was a decent cook, nothing memorable until about the time we left home and she got into cooking as a hobby, but no horror stories either.

you could sprinkle it on poke, it gives it a nice crunch! ← Just bumping this thread to say that my boyfriend returned from Hawaii the other day with a couple of pounds of the alaea salt and some herb-spice mixtures with alaea and sea salt, from Classic Hawaiian Kitchen and Island Import Co. Got them all in supermarkets. I don't usually bother with proprietary salt-spice mixtures but these are pretty tasty, and striking in appearance. I put some on plain broiled fish and really liked it. The pink salt is lovely and we will certainly be having it on poke and with onions, as well as cucumbers and other salad-y things. All this stuff is inexpensive and definitely worth picking up when you see it.

Did they ever make sherbet? I seem to remember being given some H-D raspberry sherbet (not sorbet) and thinking it was amazing. Chocolate is my favorite, I think. For some reason, I like the dulce de leche frozen yogurt better than the same flavor in ice cream. I really like those sorbet bars too.

I've been thinking about this. For me, yes, even with vodka, in a sense. That is, I don't care for drinks that taste like soft drinks or slush concealing alcohol. Why not just have the soft drink, unless you don't like alcohol but you're trying to get a buzz on? It's not so much that the flavor of the vodka should predominate as that the drink should taste alcoholic and the alcohol should interact with (or potentiate) the flavor of the rest of the drink. The last vodka drink I made was vodka and Meyer lemon juice in a glass topped up with soda. You would not have mistaken that drink for plain lemonade. Again, this is my personal taste.