Restaurant kitchens are organized chaos, even when they seem calm and serene in the dining
room.
They just do a good job of hiding it.
From shocking markups to saliva-covered foods, you might be surprised to discover what lurks
behind those kitchen doors away from diners' peering eyes.
Did you know that restaurants use menu design to influence your dining choices?
It's laid out so that you might be swayed to order the most expensive items available.
Everything from the colors used to the font sizes affect how your brain perceives the
information you're seeing.
Some chefs purposefully use a smaller font size for the prices, remove the dollar signs,
or keep the numbers from lining up in a neat line to take the emphasis away from the cost.
Even where the items are located on the menu can affect how likely you are to order them.
Restaurant Engine explains that most people's eyes follow something called the Golden Triangle:
They first look to the middle of the menu before traveling to the upper right and upper
left corners.
Restaurants often put their most profitable items in these sections and hope to hook diners
with delicious-sounding descriptions before they see the rest.
They also use something called a decoy: A profitable menu item that's placed right next
to a very expensive menu item.
You might not order the $100 Wagyu steak, but you could be enticed by the great-by-comparison
$60 ribeye steak "deal" right next to it.
When you visit a fine dining restaurant, one of the first things the server asks you is
if you want to hear about today's specials.
Some restaurants even write them up on the chalkboard in front of the storefront, so
you'll know about today's concoction before you even walk in the door.
It sounds like a great way for a restaurant to keep customers from getting bored with
the regular menu, right?
"Today's specials are the cuttlefish--"
"Let me stop you right there, sweetheart."
It's true that some chefs use specials as a way to make use of seasonal or rare ingredients,
and, according to Food Network, some specials are experiments to see if the dish is popular
enough for the regular menu.
But many restaurants use specials as a way to use up surplus ingredients that may be
close to expiring.
Restaurant critic Andrew Knowlton told Dr. Oz that seeing an item on the regular menu
and also spotting it on the specials list is a red flag.
The chef likely ordered too much of that ingredient, and the restaurant is hoping to push through
it before it goes bad.
It's more common than you'd think for diners to order the second-cheapest bottle on the
wine list.
Atlas Obscura describes this as a phenomenon where people don't want to seem cheap, so
they go one step up from the least expensive wine on offer.
Restaurant owners and bar managers have taken note of these buying habits, and they've started
to price their wines accordingly.
The Independent revealed that the second-cheapest bottle often has the highest markup.
Sommelier Mark Oldman confirmed it, telling Business Insider that the second-cheapest
bottle of wine is often the worst value.
So you're better off forgetting about the mind games, sucking up your pride, and just
ordering the cheapest bottle or asking your server for their recommendation.
"I'm going to be direct and honest with you.
I would like a glass of red wine, and I'll take the cheapest one you have because I can't
tell the difference."
Or maybe you should just get a beer, because the wine list features some of the steepest
markups on the menu.
Many of the less-expensive wines on the list are priced at five or six times their retail
price, and even the higher-priced wines can be doubled in price.
And if you really want to get ripped off, reach for the reserve wine list.
Former MasterChef judge Joe Bastianich told the Wall Street Journal that these lists contain
particularly bad deals.
Restaurant owners know that wealthy diners seek out exclusive features, so they create
a list of so-called special wines to trick them into believing they're receiving an exclusive
offering, with a price to match.
In 2001, Anthony Bourdain appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and spilled the beans about
how much butter goes into everything at a restaurant.
"It is usually the first thing and the last thing in just about every pan."
According to what Bourdain told Oprah, it makes the food taste better, mellows out sauces,
and gives food a classic sheen and consistency.
By the time you leave a classic French restaurant, you might have consumed a stick of butter
or even more.
And if you're looking to raise your blood pressure even higher, restaurant food is filled
with tons of salt, too.
A study published in Appetite asked diners to reveal how much salt they thought was in
their restaurant meal.
The average guess was six times too low.
Using salt enhances the flavor of normally bland food, including pasta, mashed potatoes,
and soup.
The sodium rises even faster when a restaurant uses salt-preserved foods like salami and
smoked salmon.
Even salad dressings can be pumped full of salt, so if you want a healthy salad, skip
it.
Bad news for germaphobes: Restaurant food has likely been touched several times before
it makes its way to your dinner table.
Metal utensils and tongs can damage delicate foods, and others believe that cooking with
your hands creates a closer connection between a chef and food.
And different states have different laws about gloves and food preparation.
Some require gloves be worn at all times, but most only require gloves with ready-to-eat
foods like salad greens, bread, or sliced tomatoes.
And it's not always better if the cooks were wearing gloves.
A 2004 study in Food Safety Magazine found that glove wearers fail to notice tears or
punctures in their gloves about 50 percent of the time.
On top of that, an article in the Journal of Food Protection revealed that glove use
may lead to worse hygiene.
Hand washing is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's recommended way of preventing the transmission
of pathogens, but gloves often provide a false sense of security, and wearers only wash their
hands 27 percent of the time.
"Even if you're not gonna soap up, at least pretend, for my benefit.
Turn the water on.
Do something!"
Cooking in a restaurant kitchen is like performing a delicate dance.
The chefs have to balance the cooking times of multiple items, all at once.
A well-done steak that takes 20 to 24 minutes might be paired with a steak that only takes
10 minutes to cook, or sauteed shrimp that finishes in only five minutes.
How do they get everything timed out properly?
One way is that many of the side dishes and sauces are prepared in advance and then reheated.
Many items such as pasta sauces, mashed potatoes, roasted vegetables, and soups, are made earlier
in the day.
Sometimes, this actually makes the food taste better because the flavors have had time to
meld.
Other times, the food is made off-site and shipped frozen to the restaurant.
Chain restaurants are famous for using this process, maintaining consistency by having
menu items that require little to no preparation.
Even some independent restaurants use frozen or jarred sauces or, say, pre-breaded chicken
cutlets to cut down on prep time.
A restaurant's menu descriptions are designed to elevate simple-sounding ingredients into
a restaurant-worthy meal.
Some menus go over the top, though, using phrases you might not recognize.
These fancy terms are intended to encourage diners to experience something new, and they
often work.
Some of these terms describe cooking methods.
For example, "en papillote" is a French term for cooking fish in parchment paper.
And "la plancha" is a Spanish way of describing food cooked on a griddle.
But don't be fooled by the fancy, often non-English phrases that describe ingredients.
Just because a dish contains "harissa aioli" doesn't mean it was made from scratch.
It's very likely that spread is nothing more than regular mayonnaise mixed with hot pepper
paste.
Other fancy sounding terms include au jus, which could just be store-bought beef broth.
And the Chantilly cream on your dessert could actually be Reddi-wip or Cool Whip.
If you hate pink meat, apologies in advance.
When you order a well-done steak, you probably don't get the same high-quality cut as the
person who orders theirs medium rare.
Here's why: As the meat cooks, the proteins begin to break down, not only changing the
color of the steak from red to brown to grey, but also releasing juices inside the steak
as the meat shrinks.
A steak that's cooked to a well-done temperature has released so many juices that it's dry
and tough.
So it's nearly impossible to tell that it was once a high-quality piece of meat.
On Reddit, restaurant cooks admit that they save certain steaks for well-done orders.
They may be cut thinner than the rest of the steaks or butterflied open for quicker cooking.
Or they may contain sinews that would be chewy at lower temperatures.
Either way, it's a waste of money to cook a nice steak to that level, and the cooks
aren't going to sacrifice it.
But you, the customer, pay the same for a well-done steak as a rare one.
When you're paying top-dollar for a fancy restaurant meal, you probably expect there
to be a culinary school-trained chef putting all the finishing touches on your dish.
But that's not usually the case.
In an interview with Woman's Day, the head chef of a New York City restaurant admitted
that she and most chefs aren't usually cooking on the line during dinner service.
The chef is there to teach the cooks, develop the recipes, and oversee the kitchen.
But they're not necessarily going to cook your steak.
The line cooks often don't go to culinary school.
Many worked their way up from being dishwashers or prep cooks.
In fact, the Washington Post reports that there is a shortage of good cooks in cities
like Chicago, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, among others.
Network shows create a glamorous view of what it is to be a restaurant chef, but the reality
is, it's long hours, hard work, and low pay in hot, cramped, sometimes dangerous working
conditions.
And that doesn't always attract culinary school graduates to line cook jobs.
They're looking for sous chef jobs or higher-paying positions so they can pay back their student
loan debt.
So many restaurants promote employees from within and train them to be cooks.
According to NPR, a 2015 survey revealed that 51 percent of food workers definitely go into
work when they're sick, and another 38 percent "sometimes" go into work when sick.
That's not good, especially considering that it can affect coworkers as well as the restaurant's
customers.
The most famous example of the consequences of working while sick was Chipotle's 2017
norovirus outbreak, which CNBC reported was due to a sick employee and the company's lax
sick leave policy.
While some restaurants are starting to provide better benefits for their employees, few offer
paid leave and health insurance.
So employees don't get paid for staying home and getting well, and many can't afford to
take time off if they're feeling under the weather.
And it's not just illness issues, either.
When the Food Network surveyed chefs across the country, they learned that more than half
of them claimed to have finished their shift even if they got seriously injured at work.
In his 1999 book, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bordain famously wrote,
"I never order fish on Monday."
A lot has changed since then, and Bourdain later retracted this statement, telling Tech
Insider in 2016 that,
"It's a better world...we have higher standards, we know more about food, we expect more of
our food."
But that doesn't mean that fish gets a pass.
You should still avoid it on certain days of the week.
According to the FDA, fresh fish, shrimp, scallops, crawfish, and squid are only good
in the refrigerator for one to two days.
If you're in a restaurant that isn't very busy or only has one or two seafood dishes
on offer, they might not receive daily seafood deliveries, and you may want to skip the fish
altogether.
Busier restaurants are more likely to receive frequent deliveries, but Wide Open Eats revealed
that most fish markets aren't open on Sunday.
That means restaurants can't usually get fresh fish that day.
"Every passenger on this plane who had fish for dinner will become violently ill in the
next half-hour."
Get the steak.
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