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After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

nytimes.com

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Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#21

Post by m463 »

polar8 wrote: post #19
UIUC_06 wrote: post #6

Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/ I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never…

...but you could just get a suana and use it 4-7 days a week for 20 min > 174 F, which reduces risk of all-cause mortality 66% and come out 17% ahead! :)

I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food.

In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish.

But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are paid to make things tasty - with salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. And then with more of those.

(also, I wonder how restaurant review eating compares to supersize me)

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#22

Post by dredmorbius »

polar8 wrote: post #19
UIUC_06 wrote: post #6

Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/ I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never…

Does that control at all for type of restaurant, both by market segment (e.g., fast food vs. sit-down fine dining), and by cuisine (e.g., "American" or "steakhouse" vs. various ethnic or vegetarian menus)?

Because I could see a lot of variability amongst those. And without controls, the study will default strongly toward fast-food, doughnut shops, pizza, burger / franks stands, and the like. Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004).

I find some restaurant meals strike me as far better than others. Taquerias, Thai and Vietnamese food, better vegetarian restaurants (say, Greens in SF), for example. Specific choices such as sides, beverages, alcohol, and whether or not the restaurant permits smoking (some parts of the US still allow this barbaric practice) would likely be huge confounding factors.

I'm not discounting home-cooked meals, and generally far prefer them myself. But overly-broad, undifferentiated analysis is ... not especially illuminating.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#23

Post by fuzztester »

m463 wrote: post #21
polar8 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/ I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never…

...but you could just get a suana and use it 4-7 days a week for 20 min > 174 F, which reduces risk of all-cause mortality 66% and come out 17% ahead! :) I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food. In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish. But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are pai…

>salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil.

there is a famous cooking book with a name close to that. ;)

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#25

Post by fuzztester »

matwood wrote: post #18
paulpauper wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why eating out is so bad if you're on a diet. Too much oil and fat, sugar, salt, fat, and other stuff

I disagree. If we're talking about restaurants and not fast food, it's portion size that's typically the issue in the US. Oddly enough, the higher end restaurants start to move in the other direction and shrink portion sizes.

>I disagree. If we're talking about restaurants and not fast food, it's portion size that's typically the issue in the US.

i think you are right.

i have always seen big portion sizes in restaurants when i have gone to the US.

also, very recently, i saw a youtube video in which a french person says the same thing. they said that even though the French eat a lot of fat, their overall portion sizes are smaller than those of the US. so overall, they end up eating less calories than US people.

also the French tend to walk a lot, while the US people tend to drive a lot.

it's a generalization, i know.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#26

Post by m463 »

fuzztester wrote: post #23
m463 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but you could just get a suana and use it 4-7 days a week for 20 min > 174 F, which reduces risk of all-cause mortality 66% and come out 17% ahead! :) I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food. In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish. But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are pai…

>salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. there is a famous cooking book with a name close to that. ;)

add chocolate and get the perfect click ^H^H^H^H cookbait.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#27

Post by Larrikin »

polar8 wrote: post #19
UIUC_06 wrote: post #6

Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/ I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never…

There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home.

You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and that's just talking about average restaurants. You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.

Sure eating a fast food burger and fries everyday will be heavy, but even something that simple can be difficult to match compared to the restaurant. Grinding your own meat, double frying the fries, finding/making decent buns, etc.

Food is one of the few activities that can be very enjoyable daily. It's usually cost saving to cook yourself and there's a lot of good stuff you can make at home. But you're missing out on some enjoyable experiences by completely avoiding professionals using professional equipment with access to better ingredients.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#28

Post by BariumBlue »

shalmanese wrote: post #3

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure

This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#29

Post by dyauspitr »

shalmanese wrote: post #3

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

I can’t imagine how it could in any way be the worst job.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#30

Post by mythrwy »

shalmanese wrote: post #3

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

Not sure I agree that this is a trivial question.

Very few things in life are as important as burritos in my view.

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