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Apparently I’m Really Out-of-Step On Restaurant Meals and Take-Out
The Wall Street Journal, in an article about restaurants increasing drive-through capabilities and reducing or even eliminating in-store dining capabilities (January 28, 2023, page B1), notes that in 2022, 85% of orders at fast food restaurants and 33% of orders at “full-service” restaurants were “to go” and not eaten on the premises.
85% of fast food orders to go? A third of orders at “full service” restaurants? Really? I was shocked at those numbers.
Mrs. Tabby and I find most restaurant food deteriorates quickly after it leaves the kitchen, and so we consider take-out (and delivery) food inferior to the same food eaten in the restaurant. If we’re going to eat a restaurant meal, we’re going to eat it in the restaurant. How do people find cooked food still enjoyable after it spends ten or fifteen minutes or more in transit? Especially fast food, much of which is fried.
Mrs. Tabby and I do not have sophisticated food tastes, and so the nuances of “fine dining” (linen tablecloths, exotic ingredients, fancy preparations, etc.) are lost on us. We prefer simple foods freshly prepared, which is reflected in our choice of restaurants for eating out once or twice a week.
In our favorite Mexican restaurant, no table is more than 50 feet from the kitchen, so everything arrives at our table fresh off the grill, hot, and at its tastiest. If I dawdle while eating my dinner, I notice the flavor dissipating as time goes on. Especially notable on his carne asada. I would be wasting the owner/cook’s efforts if I didn’t even start eating it until long after he cooked it.
We have two preferred hamburger joints. Two, because one has more options if we want a fancier burger, but the other does a better basic burger, and the two places prepare French fries quite distinct from each other (both excellent, but different). At both, we value that when we start to eat the burgers just a minute or two after they come off the grill, each layer (the meat, the lettuce leaves, the tomato slices, the toasted bun) has its distinct contribution to the sensory experience.
If we waited fifteen minutes to eat it (after a drive home or after a delivery trip), the sensory experience would be different. The lettuce and the tomato would be wilting under the heat from the meat. The meat would be lukewarm. The bun would be soggy. And French fries of any kind fifteen minutes after leaving the fryer are always a disappointment. I would assume a hamburger from the large chains would suffer similarly.
During the pandemic, my preferred chicken tenders fast food restaurant closed its dining room (one of the few large chain fast food places I use). I tried drive through take out a few times, but by the time I got home (ten minutes), both the chicken tenders and the French fries were limp, lacking the crisp tactile and taste satisfaction that would be present if I were biting into them just a minute or two after they emerged from the fryer. I have noticed, though, that Chick-fil-A fried products seem to travel slightly better than fried food from other fast-food chains.
We stopped patronizing one sit-down (“full service”) restaurant after they served Mrs. Tabby meals on a couple of occasions that tasted as though they had been sitting on a warming table for an extended time.
I just don’t understand the craze for near-universal take-out food and its drive-through service corollary.
Exceptions to my objections to take out are barbeque and some Chinese or Thai.
[Not the most earth-shattering topic for a rant, but these times when I discover how out-of-step I am with the culture at large cause me to take notes.]
Published in Culture
I think the COVID shutdown increased pathological social anxieties for a critical mass of people.
Social anxieties already on the rise with the pace of technological communication development.
Stay Home and cook. It’s even better.
I don’t think most fast food is good enough to be spoiled by take-out. I suspect a whole lot of people just want to get in and out, and that many chow down in their vehicles.
I agree about “ restaurant” meals though. I don’t understand spending a substantial amount of bucks to carry many dishes home or wait for delivery, with some exceptions. My impression is that this phenomenon skews younger.
While I’m at it, stop asking me to tip for carry-out. Tips are for dine-in, table service.
It might have something to do with the restaurants not being conducive to an “eat-in” experience — particularly at fast-food places — because of an unpleasant atmosphere, or the deliberate use of uncomfortable seating (in order to get people out the door more quickly).
They don’t build these places to be pleasant. More and more they feel like cafeterias. Open, crowded, noisy, . . . which is fine if you like that. But I don’t.
When I was stationed in the UK (~1990) the only known McDonalds was in London, about 90 minutes away. That included a train ride.
Young GIs would spend a day in London and make McDonalds their last stop. They would have a list of requests which they would order “to go” and carry back to base. Yuck.
I went to a restaurant last week. They have shelving units by the door. Uber and Grub services were continuously picking up orders for delivery. It was distracting. I agree that most food degrades too quickly to be takeout.
Here in Northern VA, every restaurant I go to has a busy traffic in food-runners. I can easily see those numbers being higher than the dine-in numbers. Nice places, too, not just the dives.
Not fond of carry-out. Even less fond of eating in the car, which a lot of very busy people do have to do.
There’s a Don Pollo restaurant in the area that I’m fond of. You order at counter & they bring it to the table. Very friendly people. Sometimes a TV is on, but volumes are reasonable & programming is in Spanish, so it’s not as distracting as I’d find it in English, especially an English news channel.
There’s another Don Pollo which is closer to me: same menu, EXCEPT no coffee, and a much less-friendly vibe. I prefer to drive a couple more miles.
I see at Twitter a Silicon Valley venture capitalist says she’s improving her cooking skills so she can cook at home more…don’t think money is a concern, it’s probably more about the convenience / quality tradeoff.
I really don’t understand carry-out, or delivery, steak BTW.
On a slight tangent, I was at my first duty station, in Ohio, for about four months when I had to travel with my boss. When we broke for lunch on the first day of training, we went to a fast-food place close to base. We were given plenty of time to eat so I found it odd when my boss said his order was to go. I too ordered mine to go and was surprised to find him sitting down and eating when my order was ready. I asked him what was going on and he said that Ohio taxed dine-in meals, but not to-go meals and he was used to always saying ‘to-go’. I don’t remember checking if that was true, but I suppose it could have been an odd tax law.
Mrs. Tabby does like to cook most of the time. Hence our going out only once or twice a week (we know a number of people who eat out most days of the week). But she does get tired of thinking up menu items (even for just the two of us) seven days a week. That she does cook most of the time is probably why we developed the strong preference for freshly prepared and served food that goes from stove or oven to table in a minute.
Great, now the “gas stoves are dangerous” crowd has a piece of evidence. :)
I wouldn’t let them have electricity either.
Steak Tartare and salads for the proglodytes.
Some people find it embarrassing to eat in a restaurant alone and they don’t want to cook for just themselves.
So possibly what’s really being displayed here is that we have an increasing number of lonely, single people who can’t cook?
That, plus I suspect there are increasing numbers of families in which neither parent can cook, or at least does not have the time and inclination to cook.
I’m really out of touch with restaurant stuff because the only time I go to a restaurant is to pick up the 17 year old from her restaurant job.
Going to restaurants is just too expensive — especially adding tips. I’m never entirely satisfied with the offerings, and I’m usually disappointed with whatever I end up ordering.
I would rather make my own food and eat at home.
But why solve either issue by eating inferior food? Especially for the family, eat in the restaurant while the food is fresh. For the single person most modern supermarkets have excellent pre-made meals that a person can just stick in the oven for a bit.
Do you remember the McDLT? That was a good idea, I suppose it fell victim to the left’s great need to eliminate styrofoam packaging.
There was a product advertised on TV in the past, called the Rocket Grill as I recall, that actually did cook steaks that way. i.e., vertically. But it was a special kind of “toaster,” and you put the meat into single-use fat-collecting pouches first. It actually worked quite well.
And my brother swears by his George Foreman grill, for steaks as well as pork chops, etc.
Aside from restaurants having dining areas closed during the recent insanity, the main reason a lot of people order home delivery is probably that they can’t bear to be away from TikTok, Twitter, etc, long enough for a proper meal.
Doubt that’s it, as I’ve often seen couples/families sitting at a restaurant table silently, each starting at their own phones.
Some people still use actual computers, especially for creating and posting things like videos, and it’s much harder to bring one of those into a restaurant.
Also, if you stay home and order food, you don’t even have to put on clothes.
So many of the explanations seem to be pointing to a lack of sociability and, with it, a loss of social skills. That’s not good for the people or for our thinly veiled civilization.
I’ve often been away from home, alone, usually for conferences, and still ate in restaurants, really good restaurants. I’d go on the earlier side, bring a book, chat up the waiter/host/owner and have a delightful meal. Then I’d walk back to my hotel or B&B. Now if I’m alone in a restaurant, I read via Kindle on my phone. I’ve had some really, really good meals that way. I’ve gotten a fair number of complimentary glasses of wine that way, too, come to think of it.
I’m totally with you, FST, food needs to be eaten freshly prepared and hot. Good food. At home or in a restaurant.
I suspect it depends in part how often you eat out. When I was working in downtown San Francisco, I never took a bag lunch to the office, and we didn’t have a cafeteria, though we did have a dining area. I would go out at lunchtime and order something from one of the many downtown restaurants that cater to the lunch crowd, often tiny little storefronts with a line out the door and hardly anywhere to sit if you did want to eat in, then take it back to the office to eat with my colleagues.
In the evening I’d take the BART train home, nearly an hour commute door-to-door, often arriving home quite late. At that point I don’t want to wait around to heat something up in the oven, let alone cook a whole meal for myself, from scratch. Sometimes I would stop and eat in a restaurant, but sometimes after a long day you just want to get home and unwind for a while so take-out becomes an appealing option, especially when you walk right by a dozen restaurants on the way home.
As a cultural marker, it’s worth noting how frequently The Big Bang Theory depicted the main characters sitting on the couch in the living room eating take-out food.
I like to order things that are too much trouble to make at home or things I’d like to try to make at home. Here’s what I had last time I ate out alone:
Chestnuts, mushrooms, garlic confit and truffle oil in cream sauce and parmesan.
It was extraordinary. With a lovely Pinot Grigio. In Jerusalem, at a place called Pompidou.
EDIT: Not my photo–I don’t do that. It’s from the restaurant website.
There’s that too. But they also went to that Chinese place maybe once a week, etc. Also they showed them making stuff at home, including croissants, French toast, mac & cheese…
FIFY. Sheldon is nothing if not a creature of habit.