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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
But sometimes they had Chinese food at home, they didn’t go out to eat.
They might get take-out from the same restaurant they have sit-down meals at, but the point is, they don’t always go to the restaurant to eat.
See, for example, season 1, episode 17, “The Tangerine Factor.”
That’s still a thing in Ohio, or at least was last I noticed it and I’m usually up there a couple times a year. I grew up there so that way of taxation was the normal for me, but I can’t think of any other place I’ve been that does it like that. I believe the view was that dining in was more of a luxury than simply grabbing food and heading home with it, thus the differentiation.
In Italy the cafés give a discount if you order to-go. They’d get sniffy though if you ordered to-go and then ate in, as you’re claiming a perk you didn’t pay for.
On the taxation front, when I still lived in California a number of years ago, California changed its taxation rules so that some of the products at my favorite bakery became taxable as “restaurant food” while others remained tax-free as “groceries.” Which meant that the bakery had to figure out which was which. I remember idiotic details like, a Danish pastry or a cake was taxable while a cookie was not. Really annoyed the owners and staff.
I think you’ve hit on why people don’t eat in restaurants so much anymore. What’s to savor about ambiance, service, silverware and a table cloth if you’re not going to look at your spouse or your coworker or friends and just going to be staring at your iphone?
Some days I pray for an iPhone-destroying EMP.
If you can come up with one that targets only iPhones, I think you might get a lot of support.
Unless of course you’re going out to eat so you can take pictures and post them to your Instagram followers.
Eating in a restaurant counts as entertainment and thus is subject to the entertainment tax.
Watching a Cleveland Browns game is anything but entertaining. Browns fans should be getting a rebate.
I often think that an EMP would stop the passing booming car stereos and the late night outdoor karaoke singing, but then it would also stop the internet, the electric lights and home environmental controls.
Of course, doing away with all gas stoves would mean that a good EMP would also driving to restaurants and most home cooking, so there’s a downside to it as well.
Sometimes after photographing my meal I find I’m full.
Ooohhh, the Instagram Diet! You’ll be rich!
Unless it’s Chinese, then an hour later I’m ready to take another picture.
When that happens, sometimes I take a Chinese carry-out menu of of my drawer and look at the pictures and just pretend to call and order it.
We don’t get good pizza here. Most of it is actually bad. Even the Sbarro’s here doesn’t know how to make the cheese golden brown. There was rumor once that the Hilton made very good pizza, but they’re always rather expensive.
So just now my wife spent a half hour making a 20-inch thin-crust pizza with Betty Crocker pizza dough, covered in mozzarella, Romano, and asiago, with pepperoni and crumbled Johnson’s hot Italian sausage. cooked it in ten minutes. I figure it cost $10 to make (as opposed to like $30 at Pizza Hut) and took only as long to make as we’d have waited for carry-out. And it was really quite good, certainly better than anything we could have ordered.
But it was a learning process. She had to learn to make it greasy enough that the line of orange oil drips down to the elbow.
I’m noticing a recurring theme in these replies: why would anyone want to eat take-out, when you could just have your wife cook a delicious meal for you?
I do have a three bone rib roast in the refrigerator but there’s no point in cooking it so long as she’s making pizza.
But hang on. Isn’t Orange Oil Bad?
For a lot of people who work in a retail environment, eating lunch in a restaurant isn’t an option. You bring your lunch to work or you get something from a drive-through and bring it back to eat at work, because you need to be there in case someone needs help. In the last couple of years, a lot of fast food places don’t even have indoor dining because they cannot get enough employees to come to work.
No, that’s just leftist spin. It’s the best.
My mother in law is a great cook, however she was a bit territorial about “the Kitchen”. Thus neither of her daughters can cook very well. I did not mention it much after getting married, and we typically share the cooking duties since we both worked. When the children arrive many years later this arrangement was still in standard ops procedure, until…. one evening the six year old asked if daddy could do all of the cooking since “they” like it better. Mom quietly ask “who is they” and then the four year old pipes up and say yeah Daddy’s cooking is better.
Well from the mouth of babes, and thus is was ever since that I did/do 95% of the cooking of meals, and lately baking of bread (the only personal plus I even got from the WuFlu lockdown, I still have a starter going from March of 2020). Dining out, even with an empty nest, is only a once or twice a month event. It just doesn’t seem as good as what I prepare, and costly enough that I rather spend my shekels elsewhere.
I prefer take-out or delivery, because I have IBS and hate to cook. As far as quality is concerned, its no different from buffets or potlucks, and I tend to like those, as well. I also like to read or watch videos while I eat, though I agree that families shoot eat together around a table.
I bet Mom bribed ’em to say that.
She would have to keep paying them, maybe every week, if not every day.
I’m wondering how old those numbers are. When I read crime stats they are always a few years old or dated with the disclaimer about the numbers being from the most recent year with data available. If these numbers are from even 2022 rather than a month to month you should see lockdown numbers along with residual lockdown scare numbers. I’ve always worked in restaurants even when I haven’t, by which I mean no matter what I’m up to there are certain places where I’m friends with the owners and fill in from time to time because it’s fun. That industry gets in your blood. I see there being more to-go orders now than pre-covid, but no where near those numbers. Maybe it’s just where I live.
It’s hard to get good mozzarella for pizza. Everything is made from part skim milk, which means less fat, which means less grease, which means less browning of the cheese.
I really want to build a brick oven in our backyard for pizza making, because ovens don’t get hot enough. I do use a ceramic tile in the oven and preheat on high broil for 20 minutes before putting a homemade pie in the oven for about 10-12 minutes. It works.
Our stores seem to fluctuate between having whole milk and part-skim mozzarella and ricotta and only part-skim. We only buy the whole milk type. I think anything part-skim is just tasteless. But usually they only have the part-skim. I think that’s because everyone knows the difference and buys up the whole milk first, leaving the shelves full of the part-skim.
I don’t believe that is what is driving this trend. It’s not a huge increase in demand for takeout, its lack of staff to work a dining room. A lot of fast food restaurants have continued drive through only service because you and operate with a much smaller staff. This is also why many dine in restaurants that were previously open 6 or 7 days a week now are commonly closed 2 or 3 days a week…. to give the employees they do have some time off.
As a guy who eats more than his share of fast food, and as a guy who generally does it through the drive through, I suppose I should chime in.
Generally I do so over my lunch break. I’ve got a limited time when I can be away from my desk. Depending on the joint I can’t make it there, eat a sit-down meal, and get back to my desk in good time. Even if I can, then I’m also not sitting down to enjoy the meal because the clock ticking in the back of my mind ruins the experience.
This is a statement of personal preference. I find that the difference between a hot burger at Wendy’s and a warm burger back at my desk is negligible. It makes a bigger difference with other stuff (fries notably), but I usually stick to burgers. You’re thinking of the restaurant experience as something to be savored; I’m thinking I need food.