Using your senses and avoiding telltale signs of mediocrity will save you from a disappointing restaurant
GUEST BLOG / By Tom Sietsema, dining critic, Washington Post— Almost all my meals away from home are in restaurants I’ve chosen because I think readers might want to know about them.
My subjects might occupy prime real estate, serve an uncommon cuisine, star a major chef or simply offer great tacos. They’re newsworthy. Now and then, I find myself in a situation where others are in charge of selecting a place to eat. I have mixed feelings about this arrangement.
On one hand, the pressure is off the food critic to make all the decisions. On the other, citizens sometimes lack the set of skills and experience that professional eaters use to avoid dining disappointments.
Consider a recent dinner with loved ones who had booked a reservation at a busy waterfront American restaurant in Upstate New York. I knew we were headed into rocky terrain — a bad meal — just by reading the menu.
Not only was the list too long, the choices were all over the map: lamb chop tikka masala, chicken francaise and pork osso bucco shared the pages with steak and seafood — major red flags when dining out.
Sure enough, the fusion smacked of confusion. “Isn’t this great?” the host asked me in front of a gaggle of guests.
“So nice to be with you all tonight!” One of the tools in a critic’s arsenal is changing the topic instead of lying to anyone asking about disappointment on the plate.
Another strategy involves vetting restaurants before committing to them. With very little effort, diners’ chances for finding good food are improved simply by using their powers of observation and senses — common sense included.
Herewith are my low-tech, time-tested tips for avoiding bad meals when dining out:
Use your nose. One detail that links inferior restaurants is an absence of (good) cooking smells when you walk in. A steakhouse should be fragrant with beef, an Italian dining room should whisper garlic, and the air in a Korean venue should fairly tingle with chiles. A blank smell — or sometimes worse, a blast of bleach or ammonia from cleaning products — should send you back onto the sidewalk.
Listen for problems. Loud music early at night almost always signals a restaurant that doesn’t care about diners’ comfort or staff’s health. A boom box posing as a dining room isn’t prioritizing food.
Trust your first impressions. If a restaurant is short with you on the phone, chances are good the in-person service will match. (In fairness, diners should call at off-hours, not at high noon or dinner rush.)
If a website fails to list prices or continues to post its Mother’s Day specials in summer, the restaurant is asleep at the switch. A good establishment wants to welcome diners, not send them to competitors.
Look for activity. See that beautiful host armed with menus outside a restaurant? Keep walking. A reputable restaurant doesn’t need to use shiny baubles to lure people inside. Inside a place, look for servers who appear happy (proud to work there) and some bustle (diners willing to wait for a table). A slow sushi joint, for instance, is best avoided. You want to see a busy counter and lots of turnover.
When reading reviews, use some skepticism. Particularly for glowing reviews from major publications, check out the date they were published. Anything older than a year is iffy; restaurants are like live theater, with the possibility of changing casts and scripts. It also helps if the author or endorser is still alive. If Julia Child or James Beard approved the place, well, she died more than 20 years ago, and he passed in 1985.
As for Yelp and company, consumers are getting information from an anonymous crowd whose credentials aren’t always obvious. (Whether you agree or disagree with me, my bio and body of work are easy to find and I aim for fairness by visiting restaurants multiple times.)
Take hints from the menu. Be wary of places with menus that have lots of typos, exclamation marks or point out that a dish is “cooked to perfection.” Sloppiness and hyperbole don’t bode well for the rest of the dining experience. Nor do lists that go on and on, like Barbra Streisand’s memoir. Lots of photographs are suspect, too. See: Buffalo Wild Wings.
Keep it clean. I’ve eaten in some great places where the restrooms were less than tidy. But I’ve never had a memorable meal from a chef whose jacket is stained, or in a dining room where floors are sticky or tables go uncleaned for more than a few minutes. Such sights suggest inattention and understaffing.
Use the transportation test. Are there lots of in-state license plates in the parking lot? Step inside the restaurant, especially if Porsches and beaters are in the mix. Buses, on the other hand, should be viewed as a stop sign — a tourist trap of the first degree.
Illustration for the Washington Post by Marissa Vonesh.
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