“I went to a hospital cafeteria the other day and ate a fantastic lunch.” No you didn’t. Hospital cafeterias are not profit centers for hospitals nor significant elements in their overall reputation.Read more at location 840
The American restaurants with excellent fresh ingredients—the ones good enough to serve naked on a plate—commonly cost fifty dollars and up for dinner.Read more at location 855
New York’s Masa is commonly regarded as one of the best restaurants in the United States and it is arguably the best sushi place. The chef-owner has hired a personal fish shopper in the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo and that shopper rushes the fish to the airport to take a direct flight to New York City, namely JAL 006. Once the fish clears customs, a van driver calls Masa and tells them what time the catch will be arriving. The basic prix fixe dinner at Masa goes for $450.Read more at location 857
Avoid dishes that are ingredients-intensive. Raw ingredients in America—vegetables, butter, bread, meats, and so on—are below world standards. Even most underdeveloped countries have better raw ingredients thanRead more at location 864
Go for dishes that are composition-intensive.Read more at location 867
In Haiti and Thailand, I’ve seen fishermen on their boats pulling out the fish or conch from the sea while I am eating the morning catch for lunch. It doesn’t need an amazing sauce or an innovative preparation to be superb.Read more at location 870
The United States is a country where the human beings are extremely creative but the tomatoes are not extraordinarily fresh.Read more at location 874
Let’s say I am in a Bolivian restaurant in suburban America. There’s a good chance I will ask for the silpancho, a specialty of the Cochabamba region. There is a plain steak in the dish, but it’s not just sitting out there on the plate. Underneath are rice and potatoes, and piled on top is scrambled egg, tomatoes, onions, and, on the side, green chili sauce. The sauce is not to be missed. The steak does not have to be that good for the overall meal to be delicious.Read more at location 880
Some raw ingredients travel well, such as dried chili peppers and seed-based spices.Read more at location 887
But trying to replicate Bresson chicken, Turkish eggplant, or Hong Kong scallops is going to be much, much harder because those ingredients are harder to preserve across long journeys. They have to be refrigerated or frozen and they arrive battered and somewhat tasteless, unless you pay to have them flown in and handled by specialists;Read more at location 891
Hospital Food Bad—Casino Food Good?Read more at location 896
Does a commercial establishment receive a positive or negative boost from the surrounding circumstances of its production?Read more at location 898
The very best Las Vegas restaurants are located well behind the casinos and slot machines, not in front of them. The hope is that people will stop and gamble on their way to and from the good food.Read more at location 900
In the old days, Parisian restaurants located themselves near butchers so as to receive choice cuts, entrails, and innards quickly and easily.Read more at location 905
When prices of air flights were held artificially high by law, before deregulation in the 1970s, airline food was often excellent. They served lobster to attract more customers, and they knew they could make up for the lobster by charging the higher regulated fare they were forced to charge.Read more at location 909
the desire to compete for high-fare passengers forced the airlines to make the service as good as possible and that included delicious food.Read more at location 913
The vending machine shows you what food looks like when there is no cross-subsidy. When you are buying food from a vending machine, it is a relatively pure transaction. You give up the money; you get the food. There’s no décor, no service, no ancillary products, no nothing, other than the swap of specified assets. And what do we know about food from vending machines? It’s reliable but it’s hardly ever special.Read more at location 928
Restaurants make a lot of their money off the drinks.Read more at location 933
In essence, they are supplying food as a kind of window dressing to lure customers in for some other purpose, namely high-priced liquids. It might seem that if you don’t buy the drinks, and don’t mind settling for plain tap water, you can’t lose.Read more at location 933
you pay $2.50 for the drink, and it seems that the Coke itself costs the restaurant less than twenty cents.Read more at location 939
High prices for drinks are often a form of price discrimination, an economic term which refers to the extraction of additional money from the people willing to pay more for the product.Read more at location 947
The market for dining therefore has (at least) two kinds of buyers. The first kind is highly price-sensitive and takes the time to shop around for bargains; this includes remembering how much the drinks cost. The second set of buyers is less price-sensitive and more inclined to pay the bill without remembering how much the drinks added on. These customers pay more attention to upfront costs—the main items on the menu—than to delayed costs, such as the final tally with the drinks. A lot of these people are pretty wealthy and a lot of them are prone to spend a lot of money. In any case, high prices for drinks will induce some of the latter customers to spend more money, while the more price-sensitive customers concentrate their buying on the better-bargain, lower-margin items—namely, the food and not the drink—and thus they are not scared away from the restaurant. In essence, the wealthy and the myopic are the friend and supporter of the non-drinking gourmand.Read more at location 952
Looking back in history, formerly you could take advantage of this cross-subsidy far more than is possible today. For instance nineteenth century saloons took the drinks cross-subsidy to an extreme by offering, literally, a free lunch to their customers. Once food supply became liberated from local farmers and hunters, such free lunches became common. The hope, of course, was that they would make the money back on the drinks.Read more at location 961
the markup on drinks is in part a fee for using the table so long and also it is a way to charge for the décor of the restaurant.Read more at location 972
It’s hard to just sit there and order nothing when they keep on asking you to spend more money and everyone else is doing the same.Read more at location 978
I’ve also noticed that restaurants with wonderful views or innovative décor charge an especially high amount for the drinks.Read more at location 981
Cross-subsidies help explain why the food is so often so bad in movie theaters. The food subsidizes the moviesRead more at location 996
Popcorn entered American movie theaters in the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression. Popcorn sales kept many theaters afloat that otherwise might not have survived.Read more at location 998
Theaters in contrast make a lot of their money from selling popcorn.Read more at location 1009
The incentive of the movie theater is to charge a low price for the movie, and a high price for the popcorn. The low movie price lures in viewers/eaters and the theater doesn’t much miss out on the movie revenue anyway.Read more at location 1010
If you want to eat well in a movie theater, your best shot is to go to an “indie” theater, which shows foreign films, offbeat movies, and attracts an older and more mature audience, all of which point to better taste in food. Furthermore, compared to traditional multiplexes, indie theaters keep a higher proportion of their ticket revenue.Read more at location 1015
In its early years the chain revolutionized coffee consumption in the United States.Read more at location 1021
But over time, the expansion of the chain required greater attention to sales volume and high profit margins.Read more at location 1023
Today the store specializes in sweet, milk-based beverages, many of which are associated with the coffee idea in some indirect manner or other. We’re now in a setting where the quality and above all the availability of this coffee is subsidized by the milk and the sugar.Read more at location 1024
If you like milk and sugar, however, you’re paying through the nose—in part to prop up the coffeelike infrastructure of the store—and maybe you should consider mixing the two at home for the desired effect. Just a whole lot cheaper.Read more at location 1028
First, quality food is cheaper when there is cheap labor available to cook it.Read more at location 1031
The polar opposite case is when you see a restaurant replete with expensive labor. There’s a valet parking attendant, a woman to take your coat, a wine maître d’, a floor manager, a team of waiters, a manager to greet you, and so on.Read more at location 1036
One of the most important strategies in dining is asking the waiter or waitress what to get. It is important to phrase the question properly.Read more at location 1047
So don’t just ask the waiter “What should I get?” The waiter will likely direct you to the most high-margin item on the menu, and even more likely to want to get rid of you quickly so as to move on to his next task.Read more at location 1051
One way to proceed is to ask the waiter “What is best?” I am then happiest when the waiter does not hesitate to tell me what is best. “The venison with the spaetzle is best, sir,” is the sort of answer that warms my heart. I get more nervous when the waiter responds: “All of our menu items are good.” Another problem is when you hear: “Best? That depends on what you like. It’s hard for me to say.”Read more at location 1058
The bottom line is that these waiters have never been given firm instructions by a quality boss or chef, or those instructions have been summarily forgotten. It’s a bad sign for the whole restaurant.Read more at location 1061
In plain language: order the ugly and order the unknown. In a fancy restaurant, order the item you are least likely to think you want.Read more at location 1074
If a restaurant cannot cover its rent, it is not long for this world. Over half of all restaurants close in the first three years of operation, so this is not a small problem.Read more at location 1078
A high-rent store typically attracts a large number of paying customers per hour, charges high markup on its goods, or both. Otherwise there is no way to make the rent payments every month.Read more at location 1085
A lot of low-rent places are ugly, but still they might have good food and they are especially likely to have cheap food that isn’t junk food.Read more at location 1087
Of the four three-star New York City restaurants listed in the 2011 Michelin guide (Le Bernardin, Per Se, Daniel, and Jean-Georges), all four are in a thin strip of midtown Manhattan, not too far from Lincoln Center. These restaurants are near the homes of millionaires and billionaires,Read more at location 1090
Most fine restaurants are in high-rent areas, but most restaurants in high-rent areas are far from fine.Read more at location 1093
Most of the important new, cheap ethnic restaurants serving everything from Colombian food to classic Italian are burgeoning in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.Read more at location 1103
One upshot of this is that the recent Great Recession has been good for a lot of foodies. Rents are stable or falling rather than risingRead more at location 1121
One good way to find a tasty and cheap meal is to seek out low-rent areas near higher-rent customers.Read more at location 1125
Note: C È ANCHE LA PERIFERIA IN CITTÀ. ES DOVE STANNO I MIGR. E I RIST SOMO QUASI SEMPRE ETNICI Edit
The larger the number of restaurants serving the same ethnic cuisine in a given area, the more likely the food they serve is good. Why? Restaurants that are competing against each other can’t rest on their laurels.Read more at location 1133
The ultimate low-rent venue is the food truck. New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, have started allowing food trucks to sell their wares, and it has greatly improved food in those cities. No longer is street food a bad pretzel or fatty hot dog; food trucks bring diners authentic Mexican tacos, homemade sausages, dim sum, Vietnamese bánh mi sandwiches, and hundreds of other delicacies.Read more at location 1145
My favorite local food truck is Las Delicias, which parks on Route 50, Arlington Boulevard, Falls Church (near my house), every Sunday afternoon, and serves Bolivian specialties from the Cochabamba region.Read more at location 1151
If we wanted to improve American food, and make it much cheaper, I have a suggestion: Let’s deregulate the food trucks and the other street vendors, provided they can show enough responsibility to get an open-to-all license competition.Read more at location 1157
Low-rent food venues can experiment at relatively low risk. If a food idea does not work out, the proprietor is not left with an expensive building, fancy décor, or a long-term lease.Read more at location 1162
Lower rents also mean that more people can try their hand at starting a restaurant and marketing the family cooking.Read more at location 1165
It is common to see good ethnic restaurants grouped with midlevel or junky retail outlets, and often the best food trucks are in quite inconspicuous locales.Read more at location 1168
Do you see something ugly? Poor construction? Broken plastic signage? A five-and-dime store? Maybe an abandoned car? If so, crack a quiet smile, walk in the door, and order.Read more at location 1169
Meta-rationality means recognizing your limitations and realizing that very often the best information is in the hands of other people.Read more at location 1176
some knowledge of social science is often more useful than is a knowledge of food.Read more at location 1179
Ask people who are geographically mobile in their professions and thus accustomed to eating out and collecting information about food.Read more at location 1182
If you’re asking Google, put a “smart” word into your search query. “Best restaurants Washington” will yield lots of information,Read more at location 1185
something more specific instead, like “best Indian restaurants Washington,”Read more at location 1187
Google “Washington best cauliflower dish,” even if you don’t want cauliflower.Read more at location 1189
If you’re reading online reviews, don’t be too put off by negative reviews per se; any place that takes chances will have its detractors. Instead, focus on the positive reviews.Read more at location 1190
If you are looking to judge a restaurant, and can’t find anyone reliable to ask, my suggestion is to take a look at who goes there.Read more at location 1193
When I’m out looking for food, one of my fears is to come across a restaurant where the people are laughing and smiling and appearing very sociable.Read more at location 1195
Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with having fun, but it’s not the same thing as good food. So many restaurants “get by”—and charge reasonably high prices—by creating social scenes for drinking, dating, and carousing. They’re not using the food to draw in their customers.Read more at location 1197
If you are going to visit such restaurants, go in the first four to six months of their operation, though not the first two weeks when they are still working out the kinks in their kitchen routine.Read more at location 1202
I also start to worry if the women in a restaurant seem to be beautiful in the trendy “eye candy” sense, as they are at Zengo. For me that’s another danger sign.Read more at location 1221
It is often best when the people in a restaurant look a little serious or even downright grim.Read more at location 1225
In a lot of restaurants, it is a propitious omen if the diners are screaming at each other and appear to be fighting and pursuing blood feuds. It’s a sign they are regular customers and that they feel at home in the restaurant.Read more at location 1233
if you are walking in Florence, and you see a restaurant full of guidebook-clutching British tourists, catching an early dinner at six P.M., you need to run the other way.Read more at location 1238
Quality customers are often more important for a restaurant than is a quality chef.Read more at location 1241
When McDonald’s first started to expand, in the 1950s, it took great pains to be a “family restaurant.” Ray Kroc designed the restaurants to discourage teenage loitering. He didn’t want the outlets to be too comfortable or too “cool.” He didn’t want the restaurants to have pinball or newspaper boxes or telephone booths or candy and cigarette machines or to look like teenage trouble spots. He wanted rapid turnover and he wanted people to come and go in the normal course of their day. McDonald’s thus made its designs deliberately antisocial, the opposite of today’s Starbucks. At the time, it was well known that teenage loitering had helped make many drive-ins unprofitable. McDonald’s is a family restaurant and it looks and feels the same way.Read more at location 1242
