Unexciting food at restaurants

MY wife, Lynn and I have recently dined and stayed over at a couple of quaint Vermont inns. Upon reading chef and kitchen reviews before and after our visits, more than a few other wayfarers have raved about the cooking, saying such things as the lamb, etcetera, was the best they ever had in their lives. In my estimation the best food at any New England inn I have ever visited (many) has been at least a couple of steps down from the quality we produce at home every weekend. In my last inn experience, last week, I ordered a hamburger (from the Tavern menu – and touted to be excellent) to sidestep such disappointment and received a gray patty without proper seasoning or flavor, which might have been previously frozen. I did have a signature app and sampled fare from Lynn’s plate off the regular menu and found that food to be as unexciting as mine.

I thought about the times I found restaurant food to be transformational (No. 9 Park in Boston comes to mind) and wondered what made such a significant difference. Why is great cooking so hard to find in restaurants? After all these years, why can’t it be a matter of protocol in fine cook books from great restaurants and star chefs, not counting exciting new creations? Or is it like the case with fine wine, that only a rarified few connoisseurs can appreciate really fine quality, so that if an inn cooked such fare most people would be disappointed? The palates of most people I know (not people I hang with) prefer simple, bland, way overcooked – terrible, really – food. The chef from the last inn we visited (I am purposely not mentioning names) graduated from a respected culinary school. If he wanted, could he cook something transformational to me? Or is there an ineffable talent required to create such pleasure? And what might some of the elements of that talent be?

We visit these inns for the ambience, including basking in their history; we often love the staff, and the beauty of the drive there and back.

I know Jenise can shed some light on my question.

After pushing the send button on my original thought, I realized I had answered some of my own question. Lynn’s food is better than we find in most restaurants because she has learned what herbs and spices work well with certain meats, poultry, vegetables, sauces, etcetera, and she uses them liberally rather than tentatively. She also browns and crisps surfaces to contrast with and lock in inner moisture. And she is careful to cook to the proper consistency, which usually means less than most people would want from a restaurant.

But we don’t cook transformational food, except sometimes. I wonder if finding food transformational is partly a function of surprise and newness, or at least partially some sort of frame of mind. In the novel, Portrait of a Lady, the aesthete collector Gilbert Osmond married Isabelle Archer because she was the greatest specimen he had ever encountered. Presumably the first couple of weeks proved transformational, but after a couple of years he became bored and even irritated with her. But on the other hand, I found a restaurant called La Clé d’Or, in Westport, Connecticut, to have such wonderful sweetbreads that I went back five times in five weeks.

Hi Covert,

I think this may also be a function of age and experience. I am finding it easier to lose weight in recent years simply because I am becoming an intolerable food snob (according to my better half). This is most evident when I find myself at a restaurant with students or young colleagues wondering what the heck it is about the place that they seem to like so much. At least in this context, ignorance is bliss...

Mike

[Jenise]

What may be at work here are several things. The chef works for the owner of the Inn, and typically it's the owner who decides what type of destination experience he wants to provide his guests. Too often, such places try to please everybody by taking the safe route--like that hamburger you ordered, which is a standard menu item for unadventurous 'picky' eaters. You're probably right that it was from frozen--it has to be on hand all the time, and the person that's on the menu for likely wouldn't care. Secondly, one can graduate from culinary school without having a great palate or an inspired sense of great cuisine, just like I know a lot of people who can draw amazingly well but who lack the taste to turn that into art on canvas. It's merely a picture, not a painting. So, technical know how is one thing, personal standards for quality is another, and flair is yet another. Maybe the reason that chef is cooking in an inn in Vermont instead of NYC is precisely because they have only the first of those qualities.

We had been looking forward to going to a fairly new German restaurant in our area. We won't be going back. Bev ordered Sourbraten which was OK, but she also ordered ice tea at $2.60 and paid the same for a refil. I order a duck with roasted potatoes dish. It came with all the meat off the bone in small pieces mixed in with potatoes and onion like a hash. It was bone dry and I wasn't offered any kind of a sauce to put on it. The entrees were in the $15-$25 ranges, but they nickle and dimed you to death. Like I said we won't be going back.