Rant about Restaurant Menus

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TropicalKitty
TropicalKitty Posts: 2,298 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Good morning!

I am incredibly frustrated and have to share my frustration, because I know you all will understand. :)

I am overly frustrated with the trickery done by restaurant menus! I'm not talking about the extra salt or margarine they use. Right now I'm sick of how they don't fully describe what they plan on serving you. Here is my story from one restaurant to help you understand what I am referring to:

My bf, his family, and I went to dinner. I ordered a steak (no butter, no seasoning, just meat, please.) side of steamed broccoli (no seasoning, please), and a baked potato (butter and sour cream on the side, please). However, my steak came on a pile of golden fried onion straws. No mention of the greasy carby ick on the menu for me to ask to have them left off my plate. And not to mention, I would have asked them to leave them off as I have a wheat sensitivity.

Yes, I admit, I should have warned the waitress of my wheat sensitivity, but I wouldn't have thought of it when I asked for meat. Ok, after reading Dr. Kessler's book I know to be weary of chicken at places like Chili's...

At any rate, is it too much to be told what I'm actually ordering? I'm sick of getting things and finding random cheese stuck somewhere. A tomato shoved in something. Butter slathered on my "fresh steamed broccoli." A scoop of garlic butter UNDER my perfect steak that rocks just plain. You can still use your misleading phrasing, if you want - I know how to decipher that. "Bed of golden onion straws" = greasy carby onion ick. I don't want to have to pester your waiter/waitress about the exact details about everything on your menu before I can try to decide what will fit into my dietary guidelines. What's with the hidden garnishes that can ruin the dish?!

Just let me know what I'm getting so I can ask for it not to be there.

Thanks for reading, if you got this far. And Happy Friday!

Replies

  • lmr9
    lmr9 Posts: 628 Member
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    Amen sista!!
  • Koshie
    Koshie Posts: 61
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    Hey there,

    I get what your saying, but it sounds like you had a bad waiter or waitress as you did not get what you had ordered. When I eat out by myself I go to Applebee's as they have there WW menue and there 550 cal meals and I have never gotten extra surprises on my plate. As for the Menue thing it could be simply the matter of cost. When you design a menue, you are charged additional costs for words and print. As a designer I have never charged additional money for this but if it is a mom and pop resurant it could cost them 1000's of additional money in printing costs.
  • sophieshaped
    sophieshaped Posts: 228 Member
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    I get your point here, and have found generally it's hard to eat out and know what your getting.

    But not everyone's on a diet! A menu gives you an idea of a dish, it's not an ingredients list. I think listing every single garnish/ingredient on the menu would be madness! Where would it stop? Forget a menu, it would be a book, and by time you'd finished reading it, the kitchen would have closed :o)

    Why don't you just make sure you explain to the waitress that you're watching your weight and want all extras removed or on the side?
  • Elokyn
    Elokyn Posts: 448 Member
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    AMEN!!

    I got a veggie sandwich the other day that I thought would be awesome...WRONG! Sauteed in butter on cheesey bread with gobs of cheese in it too!! Bleck!!
  • heathersmilez
    heathersmilez Posts: 2,579 Member
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    It’s funny you mention this (which occurs quite frequently usually at more upscale restaurants with odder choices of “sides” or decoration) because I ordered a spinach grilled salmon salad the other day from an upscale restaurant I said dressing on the side and no goat cheese (I HATE CHEESE!) and I seriously got the most plain-Jane salad ever! Like 3 cups of spinach, the same stuff you can get for $1 at a grocery store, tiny piece of salmon, no butter/seasoning of any kind, ¼ cup plain no salt, no roasting pecans and 1/4 cup strawberries and blueberries – that’s it, for $25! Thank goodness it was a business lunch and I wasn’t paying. Made me feel must less guilty for eating that slice of French stick when we arrived ;)
  • Melis25Fit
    Melis25Fit Posts: 811 Member
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    I went to red lobster last night, and only ate half my meal, but at the same time, while I thought I was doing FABULOUS, I went home and entered it in, and I was 1,000 over my sodium for the day! SAY WHAT?! Yeah. So I'm depressed about that today. :(
  • megamom
    megamom Posts: 920 Member
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    My favorite restaurant knows I am dieting and to make my steak dry, seasoning but no butter. Last night I had a new cook, my steak was just dripping. I hadn't mentioned how I wanted it because I just assumed they knew, LOL. That will teach me.
  • ❤B☩❤
    ❤B☩❤ Posts: 634
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    It makes me sad that, having made it quite clear that you were NOT looking for any embellishments for your meal, the waitress didn't mention to you about all the extra crap included with the dish you ordered. I know it isn't the server's responsibility to monitor your order, but geez, at least she could have given you the option... So sorry your meal was ruined. Hopefully the people you were with made up for it! :drinker:

    A BIT off topic, but still sorta like your so-called "rants", it's reported in "Cook This, Not That", the following restaurants still do not provide nutritional information for their dishes:

    Applebees, California Pizza, Carrabba's, Cheesecake Factory, Friendly's, Hooter's, IHOP, and TGI Friday's
  • arewethereyet
    arewethereyet Posts: 18,702 Member
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    I was, and still am sometimes, a professional server. I can tell you that if a customer tells me I was a "PLAIN steak" that is what they shall get. BUT....I am the minority. Most servers are working their way through school, lost an office job, could not find a job in their field, or the money is just too dang good to let go! A lot of them have no love for their field, and/or feel it is below them.

    Therefore, you MUST be very very specific. Here is a line I use in restaraunts:

    "Oh I LOVE your food, I always get it just the way I order :happy:
    I will have the NY strip, medium cooked please and NO salt, I have allergies...sorry to be a pain..can you ask the cook to put herbs on the steak? Also, steamed broc and a baked potato PLAIN with butter/sourcream on the side. Thank you so much, I hate when I have to A)send the food back to be recooked or B) use my epi pen to keep from choking at the table!!.....insert sweet smile.
    I choose between the two depending on how the server has participated so far.

    I have never had an issue with my food. I am specific and tough nuts if the server gets po's she/he is in the wrong profession.

    As a server, I would much rather give you your food the way you want it than to have to face the cook with your plate again or get a crappy tip from the table!

    Enjoy your dinner miss!:flowerforyou:
  • SquidInTraining
    SquidInTraining Posts: 196
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    I get your point here, and have found generally it's hard to eat out and know what your getting.

    But not everyone's on a diet! A menu gives you an idea of a dish, it's not an ingredients list. I think listing every single garnish/ingredient on the menu would be madness! Where would it stop? Forget a menu, it would be a book, and by time you'd finished reading it, the kitchen would have closed :o)

    Why don't you just make sure you explain to the waitress that you're watching your weight and want all extras removed or on the side?

    I agree. Part of the advantage of eating at home is that you can tightly control exactly how you want your food cooked. I'm not saying you should never eat at a restaurant, but I am a line cook by trade and to be honest, I'd be annoyed as crap if your entree came back after adding that many modifiers to your order (No seasoning, no butter, sour cream on the side) when you found onion straws on your plate. It's not misleading, or 'trickery', and restaurants don't have a hidden agenda to make/keep people overweight.

    When someone else cooks for you, whether at home or in a restaurant, you are trading total control for service. That's just the way it works.

    Although there are always exceptions to the rule, the majority of people I've worked with in restaurants give a crap about how their food tastes, looks, and is received by the customer. The supposition that the person that makes your food has littered your plate with useless ingredients that contribute nothing to the food and are there for the sake of being fatty is incorrect. Menus, for the most part are carefully thought out. The kitchen cannot read your mind or intuitively sense that you have a wheat sensitivity, so you're right, you should have mentioned it to your server.

    When you're adhering to dietary guidelines that exclude fats, salt, or wheat, it is ultimately your responsibility to politely (and completely) inform your server so that she can relay the information to the kitchen.
  • TropicalKitty
    TropicalKitty Posts: 2,298 Member
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    I'm glad others are frustrated too. It's not always exactly about "dieting" or calorie counting, so much as that I hate cheese, I hate tomatoes and I go through the menu to find something that doesn't have them in it... then SURPRISE! I really like the taste of my real food. Plus, a lot of those embellishments do add a lot of unwanted pointless calories/fat/carbs that I think destroy the taste of what I ordered. But I suppose that's part of what our culture here has wanted, otherwise we wouldn't have these things. We prefer the $ over our health.

    ODONNA, a lot of restaurants don't want to tell you. Which is one reason why I've stopped going to places like Friday's. Obviously they don't want us to really know what we're eating for a reason.

    I really hope that we have some sort of food revolution so we can start to trust what we're eating and not have the surprises some of you have shared.
  • arewethereyet
    arewethereyet Posts: 18,702 Member
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    I get your point here, and have found generally it's hard to eat out and know what your getting.

    But not everyone's on a diet! A menu gives you an idea of a dish, it's not an ingredients list. I think listing every single garnish/ingredient on the menu would be madness! Where would it stop? Forget a menu, it would be a book, and by time you'd finished reading it, the kitchen would have closed :o)

    Why don't you just make sure you explain to the waitress that you're watching your weight and want all extras removed or on the side?

    I agree. Part of the advantage of eating at home is that you can tightly control exactly how you want your food cooked. I'm not saying you should never eat at a restaurant, but I am a line cook by trade and to be honest, I'd be annoyed as crap if your entree came back after adding that many modifiers to your order (No seasoning, no butter, sour cream on the side) when you found onion straws on your plate. It's not misleading, or 'trickery', and restaurants don't have a hidden agenda to make/keep people overweight.

    When someone else cooks for you, whether at home or in a restaurant, you are trading total control for service. That's just the way it works.

    Although there are always exceptions to the rule, the majority of people I've worked with in restaurants give a crap about how their food tastes, looks, and is received by the customer. The supposition that the person that makes your food has littered your plate with useless ingredients that contribute nothing to the food and are there for the sake of being fatty is incorrect. Menus, for the most part are carefully thought out. The kitchen cannot read your mind or intuitively sense that you have a wheat sensitivity, so you're right, you should have mentioned it to your server.

    When you're adhering to dietary guidelines that exclude fats, salt, or wheat, it is ultimately your responsibility to politely (and completely) inform your server so that she can relay the information to the kitchen.

    I believe the word "plain" says it all. Most cooks and line preps/expeditors I worked with loved the plain stuff.......bing bam boom......slap it on a plate!!
  • TropicalKitty
    TropicalKitty Posts: 2,298 Member
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    Squid & Arewethereyet, I've been a server a couple different times in my life, so I get how it works. :) I wasn't rude to the waitress and I didn't send it back. My "beef" isn't with the kitchen staff or the wait staff (they're just doing their job and following the recipes), it's with the menu writers. I know there is a lot of time and marketing and what not going into the creation of what they put on there and the culinary experts in designing what makes it look pretty, et cetera.
  • arewethereyet
    arewethereyet Posts: 18,702 Member
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    Squid & Arewethereyet, I've been a server a couple different times in my life, so I get how it works. :) I wasn't rude to the waitress and I didn't send it back. My "beef" isn't with the kitchen staff or the wait staff (they're just doing their job and following the recipes), it's with the menu writers. I know there is a lot of time and marketing and what not going into the creation of what they put on there and the culinary experts in designing what makes it look pretty, et cetera.

    Oh I was totally agreeing with you! If you just read the menu your in trouble with a capital T :laugh:

    Good example: My friend took me to lunch when I was full into calorie deficit. She surprised me with Seasons 52 where every single meal is 475 calories or less! OMG I was in heaven :love:

    I ordered the cedar plank salmon which came with grilled veggies in season and some sort of brown rice concoction. It was DELISH!! Thought I found the best place in the universe...........until I checked it out online and found out the Sodium for one of those 475 cal meals was 2 days worth for me :noway:

    Of course it didn't say on the menu "We soak all of our food overnight in a vat of salt!!" and I never thought to ask :laugh:

    Menus are advertising tools and play to the majority. No way they will ever notate each and every item involved in their cooking so it is up to us to ask.

    personally I feel a dump of greasy azz onion straws are an insult to a beautiful peice of beef :wink:
  • sherrie8929
    sherrie8929 Posts: 38 Member
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    I agree with arewethereyet. As a former server, I agree that no server wants to face the cook again, even if it was the customer who didn't specify or weren't clear about what they wanted, the servers are still the ones who get crap for it. So a lot of servers, especially the ones who are there to get their job done well and not deal with all the drama that is the restaurant industry, will take the time to get your order right and even come back to your table to clarify something if necessary.

    Not quite the same topic, but I will say that I love it when a server messes up and forgets my appetizer or forgets to bring my salad out before my meal. Often, I'll order an appetizer knowing I simply DO NOT need to be eating it, but order it anyway. By the time I finally decide to speak up and say something to the server, the food is on its way and I realize he/she just saved me God only knows how many calories and clogged arteries. And if my salad comes out with my meal, I eat less of it. Considering I usually order a caeser side salad, that's a good thing ;)
  • Behavior_Modification
    Behavior_Modification Posts: 24,482 Member
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    I really hope that we have some sort of food revolution so we can start to trust what we're eating and not have the surprises some of you have shared.

    I think our whole country needs a food revolution.
  • Mina133842
    Mina133842 Posts: 1,573 Member
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    asking for the meat prepared with no butter, no seasoning, JUST the meat please, is asking for just that - JUST THE MEAT PLEASE - not something else on top - and that's implied, and simply stated.

    I also order food a slightly different way than it may be listed - but I'm the customer, and it's MY food, that I will eat, so I should have it the way I would like it - AND, I tip very well, if I do say so myself, just because I do change things from time to time.

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