52 Things I Know I Know…and Some I Wish I Didn’t Know

Image(Wagyu coming soon to an Outback near you)

1) I know that Main Street Provisions ought to be my favorite restaurant but isn’t, and this makes me sad. There, I said it.

2) I know the only seafood worth eating on the regular is at Japanese restaurants.

3) I know that chicken parm in any guise sucks donkey dicks and anyone who says otherwise is a prole-pandering know-nothing who touts it simply for clicks from hicks who get their licks and their kicks from endless breadsticks.

4) I know that anyone who stands in line to eat food standing up is a fool.

5) Enough with the hot honey already.

6) When it comes to French bistros, Bouchon has it all over Mon Ami Gabi (which hasn’t changed its menu since Bill Clinton was President).

7) The days of the $15 cocktail are deader than Siegfried & Roy.

8) I don’t care how good you think Din Tai Fung is. It’s a chain and isn’t worth the indignity of trying to dine there. Aria parking bullshit, lines, reservations, and selfie walls…screw that noise. It’s goddamn dim sum, not haute cuisine. BONUS NEGATIVITY ALERT! It’s also full of white girls and FOMO Instagrammers…but I repeat myself.

Africa white people GIF - Find on GIFER

9) I know that the best murder’s row of restaurants these days is at Resorts World. With better marketing, it could be to the 2020s what the Bellagio was to the early aughts.

10)  Prepare yourselves for bread and butter charges (à la 1965). With accountants now running things on the Strip, the nickel and dime-ing will soon creep into your bill faster than a $78 bottle of water:

Image(Lap dances much cheaper)

11) The better the hotel, the better the restaurants. (Exception: the Sahara – a meh of a hotel housing one of America’s greatest steakhouses: Bazaar Meat.)

12) This whole kaiseki thing must be stopped before it gets out of hand. What was once special (A-5 wagyu, o-toro, uni...) has become so over-hyped and commonplace that it will soon be overrun by the sushi-bro crowd — dudes who didn’t know their unagi from their anago four years ago — douchenozzles who ten years ago were throwing down five-hundy on vodka in hopes of getting laid. Now they’re invading our better sushi bars and harshing my mellow. F**k sushi bros with a splintered chopstick.

The Real Bros Of Simi Valley GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY(I am not your bro, bro)

13) Money (the pursuit thereof) and marketing ruins everything in food.

14) There is absolutely no reason to go to the Strip for Japanese anymore.

15) If you want great sushi the way it was meant to be (sliced by dedicated chefs without pretension) head to Sushi Hiroyoshi on west Charleston, or Sushi Hiro on south Eastern, or the granddaddy of our Vegas scene, Yui Edomae Sushi. The first will remind you of a Shibuya hole-in-the wall, the latter two may have the best selection of fish in town. Kabuto is so crowded, no one goes there anymore.

16) I know I am rediscovering my passion for home cooking, and still retain some skillz taught to me by the master teachers of the late 20th Century: Julia Child, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey, Marcella Hazan (in person) Jacques Pepin (ditto), and others. In gleaning through old cookbooks, I also remembered how terrible most chef cookbooks are (exception(s): Wolfgang Puck and Jamie Oliver – whose books are remarkably straightforward, tasty and easy to follow). Famous restaurant cookbooks are even worse. This little veal roast (from Featherblade Craft Butchery, natch) with a tarragon-mustard sauce was whipped up in about an hour:

Image(Boy’z got skillz)

Image(Just say no to sauce dots and smudges)

17)  I am so over pizza it isn’t even funny. Wanna go get a pizza?

18) I wish Japaneiro were closer to my house.

19) I wish Jamon Jamon had more customers.

20) I know the boom in Spanish food (in Vegas) has reached peak tapas. Probably in the rest of the U.S. as well.

21) You officially have my permission to stop caring about the restaurants in the Bellagio.

22) I know Noodlehead is the restaurant you go to when China Mama is packed to the rafters. What it lacks in size and variety it makes up for in (Chinese) pasta punch and tasty skewered fish balls:

Image(Ballsy)

23) I know that restaurants need to give up their addiction to branzino and find another easy-to-pronounce pisces: Orange Roughy, Chilean sea bass, etc… to sell for the sake of upscale fish fanciers.

24) I know I hate summer truffles and you should too. Summer truffles bring nothing to the party but the name.

25) I know that the minute you see an AYCE sign go up at a restaurant, they are serving the cheapest, shittiest food money can buy.

26) The whole restaurant-cum-nightclub thing (Tao, STK, et al) is so cheugy it hurts. (Look it up.)

27) So is caviar on everything.

28) If you find yourself scratching your head over the weird similarity in menus (roasted Brussels sprouts, fried cauliflower, yellowtail crudo, tuna tartares here, salmon, chicken, steak there, always concluding with a smattering of vegan/vegetarian (to appease those with fear of food)….welcome to the club:

Image(Chou-fleur is so ten minutes ago)

29) Face it: mezcal sucks. It doesn’t suck as much as natural wine, but it blows as much as Moby Dick.

30) Casa Playa is terrible just like I told you it would be.

31) Viva! by Ray Garcia in Resorts World pretty much kicks every Mexicans’ ass in town.

32) Thankfully, no one is inviting me to whiskey-food pairing dinners anymore. Whiskey and food go together like hot fudge and monkfish.

33) I know I am, in every restaurant I enter, usually the oldest person in the room. Which leads me to ask: What happened to all the Boomers? Are they home sipping supper through a straw? Door Dashing every dinner? Consuming all calories on the couch? We are the generation that put T.G.I. Fridays and its ilk on the map, but we also sowed the seeds, 40 years ago, of the food revolution that brought better cooking to all corners of America. Instead of reaping our just desserts, we’ve become a generation of house-bound retirees consuming pre-chewed food in-between Netflix and Fox News updates. Or even worse: we’re cruising our way to god’s waiting room. I blame the Great Recession of 2008-2012, which legitimized hard surfaces, cheap seating, and military jet afterburner noise levels — all in the name of creating a “party atmosphere” — ALL of which came at the expense of comfort. Covid only made things worse. Now it seems, an entire generation is in hiding…or perhaps just seeking peace and quiet before we’re shown the door:

Boomer GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY

34) We are more excited about Half-Bird opening than anything on the Strip.

35) Awkward, but those who go to very popular (and entertaining) Twitter feeds like Vital Vegas and Las Vegas Locally for food recommendations always read like people with no taste asking people with no palate to send them to places with no clue. I rest my case.

WHATSHOULDWECALLGRADSCHOOL — HOW I FEEL LEARNING FROM OLDER GRAD STUDENTS

36) I know that I don’t know what’s going on at Eater Vegas and barely care. Apparently I am still blocked from the Twitter feed, even though the previous (hideous) human in charge is long gone. I’ve asked the current custodian to unblock me because I sincerely want it/her to succeed and do some good for our food scene.

37) I know you shouldn’t sleep on Vic & Anthony’s as your go-to downtown steakhouse. The food is solid, the wine list full of finds, and there’s none of that celebrity-touting bullshit to put up with. (Ed. note: I don’t give a shit how many celebrities eat at your restaurants. Celebrities don’t go to great restaurants; they go to places where they’ll be treated like bigshots. Celebrities and good food go together like lamb and tuna fish.  On Strip, don’t forget Delmonico — it is huge but welcoming, and open on weekends (Fri.-Sun.) for lunch, with a great bar and a winning wine list.

38) I know I like the food at Carson Kitchen but hate the atmosphere — beautiful food (like this terrific tempura) served in a cold, impersonal setting which has not improved with age (its or mine):

Image(Hot food, cold decor)

39) I know I’m back to eating Indian again (dots not feathers), thanks to Mt. Everest India’s Cuisine.

40) I know if there’s a restaurant in the ‘burbs I wish I ate at more often, it is probably Khoury’s:

Image(Khoury’s knows how to mezze around)

41) I know that I’m still waiting for the menu at Marché Bacchus to be more ambitiously French. But I never tire of going there.

42) Some days I’d give a digit for a decent green chile cheeseburger.

43) I know dipping a bunch of stuff in a hot pot until it all comes out tasting the same is an Asian thing I will never understand. Nor do I wish to.

Image(The X-Pot packs ’em in)

44) Live fire cooking is overdone and overrated and you know it.

45) So is yellowtail crudo.

46) So are chef pop-up dinners.

47) There are still gems aplenty in Chinatown, but it’s in danger of being overrun by corporate Korean and cookie-cutter Vietnamese.

48) I know that the ghosts of Joël Robuchon, Marcella Hazan, and Pierre Troisgros could reappear with whisks in hand and you still couldn’t get me to eat at that sorry, saddle-sore lowbrow bastion of the faux-cowboy crowd known as the Mount Charleston Lodge.

49) Stop eating food in quotes, i.e., some reshaped chemical experiment pretending to be something you remember from childhood — ersatz edibles that aren’t what they call themselves — all done in service of tricking you into eating them. Fake bacon, cheese made of nut paste, “milk” made of soy juice, “chicken” that isn’t chicken, impossible burgers….just how stupid are you? The question answers itself. F**k you and your fraudulent, dumbass, politically correct fake food diet with a lamb shank.

Image(Vegan “butchers” are a thing, people)

50) For the 10,000th time: tipping is sexist, classist, racist, and elitist. And probably a dozen other ists which I can’t think of right now. If you’re in favor of tipping, you are buttressing the evil confederacy of cheapskate restaurant owners and self-serving servers — neither of whom give a damn about anything but the bottom line in their pocket. As Wendell Berry once said, “Eating is a political act,” and your attitudes about tipping have far-reaching consequences for society. Choose one: Am I a selfish asshole? Or someone who believes in fairness? It’s that simple. You’re welcome.

51) Yu-Or-Mi Sushi has gotten scary good. You heard it here first:

Image(Spooky sushi)

52) I wish I didn’t know that the foodie explosion of the past forty years is inversely proportional to the sustainability of life on this planet. What we have gained in the knowledge and enjoyment of better food has been devastating to our climate and the species we rely upon for our proteins. And by “we” I mean middle and upper-income Americans, Europeans, and Asians.

Every time you eat a piece of sushi, cheap salmon, free-range filet, or Chick-Fil-A, you are contributing to the unholy union, and devastating effects, of human avarice and appetite. True Beluga caviar does not exist anymore because short-term greed triumphed over long term husbandry. Tuna and who knows how many other fish will be next. Chicken dinners used to be special. Now we raise and kill them by the billions to feed our ever-hungry maws. As a species, we are addicted to cheap eats and advertising, and every living thing on the planet is suffering for it.

I have been fortunate in my life to taste the best meat and poultry money can buy. I’ve eaten oysters straight from the Bay of Mont Saint-Michel and striped bass right off a  Nantucket boat. (Once you’ve tasted a proper king salmon, in season, in the Pacific Northwest, you’ll never again order it  anywhere else.) I’ve had wild game and elusive birds brought to my table by chefs who bought them that morning from the hunters who claimed them. My fork has torn at the sweet, gamy well-traveled flesh of langoustines and wild turbot, flown 6,000 miles from their source for my amusement. Fromages fit for a king have sated my taste buds, just miles from where they were made. But it is all to end soon and I know it.

Flavorless truffles will soon be as ubiquitous as Portobellos.  Japan now makes “scotch” whisky. China is getting into the wine game, and what they produce will be passable, but not as good as those they seek to imitate. Uni from Hokkaido or Santa Barbara used to be a treat reserved for those in the know. Pretty soon someone will figure out how to farm them and they’ll appear at Red Lobster. (Okay, maybe that’s an analogy too far, but you get my point.)

Regardless, in a couple more centuries, humans will have used up the animals that have sustained us for millions of years. Overfishing destroyed the Atlantic cod stocks in half a century, probably never to return. We should be ashamed of ourselves but lust and commerce do not allow for such reflection. We are destined to be vegetarians and vegans (as soon as they figure out a proper food replacement for animal protein), and I’m kinda glad I won’t be around to see it.

So the last thing I know I know is to enjoy the earth’s cornucopia of great taste while we still can. Because soon enough, this dude will be making all the rules:

Best Vegan Problems GIFs | Gfycat

Bon appétit!

The 3% Solution

Image result for Lotus of Siam

You would’ve thought someone had put Rice Krispies in the Nam Khao Tod.

But this brouhaha had nothing to do with food.

What it concerned was this little cost dollop added to the bill, at Lotus of Siam, which hit the presses last week:

No photo description available.

THANK YOU. The 3% employee health insurance added to you bill help our team members afford health insurance for them and their families that is provided by the restaurant. Thank you for supporting a healthier Las Vegas. If you would like the charge removed, please let your server know and the charge will be removed.

The haters had a field day:

“Greedy owners!”

“I’ll never eat there again!”

“Obnoxious.”

“Tacky.”

“I hope this place closes.”

The dummies were out in force:

“We won’t be eating there. Customers should not have to pay for employees insurance/medical”

“The food is terrible and too expensive. Now I’ll never go back.” (A 3% surcharge apparently being more of a deal-breaker than terrible, overpriced food. Ed. note: the food at Lotus is some of the best Thai food in America.)

“This is what happens when California socialism destroys America.”

“I dont pay junk fees, so Avoid places like this. You fee me to death, you never get my business again. I dont CARE about your financial problems, don’t fee me to pay for your inability to make money,”

The slightly more rational objectors pointed out:

“It’s not our job to pay your employee’s healthcare! It doesn’t matter if the fee is optional the fact you put that on customers is ridiculous. Just spend the money and reprint menus and build it into your cost and not go the cheap route on the register receipt!”

So, you don’t want to supply your employee’s any benefits – but you think your customers should pay for it on top of your profit? Yeah, that’s going to go over like a lead balloon!

And a few intelligent folks chimed in along the lines of:

“I don’t mind paying an additional 3% for their healthcare. The restaurant should increase menu prices 3% instead of adding it to the bill separately; that way people can quit complaining. You guys are complaining about 30 cents for every $10.”

So it went on for hundreds and hundreds of comments, most of them by turns negative, incensed and disgusted.

Here’s the official statement, by Nay Chua, daughter of LOS founders Bill and Saipin Chutima:

 I do my best as a person to be able to provide, help and encourage my employees. I try to help by leveraging their cost so they can enjoy their way of life. I am able to provide my employees with a livable wage, with work hours that don’t impact their mental health or physical. I help my staff and their families. I try to save my staff on their deductions, their taxes, whatever they need help on, in legal fees and even personal problems.

Chua has also said in social media posts that she doesn’t want to increase prices (because she gets taxed on the revenue), or pay it directly to her employees (because it would then be taxed to them as income).

What’s going on here? Aside from diners generally being cheapskates and ignorant about how restaurants run?

Before we get to the answer(s), however, a few thoughts about what Lotus of Siam (our most famous and decorated restaurant), is trying to do.

By tacking on an additional 3% to the bill (which you see only at the end of your meal), it is asking the patron to subsidize its health insurance cost to employees. (Because it has more than 50 employees, LOS is mandated by law to provide health care coverage.)

But nothing raises a restaurant customer’s ire more than being told (asked?) to pay a little more for their meal. Especially when it’s a separate charge, specifically earmarked to help the restaurant’s employees.

Keep in mind the no-tipping policy of some restaurants is still under siege.

People love the illusion that they are totally in control of how much waiters get paid to deliver their food. Asking them to pay a little more is seen by many to be a personal affront.

Asking patrons to help a restaurant provide decent health insurance to its workers is something new (and admirable), but from the comments, you’d think the restaurant was asking its paying customers to underwrite a human trafficking operation.

Almost immediately upon showing this surcharge, the social media blowup began.

Image result for Nam khao tod(I would happily pay 36 cents more for this)

My thoughts:

The restaurant industry has created its own hell of unreasonable expectations, and now it’s being burned.

But the blame does not rest solely on its beefy shoulders; there’s plenty of chicken fingers to point at the other participants in this unholy stew of how we pay people to serve us. And now (to keep my metaphors mixed) those putrid birds are coming home to roost.

By depending on diners to directly defer labor costs, all sorts of false expectations get reinforced with each tip paid at almost every restaurant in America.

Thus does a culture of obliviousness remain here about the true cost of eating out.

This surcharge represents another in a long list of creative ways the hospitality industry has tried to boost its bottom line (or minimize expenses) by tacking on fees rather than incorporating them into the price being charged for what is actually being bought: be it a hotel bed, a meal, or a plane ticket to Timbuktu.

Nobody wants to actually raise prices (THAT WOULD DRIVE AWAY CUSTOMERS!) so instead they prefer to nibble their patrons to death with minnow-sized fees.

The bottom line is the bottom line: the restaurant industry has relied on customers underwriting their employment costs for so long, it can’t break the cycle of dependence. Foisting a significant part of its expenses on customers on an ad hoc, piecemeal basis has become a habit they can’t break.

For waiters, getting paid by customers as a different line item on the bill has been a sweet deal for years.

Customers get to see a lower check cost (while retaining the illusion that they somehow “control” or “reward” how good the service is); the waitstaff retains a deluded sense of independence (and the ability to cheat on their taxes); and the owner gets to pawn off part of his/her labor costs. (Wouldn’t my dry cleaner and lawn guys love it if they could tell their employees to look to me directly to help them make their paycheck.)

The trouble is, of course, that with all that freedom (from all points of the 3-legged stool) comes an in-bred lack of responsibility.

Customers aren’t paying the true cost of the meal (they’re chopping it up into segments so they can fool themselves about only paying $40 for dinner, even though they left a 22% tip and the actual cost was closer to fifty bucks.)

Waiters can make out like bandits — although with cash become scarcer, the (tax free) wad in your pocket at the end of the night is becoming rarer. And benefits? FUCK benefits. “Gimme the $$$ and I’ll benefit myself,” has been the mantra of restaurant workers for about a hundred years.

As for the owners….well, they’ve let these twin delusions keep them in tall cotton for a long time.

But things they be-a changing.

Whether it’s our booming economy, health-care politics, Millennial-inspired advocacy, or a mini-revolution how we eat out, a sea change in how restaurants operate is underway.

As governments have gotten more aggressive with labor laws, minimum wages, health care, etc., creative accountants have come up with all kinds of ways to defer expenses without raising prices.

In California, an entire cottage industry has sprung up advising restaurants how to increase the bill without actually having to pay more to the help, or in taxes.

It’s all a big exhausting game pitting the restaurant versus its employees and customers, in a new sort of 3-way contest.

And the big losers are you, the diner. The person who only wants some good, clean, tasty food delivered to him at a fair price.

Image

My thoughts Part II:

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the LOS gambit — it’s clearly a fair way for them to enlist the customer’s help in underwriting health care costs.

But the optics are all wrong.

The 3% charge may be optional, but not really. You have to take pains to have it removed. And as soon as it hits the table, the diner feels they’ve been had. And no one, in a restaurant like to feel like the restaurant has pulled a “gotcha!”

The moment the tariff is presented, the appearance is one of an entire dishonest exchange from the get-go. (People don’t read signs, let’s face it.)  By surprising the client, with a charge that has nothing to do with the food or service (see above), the restaurant is ensuring awkwardness all around.

The surcharge also inserts two things into people’s meals most would prefer to avoid: economics and politics — both of which leave a bad taste in the mouth.

And let’s face it: People are petty. If tacking a $1.50 fee onto a $50 bill (for an admittedly good cause) will keep them from a night on the town, then they shouldn’t be eating out in the first place. But the very act of asking them triggers something supremely small-minded in some folks (makes them think, perhaps?), and they will take their pettiness out on you.

The owners of Lotus of Siam are to be commended for their transparency in instituting this measure. Their intentions are honorable, but their methodology is flawed. As much as segregating an employee benefit and asking your patrons to help you finance it would seem to be the “right thing” to do, people, lots of them, won’t see it that way.

This 3% addendum creates a whole new dynamic between restaurant and customer far beyond the “you pay me, I’ll give you food” formula that has been in place for 200 years.

In a perfect world, we’d all be paying more for our food. Americans have become fat, stupid and lazy relying on cheap restaurant food (and labor) to sustain them. We eat so shitty because we eat so cheap. It’s high time we paid more for good food and paid restaurant employees like every other job.

Such a paradigm shift may be on the horizon, but in this town, at this time, if you want to bestow employees with more benefits (and not endure the blow-back), the best thing to do is add a buck to the price of your burrito.

Image result for Lotus of Siam

 

When Did Tipping Become a Stick-Up?

ELV note: Have things gotten out of hand over hand outs? Click on the link below to read John Mariani’s article in its original format, or continue after the jump. Either way, wethinks you’ll want to weigh in on what’s going on when it comes to this “gratuity” ….that’s now all but demanded by restaurants and their staffs.

WHEN DID TIPPING BECOME A STICK-UP

By John Mariani

On a recent TV show a restaurateur told the host that he would never have a problem getting the best table in the house, but that all those out there watching that show were going to have to pony up big time to get even the slightest recognition of hospitality at his restaurants.
He then went on to detail exactly what amounts achieved precisely which results at his restaurants:  “Twenty dollars will get you noticed,” he said. “Fifty will get you a good table. But you’re going to have to pay out a hundred to get a  great table.”

Continue reading “When Did Tipping Become a Stick-Up?”