I'm married to this post: someone who is painfully, and in public socially-awkwardly, super-indecisive about small matters (time to leave! tends to be another one). The scenario of the waitress coming by and saying, are you ready to order? - he always answers in the affirmative though he's still studying the menu, so I order, then he looks up at her as if in appeal, if an unfamiliar place typically asks an irrelevant food question of her that amounts to asking what color she prefers; never goes with any forthcoming suggestion, anyway (this will also be true when he asks you which shirt to wear); "Yeah, I'm going to have, I think I'm going to get .... [long pause] ..."
This is a painful, triggering topic. I wish you had never brought it up.
That said, in any moral question in life, and in anything related practically or intellectually, to his field - my husband knows the answer, and is not gripped with doubt. It is marvelous to behold.
So, you live with la différence. Nobody can change, and nobody ever will.
I agree that the freak out is weird, but my wife and I have pretty similar tastes so we usually get more joy out of splitting two meals than we would out of each sticking to our own dish. (Not always, though!)
I also couldn’t agree more about considering the context of what the restaurant is known for, and I am also often the person who steps up when ordering tapas or family-style
> Put the whole order in at once. Incomplete orders are one of my big restaurant pet peeves. I hate them for the same reason most restaurants do — getting the order in all at once helps them pace your order correctly and avoid a long gap between service of appetizers and mains. It also saves the wait staff time. So when dining with a group, I do my best to enforce all-at-once ordering. It’s really in everybody’s best interest.
This is one of those times where you hear about a new concept or mode of behavior so legitimately shocking that you feel like you might have flipped a bit in the world simulation. Like when you find out that Alabamans call shopping carts "buggies".
I have never, in 10,000 years, ever heard of or remotely contemplated the notion of a table ordering the same part of the meal in multiple incomplete groups.
I'm talking about ordering appetizers and then not ordering your entrees until the appetizers have been delivered, which is a thing I see people try to do with alarming frequency.
I also prefer to order everything at once, but wait staffs often encourage this! They’ll ask if we want appetizers when ordering drinks (within minutes of sitting down)!
Thank God. I can at least wrap my head around people behaving this way, even if it falls short of best practices.
(It is a very weird asterisk of modernity that I'm replying to you in a comment chain in the very instant as I am listening to Serious Trouble--I had to pause. It was just too weird.)
Is it permissible to order a shared appetizer along with the drinks, so that it’s in progress while you’re perusing the rest of the menu? E.g., a plate of nachos or whatever.
That seems like normal behavior, whereas yes, everyone ordering an individual appetizer and then refusing to order entrees until they’ve all arrived seems like space-alien stuff.
I don't think this is a best practice, but I've noticed waiters increasingly prompting diners to order in this way, which I guess must mean it's not a problem for their workflow. We did this the other day because one of our dining companions had gone to the wrong restaurant and was late. It happens.
As I said below, and this confirms, this has a wider spread that just Alabama
> 5 also grocery buggy, shopping ~: A four-wheeled cart with a metal or plastic basket provided by a supermarket or other large store for customers to use while shopping. chiefly Sth, S Midl, OH, PA Cf carriage n 1
They were from Scranton, so not quite that part of PA.
They had some other weird idiolectical things that I always attributed to growing up bilingual with Russian. This is really the first one I've actually found out was a regional saying somewhere else!
edit: Sharty's link above confirms that's not just Alabama
> 5 also grocery buggy, shopping ~: A four-wheeled cart with a metal or plastic basket provided by a supermarket or other large store for customers to use while shopping. chiefly Sth, S Midl, OH, PA Cf carriage n 1
"For many, it’s verboten" I'm sorry is this a thing? Reminds me of those New York Times "trend" pieces that talks about the supposed "new trend" in town or new hip place that somehow always ends with some interviewee saying a version of "anyone who's anyone is living in or doing XXX"
Honest to god, if a restaurant has a signature dish, why wouldn't it be something multiple people order at a table? Also, has this writer heard of sharing a pizza? You know, the most popular food item in America to eat? If that's not having the same meal, I don't know what is.
There''s a slow news week and then there articles like this or "Tan Suit" (still my go to example of how right-wing media speaking in one voice can make anything a story).
Tan suit was as self-defeating as anything liberals tried in the Trump era, basically the conservative equivalent to “Drumpf”. It just tells normies you are not even trying to make an argument anymore
I think for me it's actually instructive you chose "Drumpf". It was a "Last week tonight" joke that...didn't take off. Tan Suit actually managed to get mainstream media attention and think is a good example of media asymmetry.
Totally fair, and I think conservative media is much dumber than liberal media (NYT isn't perfect, but I enjoy it and it's an objectively excellent product). But it was also a complete failure for the right because it made them sound like they were all 900-year-old decorum-obsessed neurotic weirdos. A nice reminder given that nowadays weirdo neuroses are more associated with the left
You're point well taken though. There are certain stories/jokes that you only understand or get if you're in a particular media bubble. I think it's much more a problem on the right, but yes it's hardly as though the left is immune to it.
This is the best restaurant advice I've ever read. My friends and I almost always do this wrong and it's so nerve-wracking. The only useful thing I sometimes do is to study the online menu in advance to make a tentative choice in advance or at least be better oriented to it. Thank you, Josh!
This is such a great post. My husband gets so annoyed when I get frazzled if we order the same thing and I know it’s something I need to get over and I’m working on it. Showed him the headline when he got home today, he laughed and said “hope you read it and took it to heart!”
As a rule if I'm at a decent restaurant dining as a pair, I'll order something different. There's going to be at least 2 good things on the menu, and I always find it weird to sit there and eat the same thing where there were other options - live a little, eat that slightly less obvious choice.
But if you're the 80 year old president of the united states eating with your wife of 46 years, get the pasta if you want the pasta. You're not in need of broadening you horizons.
This was one of the stupidest “controversies” I can remember. I cannot figure out why WaPo chose to ask a 24 year old about this either. I’m not against a 24 year old having opinions, but that seemed to be their main qualification. Pretty much everyone who has been 24 and is now older knows that new college grads have no idea what they’re talking about regarding restaurants. That said, I do enjoy the throwback to truly stupid controversies vs. “are we in a capitalist hellscape” (no) controversies.
> If the menu is built around shared plates, someone needs to be in charge.
There are some places where this works, but it’s far fewer than the number of places that tell you to do this. It’s my biggest eating out pet peeve. I am extremely good at ordering the food I want to eat, in the quantity I want to eat it in, and I would almost never prefer one serving of 5 things to 5 servings of the best thing. If you ask me if I want to share plates, the answer is no and you should just get better at ordering yourself. Dessert is the only exception, but only because I usually try to limit myself to one bite of the best thing.
"If you ask me if I want to share plates, the answer is no and you should just get better at ordering yourself. Dessert is the only exception, but only because I usually try to limit myself to one bite of the best thing."
I'm like you, but my wife is a "wants to try everything" type. It occasionally results in friction when she essentially wants to quarterback both of our orders ("ok you get A and I'll get B for the first course, then we switch halfway, then I'll get C and you get D for mains, but I definitely want some of those prawns on yours!") and I just want to get what I want and eat off my own plate
Totally disagree with your point about placing the entire order at once. Placing it all at once means that 95% of the time your entree will arrive before you have finished your appetizer. Only if you are in a hurry should you place the entire order at once.
Also, ask for the check when you order dessert. So many times I've found that the server's attention to the table falls off a cliff as the meal progresses. Getting the check with dessert allows you to pay, enjoy your dessert and maybe hang a bit more to finish drinks and then simply go. Don't wait to get the check when you're ready to go--it's already too late.
The bourgeoisie was maligned in the past, often unfairly, as more recently were yuppies. We should be tolerant of other’s neurosis and social insecurities.
That said, if, as a society, we don’t want the children of corporate lawyers, lobbyists and lifestyle journalists to rebel and become Marxist revolutionaries we may have to crank up the ridicule of their parents at times like these.
It can be fun to have little debates about what looks best and even a slight preference for ordering something different from your partner or friends if you are a small group. This is a way of getting excited about what you're about to eat.
I think this is a matter where having opinions that are too strong, *even if they are sensible,* is a bit neurotic. Everybody should order appetizers and the main at the same time, but if somebody won't order the duck because I'm ordering it, that's fine. If they make a little remark because I pick the duck after they did, I just say "but it sounds so good!"
If they actually get annoyed at me, *that's* neurotic, but this kind of opinion tends to be lightly held.
Not sure if this is obnoxious, but when dining in a large group at an excellent restaurant, I will just ask the waiter to bring me what he thinks is best. I may not get the very best thing on the menu *for me*, but the odds of me being satisfied are high. And I’ve yet to have a waiter screw me with “Market” something or other.
This lets me keep my focus on socializing/drinking, while getting some additional value from the soon-to-be-well-tipped waiter.
In lower stakes places, I’ll often ask their opinion between my top two choices.
Josh, how do you feel about substitutions/modifications? I'm not talking about cases in which the restaurant encourages it on the menu, which, as a vegetarian of many many years, I certainly take advantage of from time to time.
I'm talking about "I'm not used to eating [dish] with [ingredient], so I'd better have them leave off the [ingredient]."
I am generally anti-substitution but it's not a bright-line view. If there's something you're allergic to and the dish will still work without it -- e.g., you want the sesame seeds left off the topping for a crudo -- then go ahead and ask for that. But in general I think you should trust the restaurant's judgment on flavor, and if the thing you're trying to avoid is sufficiently central to the dish, you should just order something else.
Oh yeah, allergies are an obvious exception. People should absolutely ask to substitute for something they're allergic to.
I agree 100 percent about trusting the restaurant's judgment. So what if it's a combination you haven't seen before? They surely haven't put it on the menu at random -- maybe TRY IT rather than automatically rejecting it.
This is an increasingly big pet peeve of mine. Why go to a restaurant at all if you don't want to see how they make food? Gah!
I'm married to this post: someone who is painfully, and in public socially-awkwardly, super-indecisive about small matters (time to leave! tends to be another one). The scenario of the waitress coming by and saying, are you ready to order? - he always answers in the affirmative though he's still studying the menu, so I order, then he looks up at her as if in appeal, if an unfamiliar place typically asks an irrelevant food question of her that amounts to asking what color she prefers; never goes with any forthcoming suggestion, anyway (this will also be true when he asks you which shirt to wear); "Yeah, I'm going to have, I think I'm going to get .... [long pause] ..."
This is a painful, triggering topic. I wish you had never brought it up.
That said, in any moral question in life, and in anything related practically or intellectually, to his field - my husband knows the answer, and is not gripped with doubt. It is marvelous to behold.
So, you live with la différence. Nobody can change, and nobody ever will.
I love this
I agree that the freak out is weird, but my wife and I have pretty similar tastes so we usually get more joy out of splitting two meals than we would out of each sticking to our own dish. (Not always, though!)
I also couldn’t agree more about considering the context of what the restaurant is known for, and I am also often the person who steps up when ordering tapas or family-style
> Put the whole order in at once. Incomplete orders are one of my big restaurant pet peeves. I hate them for the same reason most restaurants do — getting the order in all at once helps them pace your order correctly and avoid a long gap between service of appetizers and mains. It also saves the wait staff time. So when dining with a group, I do my best to enforce all-at-once ordering. It’s really in everybody’s best interest.
This is one of those times where you hear about a new concept or mode of behavior so legitimately shocking that you feel like you might have flipped a bit in the world simulation. Like when you find out that Alabamans call shopping carts "buggies".
I have never, in 10,000 years, ever heard of or remotely contemplated the notion of a table ordering the same part of the meal in multiple incomplete groups.
I'm talking about ordering appetizers and then not ordering your entrees until the appetizers have been delivered, which is a thing I see people try to do with alarming frequency.
I also prefer to order everything at once, but wait staffs often encourage this! They’ll ask if we want appetizers when ordering drinks (within minutes of sitting down)!
Thank God. I can at least wrap my head around people behaving this way, even if it falls short of best practices.
(It is a very weird asterisk of modernity that I'm replying to you in a comment chain in the very instant as I am listening to Serious Trouble--I had to pause. It was just too weird.)
This seems like it would be unsatisfying even to most of the diners who order this way.
But, basically every waiter initially asks for a drink order. Is it OK to order drinks first or should we be ready with the full order at that point.
No, of course it's fine to order drinks first.
Is it permissible to order a shared appetizer along with the drinks, so that it’s in progress while you’re perusing the rest of the menu? E.g., a plate of nachos or whatever.
That seems like normal behavior, whereas yes, everyone ordering an individual appetizer and then refusing to order entrees until they’ve all arrived seems like space-alien stuff.
I don't think this is a best practice, but I've noticed waiters increasingly prompting diners to order in this way, which I guess must mean it's not a problem for their workflow. We did this the other day because one of our dining companions had gone to the wrong restaurant and was late. It happens.
"Can I start you off with anything?" is something I hear not-uncommonly, which seems like a house invitation to do that.
Drinks usually go to the bar and not the kitchen so it’s different
> Like when you find out that Alabamans call shopping carts "buggies".
What.
Couldn't make it up if I tried
https://dare.wisc.edu/words/quarterly-updates/quarterly-update-9/buggy/
As I said below, and this confirms, this has a wider spread that just Alabama
> 5 also grocery buggy, shopping ~: A four-wheeled cart with a metal or plastic basket provided by a supermarket or other large store for customers to use while shopping. chiefly Sth, S Midl, OH, PA Cf carriage n 1
In Brooklyn, I have seen grocery store signage referring to shopping carts as "wagons."
My PA-bred grandparents also called shopping carts buggies, so I’m wondering if it’s a generational thing that Alabama just never gave up.
Could be an Appalachian thing? - it's further in extent than one imagines.
They were from Scranton, so not quite that part of PA.
They had some other weird idiolectical things that I always attributed to growing up bilingual with Russian. This is really the first one I've actually found out was a regional saying somewhere else!
edit: Sharty's link above confirms that's not just Alabama
> 5 also grocery buggy, shopping ~: A four-wheeled cart with a metal or plastic basket provided by a supermarket or other large store for customers to use while shopping. chiefly Sth, S Midl, OH, PA Cf carriage n 1
so there you go
I wonder if it's linked with the geographic distribution of Piggly Wiggly, one of the very first self-serve grocery stores in the modern style.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly
"For many, it’s verboten" I'm sorry is this a thing? Reminds me of those New York Times "trend" pieces that talks about the supposed "new trend" in town or new hip place that somehow always ends with some interviewee saying a version of "anyone who's anyone is living in or doing XXX"
Honest to god, if a restaurant has a signature dish, why wouldn't it be something multiple people order at a table? Also, has this writer heard of sharing a pizza? You know, the most popular food item in America to eat? If that's not having the same meal, I don't know what is.
There''s a slow news week and then there articles like this or "Tan Suit" (still my go to example of how right-wing media speaking in one voice can make anything a story).
Tan suit was as self-defeating as anything liberals tried in the Trump era, basically the conservative equivalent to “Drumpf”. It just tells normies you are not even trying to make an argument anymore
I think for me it's actually instructive you chose "Drumpf". It was a "Last week tonight" joke that...didn't take off. Tan Suit actually managed to get mainstream media attention and think is a good example of media asymmetry.
Totally fair, and I think conservative media is much dumber than liberal media (NYT isn't perfect, but I enjoy it and it's an objectively excellent product). But it was also a complete failure for the right because it made them sound like they were all 900-year-old decorum-obsessed neurotic weirdos. A nice reminder given that nowadays weirdo neuroses are more associated with the left
You're point well taken though. There are certain stories/jokes that you only understand or get if you're in a particular media bubble. I think it's much more a problem on the right, but yes it's hardly as though the left is immune to it.
Now going live to our Normal Behavior expert “Hannah Madden, a 24-year-old Washington resident who does fundraising for a political nonprofit.”
Depending on the kind of fundraising they do, ordering well in restaurants can be an important professional skill for a fundraiser.
This is the best restaurant advice I've ever read. My friends and I almost always do this wrong and it's so nerve-wracking. The only useful thing I sometimes do is to study the online menu in advance to make a tentative choice in advance or at least be better oriented to it. Thank you, Josh!
This is such a great post. My husband gets so annoyed when I get frazzled if we order the same thing and I know it’s something I need to get over and I’m working on it. Showed him the headline when he got home today, he laughed and said “hope you read it and took it to heart!”
As a rule if I'm at a decent restaurant dining as a pair, I'll order something different. There's going to be at least 2 good things on the menu, and I always find it weird to sit there and eat the same thing where there were other options - live a little, eat that slightly less obvious choice.
But if you're the 80 year old president of the united states eating with your wife of 46 years, get the pasta if you want the pasta. You're not in need of broadening you horizons.
This was one of the stupidest “controversies” I can remember. I cannot figure out why WaPo chose to ask a 24 year old about this either. I’m not against a 24 year old having opinions, but that seemed to be their main qualification. Pretty much everyone who has been 24 and is now older knows that new college grads have no idea what they’re talking about regarding restaurants. That said, I do enjoy the throwback to truly stupid controversies vs. “are we in a capitalist hellscape” (no) controversies.
> If the menu is built around shared plates, someone needs to be in charge.
There are some places where this works, but it’s far fewer than the number of places that tell you to do this. It’s my biggest eating out pet peeve. I am extremely good at ordering the food I want to eat, in the quantity I want to eat it in, and I would almost never prefer one serving of 5 things to 5 servings of the best thing. If you ask me if I want to share plates, the answer is no and you should just get better at ordering yourself. Dessert is the only exception, but only because I usually try to limit myself to one bite of the best thing.
"If you ask me if I want to share plates, the answer is no and you should just get better at ordering yourself. Dessert is the only exception, but only because I usually try to limit myself to one bite of the best thing."
YES. Oh my god. No I do NOT want to share!
I'm like you, but my wife is a "wants to try everything" type. It occasionally results in friction when she essentially wants to quarterback both of our orders ("ok you get A and I'll get B for the first course, then we switch halfway, then I'll get C and you get D for mains, but I definitely want some of those prawns on yours!") and I just want to get what I want and eat off my own plate
I think you're missing the point of a (true) Tapas restaurant
This is why I despise tapas restaurants. Sorry, not interested in sharing, or only getting like, 2 bites of something delicious but paying $15 for it.
“There are some places where this works”
Totally disagree with your point about placing the entire order at once. Placing it all at once means that 95% of the time your entree will arrive before you have finished your appetizer. Only if you are in a hurry should you place the entire order at once.
You are eating at the wrong restaurants, I think
“Wrong” 😉
Also, ask for the check when you order dessert. So many times I've found that the server's attention to the table falls off a cliff as the meal progresses. Getting the check with dessert allows you to pay, enjoy your dessert and maybe hang a bit more to finish drinks and then simply go. Don't wait to get the check when you're ready to go--it's already too late.
So you’re suggested you’re the Tapas Top, if you will.
Jeffery.
The bourgeoisie was maligned in the past, often unfairly, as more recently were yuppies. We should be tolerant of other’s neurosis and social insecurities.
That said, if, as a society, we don’t want the children of corporate lawyers, lobbyists and lifestyle journalists to rebel and become Marxist revolutionaries we may have to crank up the ridicule of their parents at times like these.
It can be fun to have little debates about what looks best and even a slight preference for ordering something different from your partner or friends if you are a small group. This is a way of getting excited about what you're about to eat.
I think this is a matter where having opinions that are too strong, *even if they are sensible,* is a bit neurotic. Everybody should order appetizers and the main at the same time, but if somebody won't order the duck because I'm ordering it, that's fine. If they make a little remark because I pick the duck after they did, I just say "but it sounds so good!"
If they actually get annoyed at me, *that's* neurotic, but this kind of opinion tends to be lightly held.
Not sure if this is obnoxious, but when dining in a large group at an excellent restaurant, I will just ask the waiter to bring me what he thinks is best. I may not get the very best thing on the menu *for me*, but the odds of me being satisfied are high. And I’ve yet to have a waiter screw me with “Market” something or other.
This lets me keep my focus on socializing/drinking, while getting some additional value from the soon-to-be-well-tipped waiter.
In lower stakes places, I’ll often ask their opinion between my top two choices.
Josh, how do you feel about substitutions/modifications? I'm not talking about cases in which the restaurant encourages it on the menu, which, as a vegetarian of many many years, I certainly take advantage of from time to time.
I'm talking about "I'm not used to eating [dish] with [ingredient], so I'd better have them leave off the [ingredient]."
I certainly know how *I* feel.
I am generally anti-substitution but it's not a bright-line view. If there's something you're allergic to and the dish will still work without it -- e.g., you want the sesame seeds left off the topping for a crudo -- then go ahead and ask for that. But in general I think you should trust the restaurant's judgment on flavor, and if the thing you're trying to avoid is sufficiently central to the dish, you should just order something else.
Oh yeah, allergies are an obvious exception. People should absolutely ask to substitute for something they're allergic to.
I agree 100 percent about trusting the restaurant's judgment. So what if it's a combination you haven't seen before? They surely haven't put it on the menu at random -- maybe TRY IT rather than automatically rejecting it.
This is an increasingly big pet peeve of mine. Why go to a restaurant at all if you don't want to see how they make food? Gah!