6 things restaurants will never tell you

Finding a good restaurant and having a good meal is supposed to be the most enjoyable and pleasant thing, but sometimes it makes you feel upset and you feel inexplicably taken advantage of. When you go to a restaurant, what are the pitfalls and facts you should know?

1. Recommend "Today's Specials" to clean the kitchen

When you enter a restaurant, if the waiter recommends dishes to you in a very exaggerated way, it may be that he wants to "clean the kitchen". What is a clean kitchen? It's like "Today's Dish", which is a dish that is not on the menu. Some ingredients are about to expire, so the chef has to rack his brains to come up with some new dishes to digest them.

Or it could be a "signature dish", which you will see on every table. With the waiter's eloquent recommendation, the chef can easily prepare the ingredients and stir-fry the dishes ordered by everyone together, saving gas and time. So if the chef offends the outside service staff, the result will be that the dishes ordered by guests at different tables will all be different, making the kitchen staff exhausted.

You are the guest, you are the boss! You know best what you like to eat. I suggest you ask the waiter, how does the dish taste? What ingredients are in it? Then decide whether to listen to him or not.

2. Fried fish often turns into deep-fried fish

Do you know how long it takes to fry a fish? The answer is 20 minutes. Do you know how many dishes you can stir-fry in 20 minutes? The answer is 20. If you have the concept of time cost, if the boss wants to sell you a fried fish, he will have to sell several fewer dishes, so no one will waste time frying fish for you.

Gourmets all think that fried fish tastes better than deep-fried fish. What is the difference between fried fish and deep-fried fish? Simply put, it is the difference in degree of delicacy. A good fried fish has a crispy and fragrant skin, and smells like "chichi" in Taiwanese. When you use chopsticks to pick up the fish, the gravy will slowly seep out, and the outer layer of the fish is chewy but tender. These subtle changes in the texture of the meat are definitely the taste of fried fish.

If that’s the case, why don’t restaurants like to fry fish? Because frying fish requires not only patience, but also superb skills and the ability to control the heat. As for frying fish? Honestly, it requires almost no skills. Just throw it in and you don’t have to stand by the pan the whole time. Of course, the taste is so ordinary that it’s hard to remember.

3. Pour sweet and sour sauce on food to cover up the refrigerator smell

If the ingredients are fresh, the first choice of cooking method is definitely steaming or roasting; if they are not fresh, restaurants most often marinate them first and then stir-fry them, and finally season them with sweet and sour sauce.

Sweet and sour sauce can kill two birds with one stone: remove the fishy smell and enhance the flavor. This is especially true for frozen and expiring ingredients. Just add sweet and sour sauce to cover up the frozen refrigerator smell and even stimulate appetite. So if you told me that fresh fish should be made sweet and sour, I would scream that it is a waste of food!

4. Frying stale ingredients

One of the unspoken rules in the restaurant industry is that all stale ingredients must be fried. In some hot stir-fry restaurants, the dishes are either stir-fried with strong flavors or deep-fried and then dipped in pepper and salt. Or, all the seafood is frozen, and the "delicious" food is made by frying and adding MSG. I guarantee that you will be thirsty for three days and three nights after eating it.

If you have a chance, you can do an experiment. Buy a piece of stale meat, marinate it with seasonings, then dip it in flour and egg liquid, coat it with breadcrumbs and fry it. The finished product will definitely be delicious and everyone will eat it up in a flash. No one will be able to tell how stale the meat was.

5. “Handmade dishes” may be frozen and then thawed

These days, every second counts and time is money. Customers are unwilling to wait for their food, and restaurants are unwilling to prepare labor-intensive dishes. Therefore, for dishes that need to be stewed for a long time, restaurants often try to make the food become soft and tender in a short period of time, in order to save gas and time. Dishes like lion head, Wuxi spare ribs, and sealed meat are rarely made fresh. Most restaurants cook them first and then freeze them. They are then thawed and processed after the customers place an order.

After the tedious process of chopping, frying, freezing and then warming up, the freshness and sweetness of the ingredients themselves have long been destroyed, so a lot of chemical seasonings have to be added to make people have an endless aftertaste. When ordering these dishes, people often consume too much seasoning without realizing it. It's OK to eat handmade dishes occasionally for nostalgia, but it is not recommended to eat this kind of dishes often. The reason is that there is no need to add anything extra to good ingredients.

6. Seafood raised in aquariums is not necessarily good

Live seafood is better than frozen seafood. When you go to a restaurant and see the seafood jumping around in the aquarium, you often feel that it is super fresh. But the fact is, there is a high possibility that what you are eating is sick seafood that is barely alive.

If seafood of different species, from different sea areas and growing environments are kept in the same aquarium, they will only become thinner and are very susceptible to infection and disease. In order to prevent the seafood that is airlifted to Taiwan at high prices from dying, we have to put drugs in the water to enhance resistance and activity, making you feel that the seafood is really alive.