Well, to some degree I agree, particularly when people really mean they just don’t like something when they claim they are allergic to it. But sometimes I have more sympathy for Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. Why can’t I have toast if I want it?
2 Likes
No, she’s just a pain in the ass. I actually know and like this person otherwise, but that’s just being a pain.
Somewhere in the middle there’s sanity. I’ll sometimes ask for rings when something specifically says “served with fries” and happily pay more for the chance.
Some places put cheese on a club (why, I don’t know) and I ask for none.
But I don’t say "I’d like the bacon blue cheese burger, but with american instead of blue, ham instead of bacon, toast instead of a bun, extra pickles and sauted mushrooms on the side.
That’s being a dick. 
3 Likes
Even though I occasionally make fun of individuals like you describe, it strikes me as amazing that we live in a time where that kind of diet is even possible.
3 Likes
I knew a girl who would only eat toast and raspberry jam, tinned mackerel and oven chips. Every meal.
Some day I want to write a book about weird food and weird food aversions. Tinned mackeral!? I love the stuff, but it is usually the last thing a picky eater would choose.
…and another pic of weird food I’ve encountered. (The Lamb and Mint chips were better)
2 Likes
I predict lower (and upper) GI problems in her future…
I went out for pizza one time with a friend and he ordered a half pepperoni and half mushroom large, put one piece of each together and declared himself a genius - “look, a pepperoni, mushroom pizza for the price of a single topping pie!”
Yea, you’re Albert Fucking Einstein.
2 Likes
Is is also possible, that for a while, the chef wasn’t preforming adequately, and/or the supplies weren’t fresh. Too many customer complaints can spoil the soup chefs mood. In my experience, successive complaints by several different customers in food service rarely occur in a vacuum.
1 Like
Can be. Depends on the traffic. Even the old “soup nazi” script involved a situation of high traffic restuarant, where the chef was incensed at particular deviations from his particular norm.
I am nomadic and not attached to any particular group [here] or locality, and have worked as an independent contractor who has stayed long term in a variety of cities… some do stand out in term of social strictures, some for religious reasons, some for political, altogether it is social. SF is one of those.
Las Vegas or Chicago would be more in the opposite of that. Bible Belt, lol, would be more similar.
I could definitely see Halal chef’s getting upset at some customer’s insistences, just as I could see a very orthodox, traditional Chinese chef at some outside group’s insistences.
OTOH, seen plenty of restaurants where the staff and chefs were utter crap, and they are somehow able to keep on running. Though usually go out of business. Or have some sideline business which keeps them going like meth sales or gambling in the backroom.
But, I can also see how this might get personal, as it is a statement on SF social strictures, a group to which many here very much belong and does have many very strong and authentic liberal leanings.
2 Likes
When I was a kid my dad used to take me to a narrow dingy restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown district. The chef would come out during our meal with a meat cleaver in his hand and in a thick Chinese accent he would ask how our meal was… while the cleaver bobbed up and down slightly in my face. It was always “delicious!”
4 Likes
I’m all for making sure kids try things and not catering to their every whim, but then there are things I don’t like and won’t eat. People are constantly amazed by the fact that I don’t like banana bread*. If someone told me I had to eat it, I’d tell them to fuck off, as is my right. I feel like children have similar rights, sometimes a kid isn’t just “being difficult,” and they don’t want to eat the dang thing. It’s one thing when they’re just picky as hell, but the other extreme is not letting your kids dislike things.
* There’s a story here. I was taking an organic lab and was injecting a sample of isoamyl acetate into the gas chromatography machine. For those who don’t know, these machines have a rubber inlet into which you inject a sample. Behind the inlet, at positive pressure, is helium gas. The syringes used in a chemistry lab are a little different from the one you see at the doctor’s office. Since the substances being analyzed are organic, the syringe itself is made of nothing but glass, with the plunger being a thin wire of metal of appropriate diameter to form a seal. Although airtight, the action is fairly loose. I neglected to keep my finger on the plunger as instructed and was kneeling in front of the machine. The positive pressure blew the plunger out and squirted the sample directly into my face and nostrils.
Isoamyl acetate is also known as banana oil. I can’t stand anything that has the same sickly concentrated banana scent to this day.
7 Likes
I could never stand bananas, even as a baby, and wouldn’t go near anything that smelled even faintly of them. I got tricked into trying a piece of banana bread while in my late teens, and loved it! I even enjoyed a banana in this morning’s breakfast smoothie, but still can’t eat 'em from the peel or even sliced. It can be a texture or smell or appearance issue that scares kids away more than the taste.
But watching a 40-something guy in front of me in line at Jimmy Johns ordering a #9 club without the crust still made me laugh.
1 Like
I had an ex who, upon learning her latest allergy/sensitivity (she was already lactose intolerant, and had a number of allergies including a yeast sensitivity that meant all alcohol intake had to be distilled booze), decided to say “fuck it” to the part that was within her control, namely the veganism, and her life got a lot more relaxed.
1 Like
When the custy says they have celiac and do we have gluten free bread and I respond “Oh, but our kitchen isn’t gluten free. I’m really sorry but I’m afraid we have nothing to offer you but pre-packaged chips.or fruit”
And they respond: “I don’t have it that bad.”
1 Like
At kaiten-zushi joints the Japanese welcome their robot overlords.
They have great chip flavours in Thailand, even if they are pretty conventional. Never seen Tom Yum there.
Lay’s makes cucumber chips in China, and they are surprisingly cool and refreshing, as advertised.
1 Like
That’s the key line. When my brother leaves his kids with me, they’ve already figured out that they better eat what I give them, since they’re not going to get anything else unless they make it themselves. My brother loves it.
I don’t make them eat anything disgusting though. Like liver and onions, or brussels sprouts. But dammit, if I set out to make a five-alarm red beans and rice, they’re not going to get anything else, and they know it. And now they like spicy stuff. Sure there was that time, they cried all night about being fed a little capsaicin the first time. But you give it to them a few more times, and they get the hang of it and figure out that it’s not actually poisonous.
1 Like
That’s neurotic as far as I’m concerned
1 Like
I’m with you on this. I encourage my four year old to try new things, but hell, sometimes you’re just not in the mood. And if he does try it and doesn’t like it, well, no big deal.
That doesn’t mean he’s allowed to eat only rice when we go to the Japanese restaurant, though.
2 Likes
To that point, there was for a long time, a Filipino restaurant in my neighborhood that was just awful. You go in there at lunch, they blithely sidle up to your table after 20 minutes in an empty house. Order the lumpia? Prepare to wait 45 minutes, and be given 4 obviously microwaved lumpia that are still frozen in the center.
The place never had any traffic. I’m pretty sure I was one of only a handful of people who tried to order there. Everything they served took an hour or longer, and they always seemed to act horribly inconvenienced by me coming by during business hours to order food from what was ostensibly a restaurant.
Turned out it was part of a laundering set-up along with a local church. They were awful at being a restaurant because they were too busy waiting for their partners to come by, ask for “a special” and pay their 12 cent bill with $5,000 in cash.
4 Likes
I will have the Caesar salad. But with no lemon juice or garlic or worcestershire sauce, and substitute the croutons with pepperoni, and add double cheese and tomato, and instead of lettuce place the ingredients over a pizza base and bake it all until golden brown, please.
8 Likes
Maybe for some people, but not all. Being a texture-sensitive super-taster is miserable, or was for me as a kid. I had a major breakthrough when I realized that 70% of the problem was what was considered “normal/favorite foods” in my culture - sweet-ish salad dressing, iceberg lettuce, mayo-based salads, cold cuts, canned and boiled vegetables, all things I STILL refuse to eat even though I’m now so eclectic in my tastes. But I spat out the first egg my mother ever put in my mouth and I still don’t like hard-cooked eggs at all because I taste the sulfur so strongly. Still can’t fathom how people eat celery because it’s gaggingly bitter to me.
My sister is even worse because she has the texture issue on top of the super-tasting. Plus she lives with chronic pain (migraines) and I reckon anything else unpleasant on her nervous system is probably just taking the piss, even if she might eventually grow to tolerate or like it. I’m glad I learned how to like brussels sprouts and kale and beer, but it definitely wasn’t a choice to have such strong reactions to those flavors when I was a kid.
4 Likes
