“Food is an important part of a balanced diet. But in a restaurant, it’s mostly just an expensive way to get a headache from the noise and the salt.” [Fran Lebowitz]
By Daiman Teer for The Simpleton Star
In the last twenty years, I have consumed thousands of meals across this country, and I cannot recall a single one that was worth the bill. In fact, one day after leaving any restaurant, when asked what I ordered, there is a 90% chance I won’t remember.
From the white-tablecloth cathedrals of “fine dining” to the local bistros that the simpletons rave about, the American restaurant industry has become a vast, expensive wasteland of interchangeable junk. It doesn’t matter if there is a valet out front or a line around the block; the food is universally awful. All restaurants suck! Deal with it or stay the fuck home and learn to cook.
It’s not only restaurants that suck – and we will get into that in another article — because if you walk into a dining room and see a spiral-sliced ham sitting on the sideboard, don’t sit down—run for your life. Any host who serves a mass-produced, salt-injected block of pink industrial foam has officially announced they have no taste, no standards, and no business inviting human beings over for dinner. We are living through the era of the “Salt Crutch” and the “Butter Mask” and the spiral ham.
Go to a high-end steakhouse (they all stink — all of them) and what do you get? A piece of beef (aged to vulture level rancidity) that has been hammered with so much sodium it tastes like Ruffian’s last salt lick, served with a “signature” sauce that is basically just a reduction of industrial chemicals and sugar.
Go to a “sophisticated” Italian spot and you’ll find pasta swimming in a swamp of cream and garlic—a desperate attempt to hide the fact that the flour is cheap and the tomatoes are acidic canned garbage.
The American restaurant is a performance, not a culinary pursuit. It is a place where “presentation” is used to distract you from the total absence of flavor. They stack the food into vertical towers, they drizzle balsamic glaze in meaningless patterns, and they wrap everything in bacon like it’s a mummified corpse from a discount butcher shop. It is the culinary equivalent of a “fast-fashion” suit: it looks okay from twenty feet away in the right lighting, but the moment you put it on, you realize it’s made of polyester and held together by glue.
Then there are the “artisanal” pizza cathedrals, or even the local pizza parlor, where you pay forty dollars to sit on a metal stool, or take it home, and consume a disc of charred dough that has been weaponized with enough sodium to preserve a woolly mammoth. What is with pizza parlors and salt? Their menu’s should be written on a Dead Sea scroll.
Every bite of that acidic, industrial-grade tomato sauce suggests that Lot’s wife didn’t just turn into a pillar of salt – she’s actively dissolving at the bottom of the vat. It’s a culinary salt-mine masquerading as dinner, designed for a public whose taste buds have been cauterized by processed junk.
And don’t let the Europeans off the hook with their “authentic” posturing. They are the ultimate grifters of the kitchen, peddling the same low-grade swill but wrapping it in the protective cloak of an “imported” ethnicity. They’ll serve you a plate of soggy, overpriced starch and tell you it’s a “centuries-old family tradition” from some hillside in Tuscany, as if adding a vowel to the end of a word somehow justifies charging a 400% markup for a meal that would be rejected by a discerning street dog. It’s the same garbage, just sold with a fake accent and a side of unearned arrogance.
I had one guy in Tuscana say to me – “Momma, she make-a the pasta down-a de stairs in the especiale room for the making the pasta.” Bullshit, Nunzio. You get the pasta from the Mafia run pasta factory a few miles away. The factor that all restaurants in your area have to buy from. You’re not fooling anyone.
The Childish Palate
The reason these places (American mostly) stay in business is that the American public has a childish palate. Most people haven’t outgrown the “happy meal” stage of development; they just want their salt and sugar delivered on a nicer plate. They have been conditioned to believe that if a dish doesn’t make their blood pressure spike or their teeth ache, it’s “bland.”
They have forgotten—or perhaps never knew—what a real ingredient tastes like. They wouldn’t recognize the subtle, earthy sweetness of a fresh carrot or the clean, metallic snap of a properly roasted piece of chicken that hasn’t been “brined” into a rubbery sponge. If you stop adding the “milk and sugar” to the coffee of life, you realize that 99% of what is being sold to us as “gourmet” is just overpriced filler.
The Michelin Scam
Don’t even get me started on the “stars.” A Michelin star in the USA is a badge of pretension, not quality. It usually means you’ll be served twelve “courses” of foam and tweezers-applied micro-greens by a waiter who explains the “story” of the radish while you sit in a room with the acoustics of a parking garage. You’ll leave three hours later, $400 poorer, and reach for a glass of water to wash away the chemical aftertaste of a “deconstructed” dessert.
Go ahead and call me a philistine for refusing to worship at the altar of the Michelin star grift. I’ll wear the label with pride while you sit there nodding along to a lecture about the “provenance” of a single, salt-blasted pea.
The truth is that the people defending these culinary cathedrals are the real bottom-feeders; you’re the Hamburger Helper crowd, conditioned from birth to believe that if a meal doesn’t coat your tongue in a film of industrial sodium and chemical “savoriness,” it isn’t food. You wouldn’t recognize the clean, honest profile of a real ingredient if it hit you in the face, because your palates have been stunted by decades of processed additive abuse.
You aren’t “refined” for paying four hundred dollars to eat foam and tweezers-applied weeds; you’re just a high-end mark for a kitchen that knows you’ll swallow any garbage as long as it comes with a French accent and a silver spoon.
I would rather eat in the kitchen of a grandmother in the Bronx who knows how to use a lemon and a clove of garlic than sit through another “tasting menu” designed by a chef who thinks he’s an architect.
The truth is simple: if you want a meal that actually tastes like food, you have to stay home and cook it yourself. Because in the American restaurant scene, the only thing they are actually cooking is the books—and your appetite is the victim.
BIBLE VERSE:
“Can that which is unsavoury be eaten without salt? or is there any taste in the white of an egg? The things that my soul refused to touch are as my sorrowful meat.” — Job 6:6-7
WHY I CHOSE THIS VERSE
This is the ultimate cry of a refined palate against the “unsavoury” shortcuts of the world. When a culture loses its ability to appreciate the natural, honest flavor of an ingredient, it resorts to the salt-lick of desperation. True discernment means having the courage to refuse to touch the “sorrowful meat” that others mistake for a feast.
LET US PRAY
Lord, grant us the clarity to see through the “regalia” of the pretentious and the salt-soaked lies of the marketplace. Help us to cherish the simple, the clean, and the honest, and protect us from the vanity of those who mistake a high price tag for high quality. May we find satisfaction in what is real, and the strength to walk away from the tables of the prideful. Amen.
