I’m so completely done with Michelin Starred restaurants

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How do you all rank the DC Michelins?

Not sure there are any, are there?

Jônt.

Jônt and Minibar are 2-star, there are 23 1-stars.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The best food I ever had was when Grandma was alive. She lived with us so from birth until I was in my 20s.

She was born in 1910 and made Viennese donuts all on her own, with no recipes; she made tortes, risotto, and cabbage dishes; she made everything out of almost nothing. Strudels, pies, one chicken made a soup and the main dish for six of us all the time.
Her fried schnitzels? Wolfgang Puck is doing it wrong, per his videos. I will never pay to eat that type of food; I can make it better, as I learned from my grandma.
And her winter pickled veggies, sour kraut, and what you call kombucha here? We drank them straight from the barrel. Grandma was not the chef, but my family did run a tavern before the Second World War.


Thank you, Nana!

Very sweet post, but I don't like that kind of food. To each his own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, I get what you are saying. As I've gotten older, I've grown tired of the tricks that chefs try to pull on menus to make dishes seem inventive. It frequently seems like a ploy to justify the insane pricing. At this point in my life, what I care about is simple, well-prepared foods made with fresh and seasonal ingredients. This type of food is so hard to find in restaurants because it wouldn't garner a price high enough for the places to stay in business. Instead you find menus bloated with things like espuma, verjus, fermented whatever... I just cook at home for the most part because going out makes me ragey. The quality and preparation almost never justify the cost at cheffy places.

Oh this poster has really nailed it for me.

My favorite restaurants are the ones that do fairly classic food but very, very well, and then are consistent and really emphasize customer service. I live in the Union Market area and my go-tos are St. Anselm and now Pastis. Neither is reinventing the wheel but their food tastes very good, is consistent from visit to visit, and they care about service. They aren't budget restaurants but I don't mind paying more if the food is reliably good and I'm treated well. I view good customer service as 50% of what I'm paying for when I am in a restaurant, which is why I have zero tolerance for bad service regardless of the prices on the menu. If service is rude or very bad, whatever they are charging is too much.

But yes, we eat at home a lot and cook great food. My DH, in particular, is a great cook with a pretty broad repertoire, but I do okay too. When we go out to eat and the food isnt' at least as tasty as what we make at home, we get annoyed and won't go back there. This is most restaurants in DC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think Michelin meals can be fun experiences if you can afford it and just see it as a good time, rather than the best meal of your life. It’s like the people that overhype Disney and try to do everything in one trip.

But it isn’t even a good time. I am able to get waited on hand and foot almost like royalty with my own dedicated waitstaff for my table for a simply $50 dinner in Thailand. Meanwhile, a $240 pp course at a 2 star Michelin misses my drink order and has a bunch of loud obnoxious tourists bulldozing in while wearing baseball caps and jeans. A lot of other Michelin places are also stuffy as hell with formality even when they do tighten up for who they allow in. It’s like dining with a puckered butthole the whole time, and for food that might not be better than the $2 pad Thai cart n the back alley of a city in Thailand.

But OP, you are a tourist there. Why is it ok for you to be a tourist but it’s not ok for tourists to go to the Michelin restaurant you were at?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, I get what you are saying. As I've gotten older, I've grown tired of the tricks that chefs try to pull on menus to make dishes seem inventive. It frequently seems like a ploy to justify the insane pricing. At this point in my life, what I care about is simple, well-prepared foods made with fresh and seasonal ingredients. This type of food is so hard to find in restaurants because it wouldn't garner a price high enough for the places to stay in business. Instead you find menus bloated with things like espuma, verjus, fermented whatever... I just cook at home for the most part because going out makes me ragey. The quality and preparation almost never justify the cost at cheffy places.

Oh this poster has really nailed it for me.

My favorite restaurants are the ones that do fairly classic food but very, very well, and then are consistent and really emphasize customer service. I live in the Union Market area and my go-tos are St. Anselm and now Pastis. Neither is reinventing the wheel but their food tastes very good, is consistent from visit to visit, and they care about service. They aren't budget restaurants but I don't mind paying more if the food is reliably good and I'm treated well. I view good customer service as 50% of what I'm paying for when I am in a restaurant, which is why I have zero tolerance for bad service regardless of the prices on the menu. If service is rude or very bad, whatever they are charging is too much.

But yes, we eat at home a lot and cook great food. My DH, in particular, is a great cook with a pretty broad repertoire, but I do okay too. When we go out to eat and the food isnt' at least as tasty as what we make at home, we get annoyed and won't go back there. This is most restaurants in DC.

Same! Ours is a local French restaurant in NW. we go about once a week and it never disappoints, and because we are regulars we generally get special attention. We’ve been in DC for years and have tried pretty much all the restaurants and are increasingly disappointed.

[Anonymous]

DC has good ( not great) restaurants at the high end, but nothing great below that (I'm talking actual DC, not a surrounding suburb).

[Anonymous]

Yeah dh and I just can’t do the high end restaurants. Dh is a 6’2 athlete (very skinny though) and he doesn’t get enough food. He’d order a starter and an entree but really needed about 3 entrees. Last one we went to had what seemed to be a 2oz pork chop and the sides were separate for $75. Their food portions are a joke.

I personally hate how snotty the waiters are at the more expensive places. I don’t drink for medical reasons and they make a lot of snide comments. I assume because they know it’s lowing their tip amounts when we don’t order $150 worth of wine and cocktails.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Here is one of the top rated restaurants in the WORLD, 3 Michelin Stars, Italy, I figured maybe this would be a menu to die for....look at this abomination of the sea floor's offerings as they scraped through the fish poop to find them! What the heck is Sea bream! Pigeon liver, what were they all out of Crow? Menu:

Sea bream, green apple and celery

Oyster, caviar, turnip granita, buttermilk

Eggplant, almonds and tomatoes

Flavored saffron Spaghetti, sea urchin and crispy quinoa

Burnt sea bass, lettuce salad

Pigeon, peach, liver and Verjus sauce

Sea bream is a fish. There are fish in the world besides salmon, trout, and tuna. Just because you are unfamiliar with it does not make it weird.

Tons of people eat sea urchin. Including in - gasp! - Asia. In Japan it's known as uni and is a very popular sushi item.

Pigeon is also not super uncommon - it's a fowl, like chicken, squab, quail, duck. You are just used to seeing it on city streets but in other countries they're raised for food. Or for racing - I knew a guy who raced homing pigeons.

Personally I too prefer lower-key restaurants. But nothing on the menu you quoted is weird. It isn't what I would pick, because it sounds uninteresting to me, and I happen not to care for uni or liver or caviar, so it would be wasted on me. But plenty of people do enjoy those things. Sorry OP, despite your travels, you come across as pedestrian and ill-informed. Additionally, don't forget to include the price of your airfare when you tote up all that cheap food in Thailand and China!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, I get what you are saying. As I've gotten older, I've grown tired of the tricks that chefs try to pull on menus to make dishes seem inventive. It frequently seems like a ploy to justify the insane pricing. At this point in my life, what I care about is simple, well-prepared foods made with fresh and seasonal ingredients. This type of food is so hard to find in restaurants because it wouldn't garner a price high enough for the places to stay in business. Instead you find menus bloated with things like espuma, verjus, fermented whatever... I just cook at home for the most part because going out makes me ragey. The quality and preparation almost never justify the cost at cheffy places.

Oh this poster has really nailed it for me.

My favorite restaurants are the ones that do fairly classic food but very, very well, and then are consistent and really emphasize customer service. I live in the Union Market area and my go-tos are St. Anselm and now Pastis. Neither is reinventing the wheel but their food tastes very good, is consistent from visit to visit, and they care about service. They aren't budget restaurants but I don't mind paying more if the food is reliably good and I'm treated well. I view good customer service as 50% of what I'm paying for when I am in a restaurant, which is why I have zero tolerance for bad service regardless of the prices on the menu. If service is rude or very bad, whatever they are charging is too much.

But yes, we eat at home a lot and cook great food. My DH, in particular, is a great cook with a pretty broad repertoire, but I do okay too. When we go out to eat and the food isnt' at least as tasty as what we make at home, we get annoyed and won't go back there. This is most restaurants in DC.

This is us too.

[Anonymous]

DCUM: Our home cooked food is better than almost all restaurants considered fine dining.

Also DCUM:
- Herbs are a substitute for salt.
- Jose Andres has a defective food palate.
- Measuring ingredients is a "baking hack".
- Can I cook a turkey on Monday for my guests on Thursday?
- Food quality improves the more you freeze and re-heat the dish.
- Guacamole, Pico, Marinara, and boiled water are too complicated/time-consuming. Suggest store-bought alternatives.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DCUM: Our home cooked food is better than almost all restaurants considered fine dining.

Also DCUM:
- Herbs are a substitute for salt.
- Jose Andres has a defective food palate.
- Measuring ingredients is a "baking hack".
- Can I cook a turkey on Monday for my guests on Thursday?
- Food quality improves the more you freeze and re-heat the dish.
- Guacamole, Pico, Marinara, and boiled water are too complicated/time-consuming. Suggest store-bought alternatives.

lol ok but…Jose Andres places, across the board, have reallllly gone downhill recently. He really isn’t paying attention to his dc area restaurants anymore— which is fine! But I wouldn’t recommend any of the dc ones to anyone anymore.

[Anonymous]

After talking to restaurant insiders I learned the Michelin star thing is bs. It’s mostly politics and who you know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DC has good ( not great) restaurants at the high end, but nothing great below that (I'm talking actual DC, not a surrounding suburb).

Was your last visit to DC in Obama’s first term?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:After talking to restaurant insiders I learned the Michelin star thing is bs. It’s mostly politics and who you know.

In the U.S., sure. In Europe, even London, less so. Once you get into the continental countryside, for example, basically unknown places can have a star.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I feel like Michelin rewards “creative” chefs but honestly that’s not always the best food. Cooking classics well is likely to result in better food than constantly reinventing the wheel with new combinations or cooking techniques. I feel like The Bear shows that really well—they are so focused on chasing the star with ingenuity that they don’t repeat even the stuff that worked really well.

I have a huge pet peeve on this with pastry chefs. It is incredibly hard to make a really good piece of cake or really good berry cobbler. Do that — don’t feel like you have to throw gold flakes on it or add tarragon or something weird like that. There are sometimes that it really works but most of the time it’s just covering up for substandard baking. I can’t tell you how many “meh” pieces of cake I’ve had at really highly rated restaurants.

Yes, so true. I am a very experienced baker and look forward to dessert when I eat out. Almost always the cakes are awful, not really fresh or tasty. A comically small piece of mediocre cake for $10? Just not worth it!