There are a number of obvious answers to this question:
- the chef who prepared it has years of formal training
- you didn’t go through the hassle of cooking it yourself
- you know you’re not going to have to do the washing up
There are also a number of slightly less obvious answers:
- you are more likely to experience something new in a restaurant – a new dish, a different ingredient, an original combination of flavours, a novel association of wines…
- restaurants have specialised equipment that allows them to produce dishes you could never attempt at home
- you are more likely to be in different company, and that can change your perception of food
But I think there are some more fundamental reasons…
Professional food makers are very conscious of a dish’s acidity whereas the domestic cook rarely worries about it. Think of all the recipes that tell you to adjust the seasoning – meaning salt, and maybe pepper. I’ve never seen a recipe aimed at Joe Public that tells you to check the acidity and add a dash of vinegar if necessary. But acidity is very much under the control of the professional chef. Adding dry white wine here, deglazing a pan with vinegar there, some green tomato here, some lemon juice there… Recipes aimed at the non-professional give you these instructions without explaining why. But the acidity imparted by the white wine is key to a great risotto. Mayonnaise without lemon juice is vile.
As a consumer – especially at the lower end of the gastronomic spectrum – we are more used to acidity adjustments than we may think. Many of our usual condiments and sauces are highly acidic: ketchup on anything, brown sauce (yeuch) on everything, malt vinegar on chips… So we do it at the counter, but not in the kitchen. Why is that? Could the English obsession with giving you a bunch of salad on the side of every dish be a back-door way of introducing acidity – the vinegar in the vinaigrette – to almost anything.
My culinary history books tell me that verjus (the juice of unripe grapes) was used as a general condiment in the middle ages, but was eclipsed after the introduction to Europe of the tomato in the 16th century. Maybe we should blame the Spanish explorers for our general acidity conscience-lowering.
Do other cultures do this more explicitly?
What other fundamental reasons keep me going back to restaurants?
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