restaurant hunter

[calimac]

Previously I was compiling the Potlatch restaurant guide. Now we're at the point where the rubber meets the road. We have a complete list of 76 purveyors of food of some kind (mostly restaurants, but also groceries of varying sizes) in the immediate area of the hotel, and a selection of more than 50 others within easy driving distance. That's almost as many as we have members of the convention, and I am visiting them all to make sure they're still there (several have changed name since the list was compiled), and get the hours and a sense of their menus.

This is challenging, especially for an introvert for whom explaining myself to a series of strangers is exhausting. A few of the restaurants have informative websites. Most require a visit. First rule: Asking the opening hours at a restaurant that doesn't have them posted, especially when it's a small Asian place catering to folks from the home country, is liable to get you a blank stare for a minute while they process the question. A few had so little English I had to give up. They all understand the word "menu", though. (And were you going to ask why I didn't just phone?)

One little sushi place was apparently not open for lunch: no sign of customers or food when I opened the door. Two men at a table were talking. I said I just wanted to know their hours. This is a very important meeting. But [and unsaid: since I already interrupted it] I just want to know the hours. Very important meeting; come back later. I didn't come back later, except to note that it did look open when I drove by again that evening. The note on the list will not be informative; there are limits.

I'm also filling in a few of the holes in the list of places where I've had lunch. One Korean restaurant appeared friendly, so I got a table, browsed through the bilingual menu, and ordered a bowl of spicy beef soup. The waitress looked stricken. Have you ever had that before? No; what's wrong with it? Well, it may taste ... a bit strange. In truth, it was a bit strange, mostly for a couple ingredients that were not, so far as I could determine, edible; but overall it was OK, and one of the unnamed things that came on little appetizer plates was positively delicious.

I am musing the idea of a Scale of Intimidation for the Asian restaurants, that being a measure of how much an innocent Euro-American will feel out of place on walking in, and on the indecipherability of the menu. The problem is in using myself for the scale. There's more Korean restaurants than anything else around here, and I find Korean cuisine very intimidating indeed. But I'm so used to Thai and Chinese in particular that I may forget how they could appear to others. Within a cuisine, some places look inviting or explanatory to the stranger, others less so, but you can get fooled: I did not enjoy living out the stereotype of the ignoranti blundering through the Korean menu.

There are restaurant review web sites, but I am not finding them very helpful, except for occasional clues as to specialties. Yelp is easy to search and very complete, but the reviews tend to be divided uselessly between those written with an enthusiasm that reads as if it came from the owner's nephew (in a couple cases the writer claimed actually to be the owner's nephew), and those which are determined to paint the place as the having the most vomitrocious food or the worst service of any restaurant on the planet. Many's the gruesome description of a horrid meal at some place I've actually been to, but at which I have to shake my head. Where'd they get that from? Chowhound has much more intelligent discussion, but it is also much spottier in coverage, randomly organized, and very tiresome to search, especially when you need to look up a hundred restaurants.

So my guide will have a lot more brief neutral descriptions of the nearby places than I wanted. Most of the ones further out were specifically recommended by someone who wrote an actual descriptive review, but over half the time that someone is me. Well, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

Comments

[divertimento.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you can evaluate the intimidation factor with some of the metrics followed in this old article from The Wave: "Snackmaster 2000".

http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?articleid=21401&pagename=article

This article scores high among "funniest things I've ever read".
Here's a sample of the evaluations of packaged snack foods purchased in oriental markets.

Item Name: Prepared Poly Fish
Country of Origin: China
Fish Based: Hell yes!
Inscrutability Quotient: Quite suspicious
Looks Like: Sesame fish cracker
Tastes Like: Satan's wrath
Fear Factor: This terrorized our minds.
Research Comments: Gaze not into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee. Nothing could prepare you for prepared poly fish. Stay away.

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

We have a bunch of things like this in our home that a friend brought from China. Pat refuses to throw them out because he mysteriously thinks that someday, someone will want to eat durian flavored chips.

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

I think brief but neutral is good. People just want to know where they can get a meal and maybe if it's big enough for a group, they aren't looking for four star cuisine.

They do want to avoid the Poly Fish, though.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Brief but neutral" isn't the opposite of "four star cuisine". In fact, the only four-star restaurant on the list is getting a brief neutral review. The ideal subject for a subjective review, in fact, is "inexpensive but tasty and interesting".