ordering food

[calimac]

oursin asks "Do my dr rdrz ever have that experience of ordering something in a restaurant less for the main whatever in the dish, but for the side it comes with?"

My reply (on DW) was, I almost always do. In the kind of restaurant that offers dishes where the veg and starch are specifically chosen to match the entree and are different for each entree, I have to face the fact that I'm good with most meats, but I'm somewhat picky about vegetables and I don't eat potato at all. So the first thing I do when narrowing down my choice is to cross off everything that comes with potato, and only go for the ones with pasta or rice. Then I look for veggies I love or hate, and only then do I consider the entree. Quite frequently there will only be one left on the entire menu by that point, and my choice is made for me. This is so common that I sometimes feel flummoxed at non-potato-oriented restaurants when there's still a lot of choices left. I'm not used to having a choice in these cases.

Back in the days when airlines served dinners, the flight attendants would come down the aisle asking each passenger, "Beef or chicken?" or sometimes "Chicken or fish?" with no additional information. I always ordered the fish if any, and if none then the chicken over the beef. That had nothing to do with my meat preferences, which are pretty neutral, but was solely because the beef was the most likely to come with potato, and the fish the most likely to come with rice. It did no good to ask what it came with, because the flight attendant would always say, "It comes with salad, roll, and a brownie" or whatever.

But what oursin was really asking about was restaurants where the side dishes outshine the mains in quality. I've certainly had that experience too, most recently at the vintage-1884 restaurant in Springfield, Illinois, where the prime rib was OK but the green beans that came with it were superb. The most striking example of that I've had was at a seafood restaurant on an island in Chesapeake Bay. I ordered a sampler platter with shellfish of various kinds, all of which was good - except for the soft-shell crabs, which tasted like biting your own fingernails - but by far the most outstanding part was the fresh corn (maize) that came with it. I had already noticed that the stuff occupied most of the farmland in the area, and I guess it was as local as the seafood. But in none of these cases did I know in advance that the vegetable would be the best part.