Food and Cooking

6449 readers

32 users here now

All things culinary and cooking related. Share food! Share recipes! Share stuff about food, etc.

Subcommunity of Humanities.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

Gaywallet@beehaw.org

SoaringFox@beehaw.org

remington@beehaw.org

Why Are Pepper Grinders A Thing In Restaurants? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by ScrollinMyDayAway@lemm.ee to c/food@beehaw.org

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Let's say I decide to go to a nice restaurant for a meal. The dish comes out, and I ask for a salt shaker before I even taste it (I never have, btw). That is normally considered an insult to the chef or you are pegged as a neanderthal diner.

Why, then, is it normal for a waiter to offer you grinds of pepper all over your plate before you have even had your first bite?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] liv@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If I were to ask for salt for chips in a cafe or something, no problem. But in a proper restaurant, that would be the same as what @ScrollinMyDayAway@lemm.ee describes: it would mark me as some kind of philistine that can't appreciate the chef.

I'm fascinated by this stuff too! We share a language and consume a lot of your pop culture but there are still so many little things that are different.

Eg "tuna noodle casserole" sounded super gross to me because of the language difference. Here, casserole = a thin, liquid stew with chunks of meat in it, cooked in a ceramic pot, and noodles = only Asian noodles (ramen, udon, etc). But it turns out it's more like what we call a "pasta bake", a totally normal dish.