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This one is easy: I have a visual (see photo).
It’s fun to eat at home. We can make things exactly the way we like, without feeling apologetic because the restaurant we’re frequenting likes to make it wrong. When the restaurant makes it wrong, we have to explain to the poor waiter that we don’t do it that way and they need to change it. We feel guilty or entitled or difficult- but all we want isthe stuff we like.
This happens all the time. If we like salad but we don’t like weeds, then don’t put any arugula, radicchio or escarole in it. We just want a salad, not what Alice Waters pulled out of her Berkeley garden in 1971. If we want a martini, then make it with Gin and Vermouth, the way it was described in the 1860’s and don’t serve us a glass of really cold Vodka that James Bond (not a real person) thought of in the 1960’s.
This madness even extends to how we cook things. Thank you for asking how I would like my steak or salmon cooked- I really do appreciate it. But next to my eggs-over-easy, do you really think I want a soggy, fatty disgusting piece of meat you call “bacon”? That’s not bacon! I want it crisp, lean, darkly colored and delicious- the way I make it at home.
I’ve tried a million ways to describe this to waiters at restaurants. Finally one day, in a fit of desperation that one could argue was actually genius, I picked up my knife, held it on one end, and said, “This is the way I’d like it cooked- so it’s perfectly straight when I hold it up. If it’s not, don’t even bother giving it to me.”
Brothers and sisters- this works! Enjoy bacon the way God intended it, the way you cook it at home, and be able to order it proudly at a restaurant without even having to speak a single word.
It will change your life; it changed mine!
