Between a rock and a place I’d rather not be…
Fall wedding season is back and crazier than ever. Sorry for my absence but I am here now and armed with a new post! Without further delay, let’s take a stroll through a local chef’s thoughts.
“Where’s your favorite place to eat in Macon?”
Oh buddy… put me in a spot, would ya?
That’s the question of frustration I get more than almost any other culinary question. I’m not the one frustrated by it but I have a keen feeling the person asking is left with an answer they didn’t want to hear.
The thing is, I’m never going to dish dirt on the culinary scene here and that is what a lot of folks are asking me to do – to divulge my opinions on local restaurants they themselves don’t favor. They want our pedigreed opinion to validate theirs and that puts me in a bad position.
I may or may not agree with them but I won’t tell them that, at least, not in the negative. I don’t want to put that out in the universe. I have my reasons. Let me explain.
First of all, if I don’t like a restaurant, it may not be because of the food. It may be a personality conflict with an owner. I may be that I don’t like the atmosphere or concept of the restaurant. It may be that it’s geared towards a customer base that I’m not a part of and that is okay.
If I don’t like a restaurant because of the food, well that’s because it doesn’t fit my tastes. I’m willing to wager that my tastes are different than your tastes as well. My palate has been trained.
Yes, trained.
I spent two years in school developing a palate to start with and the years since refining it and honing my skills. Chefs are trained to taste every part of a meal. We can tell exactly what spices, herbs, proteins, sugars, and dairy ingredients are in a dish simply by tasting it. My palate is vastly different from yours and that is also okay. It’s as it should be.
If I don’t like a restaurant because of my experience there, I may have only been once and that’s not a great barometer for anyone else to judge. I was a server in a past life and I know that there are good days with good crews working and then there are the other days.
Working in the industry is akin to mastering a line of spinning plates on tall skinny sticks. Everything is running smoothly; a bunch of well-balanced plates spinning at top speed directly over their sticks with nothing to mess them up… until that one clumsy person who, while not paying attention, elbows the end stick, knocking that plate into the other and so on and so forth until the whole thing comes crashing to a screeching halt… in a pile… on the floor… with tears… in flames.
That’s a gentle description of what can happen during one shift in a restaurant and patrons usually get the worst part of the fallout. I great restaurant can mostly make up for a bad meal but that is not always the case.
On evenings Sam and I both have off, we like to cook for ourselves. It’s how we started out and given enough time and money, we will come up with whatever we happen to be in the mood for that day AND we get to eat it in our pajamas. Our nights of eating out are few and far between.
Lastly, I don’t want to trash talk another restaurant because this industry is hard enough without in-fighting. It can be and quite often is a by-product of the business but I know that I would hate to be on the receiving end of that. Constructive criticism and honest input is important and productive. Being mean is not.
As always, be nice to one another, shop local, and eat well!
-katie
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www.maconcakesbakery.com
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