restaurants

Cooking is my favorite activity. I love chopping and grating and shaving and adjusting spices and plucking fresh herbs of my windowsill (window sill? window-sill? nothing looks right) to garnish my creations. Ideally, I will find a job that involves all the food knowledge I have accumulated by scrutinizing the cooks at the restaurant, pouring over cookbooks, and reading numerous food articles and books (the latest being Heat ).

Although I love cooking, I also adore going out for dinner. Most of my recipes have been inspired by restaurant meals. And also--and this is a bit of a vanity thing--when I'm cooking, I've VERY aware of how much oil and cheese and cream I'm using. When I order a meal in a restaurant, I can just go with it. Sure, dressing can be put on the side, but even then I don't have the bottle of dressing stating, "2 Tablespoons=16 grams of fat," so who cares if I use the entire little cup of it? MAYBE it's low-fat! Who knows? Who cares? When you're out for dinner, you're paying for a meal, for a nice experience, and I'm not going to be satisfied by some iceberg sprinkled with lemon juice. (I am also lucky to have a boyfriend who likes me better happy and 5 lbs heavier than starved, crabby, and skinny.)

I have always wanted to be a restaurant reviewer. I think I would be very good at it. This is the problem: at a young age I became a vegetarian. And I can't stop. I don't even know what meat tastes like anymore, and the thought of eating a rare steak turns my stomach. (No worries though, I'll serve you a rare prime rib with a smile and without any comment other than, "Enjoy!" I don't lecture, I don't care what you eat, I don't care if you eat meat around me. And I actually honestly don't care if I eat a soup and find out later it was made with beef stock. I won't order it again, but I'm not going to die if I accidently eat meat-based items. I'm a chill vegetarian.)
(And, as a side note, I would say that any vegetarian that's eaten in a restaurant has eaten something with chicken or beef stock. I mean, stock is added to EVERYTHING. And restaurants, for the most part, could care less. Accidently put meat on your sandwich? They''ll pick it off and send it back on its way. Many of the cooks are from South America [and that's not a generalization, it's very true], and have no concept of vegetarianism. Pluck that bacon off--ta da! They have better things to do than remake your eggs without the side of meat.)
Case in point: until not long ago, an item at my restaurant was listed as having "seasoned spinach, ricotta and mozzarella cheese." That's it. The spinach, however, was seasoned with a nice little blend of prosciutto and some other spices. My boss, KNOWING I was a vegetarian, made this dish for me. And when I got upset after finding out he'd knowingly fed me prosciutto, he shrugged and said, "It's only a little." After I flipped out, saying that we have a large Jewish population and to feed them pork is a disgrace to not only our restaurant but to the entire industry, and that I couldn't believe he was marginalizing other people's beliefs, and that I was going to tell every single person who ordered the dish that my boss refused to list a significant ingredient, he fixed the menu. Yes, I can be a drama queen. But seriously? Don't knowingly mislead people. I mean, it's one thing if I accidently eat meat--it's really not a big deal. But for someone who keeps kosher, that's just not acceptable.

And now I will end my rant. The real point of this post is that I'm going to start writing restaurant reviews. I will rate restaurants not only on food and service, but I will be judging from the food-industry point of view (many critics have never worked in a restaurant, or are far out of touch with the industry. I, unfortunately, am an expert on both counts). I think it will be fun, and it's a way for me to live out my dream. And for the four people who read this blog? You can skip right over them (as Emily does with the cat entries). OR you can give me new places to try out and make me order new dishes at favorite spots. And someday, when a vegetarian magazine pays me to do this, I will take you all out for free. Won't that be FUN?