> The difference would be completely lost on them.
I've definitely heard the life advice to avoid trying this kind of thing in case you do like it, then everything less is permanently tainted with the knowledge that it's not as good.
However, western super-high-price dining tends to be one or both of "demoscene for food" or "NFTs for food"
- demoscene: a series of increasingly elaborate and labor-intensive techniques for showcasing skill in a constrained environment. The Heston Blumenthal/molecular gastronomy approach.
- NFTs: the process entirely about conspicuous consumption; the value of the food is determined by how many resources were expended in the process, not what it actually tastes like. Wines in particular have a value determined by rarity and the secondary market.
The best compromise is probably found around the "twice as much as a chain restaurant" price point; enough to find quality ingredients and staff who aren't too rushed off their feet, not enough that you start getting weird stunts.
> I've definitely heard the life advice to avoid trying this kind of thing in case you do like it, then everything less is permanently tainted with the knowledge that it's not as good.
Does that actually happen though? I know a thing or two about wine and sometimes buy bottles in the 50-100 euro range, which I feel are totally worth it, but I'm still happy to drink cheap plonk with friends most of the time. This works because (1) you forget about what the high end experience was like quite quickly and/or (2) you drink it in a very specific setting so you're not likely to conclude "I now always need/want this" and (3) a lot of what makes high end cuisine / wine / spirits so fun to try is not just that they're better but that they're different from what you're used to, the scale is not just worst-best but also ordinary-extraordinary, and you're not always in the mood for extraordinary.
My guess would be that the phenomenon of permanently hankering for the good stuff after having tried it once is probably more likely to happen with everyday luxuries: good bread, slightly-above-average wine, etc. And in that case, you get a little bit more enjoyment out of your food for a little bit more money, which seems like a fair deal. But even in that case, I don't know anyone who, after trying craft beer, has vowed to never drink a cheap pilsner again.
It definitely happened to me with steak. After a year where I unintentionally climbed that hedonistic ladder, I ended up in a place where steak I would have formerly been fine with is now unpleasant to eat. So I just don’t eat steak much any more. I don’t think anything was really lost there - well prepared steak still tastes amazing, but the environment and my body could benefit from me eating fewer slabs of cow anyway.
It definitely also happened to me with coffee. I used to be able to drink almost any coffee straight, but over time my taste drifted towards more expensive stuff and I started adding cream and sugar to hide the taste of cheap coffee. That’s mostly thanks to all of the trendy coffee shops in San Francisco where I did meetings. So one of my small projects during covid was actually finding the cheapest bulk coffee I could drink straight. As proof that my tastes had drifted, what I settled on turned out to be a step above the cheapest cohort, but thankfully still several times cheaper than making a daily habit of single origin coffee.
Thankfully, it never happened to me with restaurants. Despite having paid hundreds of dollars for a meal on a few occasions, I haven’t lost the ability to enjoy stuff across the whole price spectrum.
I agree with you. I find that the amount of enjoyment I get out of the thing doesn't change, I just now need more a expensive thing to get the same amount of enjoyment.
That's why I choose to listen to music on my cheap $100 speakers that can still give me goosebumps and not listen to my friend's $5000 speakers. All that would happen is that I'd lose the goosebumps because I'd notice how shitty mine are.
It happened to me with speakers/headphones. I used to listen to all kinds of music on cheapos before I found a nice pair of cans with good balance across the frequency range. After that I couldn't help noticing all the distortions from the cheapos and how they degraded the entire mood of the music. When the nice ones broke I pretty much stopped playing music. Sometimes I would get the urge and start up a playlist but it would usually feel flat. After it was over I didn't have the motivation to put on anything else and would rather just be in silence. The music was so much nicer in my head that playing it through the cheapos was just too disappointing.
I've done quite a few as part of courses, and I've also served expensive bottles to people without telling them. It's definitely a humbling experience and the most expensive wines are certainly not always the most liked, but that's why you study: to make sure that you don't just buy ostentatious expensive stuff, but that you buy expensive stuff that is actually good and noticeably different from supermarket wines.
I'm guessing your reply is motivated by the 2001 blind tasting where oenology students couldn't even differentiate between red and white wine [1], which is certainly an interesting bit of research, but not the kind of slam dunk you would think when you read third-hand reports about it in the media or rationalist circles.
> demoscene: a series of increasingly elaborate and labor-intensive techniques for showcasing skill in a constrained environment. The Heston Blumenthal/molecular gastronomy approach.
I’d add on: anything that’s difficult/time-consuming/etc. to make at home even if you could, but scale makes it a lot easier.
I know a Ukrainian guy that, without fail, orders borscht if it’s on the menu. He could make it himself, but his wife forbids him from stinking up the house with beets and cabbage for the afternoon it takes to prepare.
> I’d add on: anything that’s difficult/time-consuming/etc. to make at home even if you could, but scale makes it a lot easier.
True of restaurant food in general and even street food; what makes these things great is often lots of little bits and pieces of topping or flavoring that would be too time-consuming and wasteful to make at home.
But it's not limited to high end. "Indian" food is cheap but benefits from the scaling of cooking a lot of different spices in a large pot for a decent amount of time. Your borscht is another example.
(What the UK calls Indian food is often cooked by Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, the name is kind of a historical accident)
Hey, just thought I'd reach out to you. I'm Tom from GoPlacenta.io (YC S21). We're out to make meaningful changes in the placenta market segment. We've already built a review platform and we're teaming with 23AndMe for an integrated vertical approach...
The other odd thing about placenta: "The placenta is unique in that it is an organ which arises from the tissue of two genetically distinct organisms; part of the placenta develops from the tissue of the mother’s uterine wall, while another part develops from the fetus’ own tissue. After the blastocyst which will develop into the fetus makes contact with the uterine wall, blastocyst and maternal tissue grow together to form a single, cooperating organ that links the two together."
I don't know whether mothers think of the placenta as their own body part or part of the baby, but personally I think it is in poor poor taste to eat baby parts.
I think you're missing the point on the compromise. It's not simply about the price.
Look for ethnic restaurants whose primary clientele is their fellow countrymen. (Easy to find in a large city. Less so in the suburbs.) This is where you will find the intersection of low price and high quality product.
Mexican and Asian places abound in this category. But you can find just about anything in a large city - Middle Eastern, South American, even European (especially eastern)
haha classic line "The three diminutive crab cakes for £32 have a rigid shell the development chefs at Findus would envy and taste only lightly of crab, as if embarrassed about the star ingredient. They come with a sauce reminiscent of school-dinner salad cream circa 1975."
I've definitely heard the life advice to avoid trying this kind of thing in case you do like it, then everything less is permanently tainted with the knowledge that it's not as good.
However, western super-high-price dining tends to be one or both of "demoscene for food" or "NFTs for food"
- demoscene: a series of increasingly elaborate and labor-intensive techniques for showcasing skill in a constrained environment. The Heston Blumenthal/molecular gastronomy approach.
- NFTs: the process entirely about conspicuous consumption; the value of the food is determined by how many resources were expended in the process, not what it actually tastes like. Wines in particular have a value determined by rarity and the secondary market.
The best compromise is probably found around the "twice as much as a chain restaurant" price point; enough to find quality ingredients and staff who aren't too rushed off their feet, not enough that you start getting weird stunts.
(a fun read: Jay Rayner's negative review of the Polo Lounge https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/aug/15/the-polo-lounge... )