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?
As a condiment it works so much better if ground fresh & people tend to know whether or not they like pepper with a specific type of dish or not.
As for the ritual, pepper remains more expensive than salt, but in the past pepper was extremely costly outside of the regions where it is grown, and not something that could be left on a table or necessarily with anyone except the head waiter, so to retain the “tonight we’re being fancy” effect, some places still do the whole palaver.
Though I guess they just don’t want people running off with the pepper grinders. Unlike the other stuff diners pinch from tables, big tall grinders with good mechanisms are expensive and suppliers don’t tend to sell them at a discount or bundled for cheap with other items.
Have never been to a restaurant that did not provide salt at the table, including some that are as fancy as they come. There was a brief phase in the 1990s where one would get these rumours of some famous chef or other [they were never named, funnily] refusing to allow salt at the table & flying out of the kitchen to berate any hapless diner who sought it. Other than that, chefs know better than most that everyone’s palate is different, and that the diner is the one putting the food into their body. No matter how sure a chef is of their own culinary genius, they’re also pretty into wanting people to enjoy eating their meals, even if some of the nuances will be lost on those who add salt as a matter of course. It only takes a week or so to reeducate one’s palate away from wanting added salt, but a meal out probably isn’t the best time to start trying to make the switch.
Pepper is best when fresh, and its an easy way for them to provide an experience for diners where they feel like someone is giving them special care when it comes to their food, if that makes sense. Salt makes no difference freshly ground. Also, at least in the USA, generally no one will be insulted if you ask for salt; is that an experience you have often? And do you have to ask for salt often? Anywhere I eat they just have salt shakers available, it seems odd to me that they’d make people ask
Because the food is almost always going to be salted several times during cooking, but pepper is best put on very fresh afterward and isn’t necessarily used on everything.
But also: Where do you have to ask for salt? I’ve never been to even a fancy place that didn’t keep salt on the table.
New Zealand. Another cultural difference I know about is we also don’t really have filter coffee, except in really old-fashioned working class cafeterias.
The espresso culture in this part of the world is so well established that Starbucks struggled when it expanded into Australia and New Zealand and instead of proliferating, shrank to just a few stores that cater to overseas tourists.
Do cafes there serve more than coffee and pastries? I’m just curious why they would have salt on the table, but not a restaurant and I’m flooded with ideas that are probably really dumb lol
Thats genuinely fascinating! I love hearing about that kinda stuff, its always really neat to hear the life experience that folks get and how it differs in different cultures.
If you were to ask for a salt shaker, do you feel like it would be offensive to the folks working there, or preparing your food?
Thanks for sharing your knowledge of another culture with me ☺️
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 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.
Yep, like me. I normally like my food spicy, and can usually tell whether a dish needs pepper or not.
Also, at the nicer restaurants, the waiter offering it to you is part of the tradition and experience. It can be seen as the restaurant being attentive to the diner. It’s not just pepper, they may offer to grate cheese as well, and I guess customers have come to expect such service as those restaurants.
Even though this happened over 20 years ago, I will never forget the experience I once had of a waiter grinding all the pepper into my lap instead. It was an upmarket restaurant, but I think perhaps he was on something.
Doesn’t matter what level of culinary experience you are partaking in, the kitchen is probably partaking in something.
To the point where it’s actually a huge issue and there are organisations to deal with the drug abuse and depression experienced by chefs and other hospitality workers.
My employment is in tandem to the hospitality industry and we sponsor some of these charities, among others.
I guess that’s not surprising, based on the people I used to know in hospitality. One person who was a chef changed field and retrained after one too many hostile workplaces.
I can’t stop laughing. Did you tell him, or did he just sit there grinding more and more pepper into your lap?
My wife and I went to an Italian restaurant in Vegas a few years ago. The waiter asked if we wanted Parmesan, pulled the tiniest cube of cheese out and held it up like a magician, and then never broke eye contact while he grated it. It was unnerving.
Add comment