Tonight's restaurant dinner fell off the Sysco truck | Hacker News Reader

Tonight's restaurant dinner fell off the Sysco truck

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65 pointswalterbell61 comments

Tangentially, one dimension by which I can divide my friend-groups is when I say "I do a lot of work with Cisco(Sysco)" is the group that by default thinks "he's a network guy" and those who think "he's in food service".

Here I was thinking Sisqo… maybe you’re in the recording industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisqó

Everyone knows I have absolutely no musical talent. We're good.

Neither do most entertainment executives, so you’re good.

Yet both sides will reproachfully ask you why you'd choose that vendor (edit: as evidenced by basically all the other comment threads on this post).

Somehow this has been in the news recently but it’s been happening for a long, long time. There are some foods I just kinda dread and don’t order because they’re the same everywhere. If they’re the same everywhere, it’s because they’re little more than frozen bags and boxes shipped in from Sysco, and I can make the same thing at home.

When I see a Sysco truck delivering to a restaurant I tend to start avoiding it

Not necessarily the best idea. Often they are the only dry bulk(flour, etc.) or paper/plastic distributor that a restaurant can access. See if they also get deliveries from others before jumping to such conclusion.

Restaurants hate Sysco just like you do. They deliver late, get it wrong every time and argue about rejection when half their delivery is destroyed goods.

I could see that in many places, but I tend to live in the largest urban areas. I see lots of local distributors around.

I've worked at Michelin starred restaurants in major cities that ordered paper products as well as commodity items from Sysco. Like I said, it isn't a particularly good metric.

If you like unique local eats that aren't chains and have regional specialties I recommend Roadfood website and book. It was started by two food critics who loved roadtrips and hated chains so they wanted to find authentic local places: https://roadfood.com/

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050133-roadfood

Tons of made from scratch, non-Sysco eats on there!

Sysco reminds me of how airplane, hospital and hotel lobby restaurant food tastes.

Maybe you’ll hate me for this but when I hear food described as “authentic” I assume that the place is touristy! Something about the word “authentic” stands out like a red flag in restaurant reviews, warning me away.

I like places with negative reviews. The right people have to hate it in order for me to like it.

Heh.. I get your point! What I meant by authentic is more regional local faire, house-made. For example they recommended this place called Als in Barberton, Ohio that specializes in Barberton chicken which was one of the most amazing meals of my life. Totally worth visiting if you are driving through Ohio:

> The chicken recipe and the meal itself were brought to the New World from Serbia when the Topalsky family immigrated to the farmland of Ohio at the beginning of the 20th century. After they opened Belgrade Gardens, three more restaurants in town began serving the same chicken dinner, which is now Barberton’s claim to culinary fame. Barberton chicken aside, there is one other essential stop in town: Al’s Corner Restaurant. A modest storefront that serves only lunch, Monday through Friday, Al’s is affiliated with Al’s Quality Market just down the street, which is where its sausages are made. The sausages are divine, as is everything else on an Hungarian-accented menu that includes chicken paprikash, halushka, stuffed cabbage, and pierogies.

But literally everywhere I've tried that's been recommended in that book has beem a gem, I check it before every road trip to see what's nearby my planned route.

It depends on who's saying “authentic”; if it's a legit chef, food critic or expert in that type of cuisine, versus someone just trying to pump reviews and scores e.g. on Yelp.

The term “authentic” can be misused, just like “homemade” and many others...

I think unfortunately this is a massive conflux of many negative rentseeking factors that creates a blackhole of mediocrity.

A lot of local restaurants in Seattle can't afford space rent, but then when they leave those spaces stay empty. The restaurants that do thrive are part of big multinational chains or have to serve the same slop as everywhere else because it's the cheapest. Combined with increasing consolidation, everything converges towards low quality shit.

Fixing this would require, like a lot of our self-inflicted problems, realizing that big corporations and consolidation is slowly strangling everything.

Or more density in urban areas! Then rent will go down

An interesting psychology of restaurant menus is when they use the term ‘house made’ for an item. My assumption then is that all the other items came from the Sysco truck and will be suitably generic.

It has to be because apparently you need a huge menu several times what you can prepare fresh in order to be a restaurant. Some of the best restaurants I've ever been to had only a few items on the menu.

At the same time, I've seen chefs take over and declare everything will be made in house, such as sauces and gravies, only to to see regular customers fight back and complain bitterly about the changes - they want the canned slop! Some clientele are just chicken nugget people, through and through.

I think it's a common rule that everyone should know. A specialty restaurant with fewer items is always better. It's cheaper and better for them to run, and you get cheaper and better food

Likely, yes. Sadly, most restaurants (in the US at least) are shit, and most restaurants are using shortcuts like the "Applebee" model of glorified frozen TV dinners. Especially in wholesale supplier food deserts in the middle of nowhere where the options are fewer.

By contrast, I know of a Turkish-American-owned fast casual restaurant on University Ave in Palo Alto that spends hours every day making almost everything, including hummus and baklava, from scratch. There are only a few complicated things that aren't made from scratch ordered from Turkey from specialty Mediterranean food suppliers. The generic stuff is sourced from Sysco, local butchers, and various other suppliers. It's a lot of time and work to do things right, and it takes pride and cost to make excellent food.

What’s the restaurants name? :) thanks

I just saw a YouTube video on a similar topic, with the host noticing that jalapeno poppers seemed to be the same no matter what restaurant he went to, and then it dives into the struggles of NOT using Sysco as your distributor if you want to have local goods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXXQTzQXRFc

Also just saw that. I wonder why YT vid and article both feature “Milk and Honey”

It's awe-dropping the lengths at which societies go repeating errors of avoiding market dominance because they are detrimental to consumers.

What do you mean?

What I mean is that it is not a newly observed fact that when companies grow very big and dominant, they obtain market power and this is often abused, to the detriment of customers and end-clients. Still, this happens time and again even in jurisdictions with powerful regulators such as the US.

Cue Lily Tomlin’s late 70s SNL commercial… “We don’t care, we don’t have to. We’re the phone company.” ;-)

I don't think this is correctly capturing the issue. It's just price. Sysco is maximally scaled and cheap. Local weird stuff isn't. It's that simple.

Like, there actually isn't a "shortage" of the kind of local fare the article is remembering. It's just concentrated in higher end fancy places in urban cores. Hipsters love it. We live on that stuff, and there's a huge market to serve it to us.

But the market conditions that produced a hand pie or cheese steak or whatever as a genuine local Food of the People just don't exist anymore. Those things were cheap before, they aren't now. But they aren't gone, or even going anywhere.

I'm gonna be a little mean here... I don't think it's about hipsters, urban cores, or even money. It's about whether or not the market cares. I mean, here in Oregon, where the urban/rural divide is very sharp and where hipsterish craft foods and locally sourced ingredients completely dominate Portland: Yes, go a little into the suburbs and most restaurants are fed by Sysco. But pretty much every small town west of the Cascades will have at least a couple restaurants that do everything local and make things from scratch. Some tiny podunk burgs in this region sport restaurants that truly deserve Michelin stars, and breakfast cafes that would be at home in Paris. And they're not just for tourists. Yes, you need money to eat there, but my contention is that whether or not local people go to those places versus predictably bog-standard Sysco cafeterias is not really based on the price point, because they're not necessarily much more expensive. It's based on whether or not people care about what they put in their mouths, and whether they're curious or scared of trying new things. Some of it is purely cultural - people who know how to behave in a Red Lobster may feel freaked out being at a real restaurant with unfamiliar choices. Sysco has become the comfort food of the masses, and a majority of people want comfort and are afraid to stray outside it. You don't have to be a hipster to want fresh food... lots of small town people will go to a locally sourced restaurant if there is one. Just not the majority of them.

> Sysco has become the comfort food of the masses

Well, exactly. But to my point, that's true in what is basically a specious sense: it's cheap. People didn't invent "comfort food" for comfort! Comfort food is the stuff people grew up eating. And people grew up eating what their parents could provide affordably and reliably.

Well, now that cheap and available food arrives in big white box trucks and gets canned a continent away. But the principle behind choosing it hasn't changed a bit.

But the size of Sysco creates economies of scale that make it even cheaper and exacerbate the problem. It is bad for larger companies to be able to sell things cheaper.

> A common theme in concentrated industries is that innovation and quality declines.

Yes, big companies are bad. Sysco should be destroyed like all the rest of them.

It's funny to see the same type of criticism come up elsewhere too: https://www.economist.com/china/2025/09/22/a-restaurant-scan...

Is it not just these are two entirely different target markets? While I'm not familiar with sysco as I'm not in the US, these are just chain-y generic and cheap eateries that are frequented by families/people that just want something predictable and cheap? Conversely people that like food or are a bit better off eat at restaurants that actually cook stuff from scratch?

Bonus points - investigate WHY people/families are after cheap eating out, and not cooking at home.

> While I'm not familiar with sysco as I'm not in the US, these are just chain-y generic and cheap eateries that are frequented by families/people that just want something predictable and cheap?

Chain restaurants of the sort supplied by Sysco in the United States encompass everything from cheap fast food and diners to “fast-casual” to mid-range “sit down” restaurants. Even upscale steakhouses will source things like side dishes (particularly potatoes) from them.

It’s going to suck when that single point of failure supply chain breaks down, but capitalism is antithetical to resiliency, so.

> There’s even been consolidation among owners of chains. A large number of food options in and around American malls trace back to one private equity firm named for the main character in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead.

I don’t know why the author avoids naming the firm here, but it’s Roark Capital Group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roark_Capital_Group

> The firm claims that its name is not meant to connote any particular political philosophy but instead signify the firm's admiration for the iconoclastic qualities of independence and self-assurance embodied by the central figure in The Fountainhead.

Well spotted

Most restaurants these days are just serving unique presentations of various Sysco food, or other mass market food distributors.

Given that nobody is buying the US soybean glut, I'm surprised that a mass 'back to tofu' marketing campaign aimed at restaurants isn't taking place. The Sysco distribution network is already in place - 'Soy for Strength' maybe? Or has the carnivore culture made that impossible?

Just more evidence that the American corporate food pipeline is mostly slop - optimized for long shelf life, minimal labor costs, maximal prices via monopolistic coordination. Human health and nutritional value comes last. It usually tastes not so great, so restaurants compensate with butter, salt and sugar to cover up the low quality.

You can eat twice as well at home for half the cost, but the payment is time and energy: learning cooking techniques, especially high-speed strategies suitable for quick meals, cleaning up, washing dishes, sourcing and buying ingredients, etc. Some areas have local farms, but they're not so easy to buy from often, and consumer prices are pretty high through middlemen - but still far cheaper than a 'decent' restaurant. Some high-end restaurants are great quality, but you pay a lot for that.

Also 'farm-to-table' turned into a big scam, hard to trust any of those companies, some have been caught filling the 'farm boxes' straight from the corporate giant's pipelines. Some are OK. All in all, it's a bit of a cognitive load, a constant cost, to find good food in these rather opaque markets.

Good health and nutrition is hard to put a price on, though - it's worth the effort.

Refining slop to different slop needs large scale factory or multiple. If you do not have that capacity in place or easily reconfigurable it won't happen. So issue might be making it and then packing it up. And then packing in what? Where is everything printed for example?

trump has cured the woke from tofu

There is also a mini documentary about the consolidation of broadline suppliers from More Perfect Union:

https://youtu.be/rXXQTzQXRFc

The value proposition for restaurants is almost completely gone for me, by now. Why would I travel out of my house, sit down some place full of people, pay 3X-5X what I would for an equivalent meal from the grocery store, for commoditized Sysco Slop that every other restaurant serves, and then pay an additional 20% because the restaurant won't pay its workers properly? And getting it delivered with DoorDash? Even more of a waste of money, even more extortionate tipping, and on top of it you have to worry about it arriving cold or the driver eating it. There's almost no upside to eating in a sit-down restaurant anymore.

Depending on where you are, there are still lots of restaurants that actually cook food, not just thaw and heat.

I've road tripped across the north east, South East, Midwest, PNW. I don't even think it depends. Not finding a place that actually cooks food is the exception, not the rule.

> I've road tripped across the north east, South East, Midwest, PNW

There is a class element to the problem. Restaurants tailored to folks on the road tend to focus on their costs. Restaurants offering fine dining obsessively make everything in house. In between, you need local knowledge to navigate the landscape—you’ll struggle to get that on a road trip (versus staying in one town for a few weeks).

Amazing take! Would you say that you could comfortably afford it but are opposed to the costs on principle? What does your average home cooked meal look like? In my experience most people with the means rather enjoy eating out, but you sound a bit like my father.

[Forgot how much HN loves restaurants -- that would explain the karma hit!]

I just don't like paying someone else multiples of what it would cost for me (or my spouse) to do ourselves. We eat pretty simply and inexpensively at home. Lots of rice, potatoes, pasta. I don't pay someone else to fix my car or appliances, either, out of the same principle.

But even if the cost was comparable I still wouldn't be a super-fan of restaurant eating at most restaurants you'd find around where I live (not in a city). They're inconvenient to get to, understaffed, often slow (up to 2 hours due to all the back and forth with servers).

> just don't like paying someone else multiples of what it would cost for me (or my spouse) to do ourselves

I live in west Wyoming and stopped eating steaks out for this reason.

That said, I am an adventurous eater. I am curious about food, and for that restaurants are a raison d’être. If you aren’t curious about food, it obviously isn’t worth the price. (The Sysco spots pretty on tourists or those seeking to eat out for convenience. They serve glorified fast food.)

> Forgot how much HN loves restaurants

For what it’s worth, your original comment dismisses restaurants generally. If you point out you prefer to eat simply, predictably and on a tight budget, the conclusion that restaurants don’t work for you follows.

It doesn’t seem like you are making lamb josh or Peking duck at home, though. Can you do those yourselves cheaper than the restaurant?

You can buy Peking duck and make the rest of the dish yourself at home though. The restaurants mostly don't make it themselves either, but that's normal.

In the large-ish East Coast city I live in, there are so many restaurants making food that a) isn't defrosted Sysco meals and b) is something that would take either a large amount of labor or specialized ingredients to make at home. My home oven is insufficient to make something like Peking duck. Even if I could source the quality of fish the fancy local sushi spot does, would my amateur preparation come close to what they're offering?

Which is all to say that this comment seems limited to people that live in places where the only choices are fast food or fast casual and excludes most everything else. I'm not arguing that restaurant food is affordable, just that there is plenty of non-Sysco food out there.

> in places where the only choices are fast food or fast casual and excludes most everything else.

Which, at least in the US, is pretty much every place that isn't a large-ish city. Lots of people live in such places.

Similarly, the parent comment claims

> There's almost no upside to eating in a sit-down restaurant anymore.

But _lots_ of people live in places where there are multiple choices of restaurants whose menus aren't filled with Sysco food

> _lots_ of people live in places where there are multiple choices of restaurants whose menus aren't filled with Sysco food

Yes, lots of people live in large-ish cities. But also lots of people don't.

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