> To avoid spending money, we'd been subsisting on a diet consisting largely of soup. [...] But now, we'd gradually started to feel like we might be able to afford to eat at restaurants again.
No middle ground?
For anyone asking about recipes: this book is good : http://www.amazon.com/Soups-Over-Best-Recipes-Hamlyn-ebook/d...
out... ?
outside?
Sure living off of nothing but instant ramen isn't great, but neither is living off of nothing but broccoli.
> Nothing in instant ramen is inherently bad for you
I'd be astonished if nothing else on this list is inherently bad for you: http://i.imgur.com/sHJldVY.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81iUkR2HDYL._SL1500_.j...
Until recently almost everyone was eating trans fats because they were promoted as a healthier alternative, you can't single out Ramen here.
Top Ramen doesn't (which is what I was going on), they removed trans fats several years ago. Also nothing else on that list is inherently bad for you.
Of course, high-end restaurant also do exist.
The english language varies considerably by geographical region, the speaker's socioeconomic class, etc. Your statement is not universally true; I've met people to whom it's true and people to whom it's not.
The original comment said that Americans consider McDonald's a restaurant, in implicit contrast to unnamed other places where McDonald's does not qualify as a "restaurant," as a way to suggest that Americans have lower standards than others for food quality.
I am pointing out that, at least among the people I've known my whole life here in the US, this is definitely not the case; McDonald's and other fast food places are not in any sense considered "restaurants," no more than a gas station that sells microwave burritos is a "restaurant."
I hope you limbered up sufficiently before stretching so far to find a way to take that as an insult.
A restaurant would be anywhere that a group can go to have food prepared for them, and then sit down and eat it. Most gas stations don't qualify on either count.
(And incidentally I've been to some really excellent, chef-owned restaurants that don't have table service. Cajun places, mainly. Cajun seems to occupy a weird intersection between "classy" and "cheap" that no other cuisine can enter.)
Key point: apparently McD is cheap in the United States. Not so much in the eastern parts of Europe.
This arose because the easiest way for a restaurant to increase revenue is to increase portion sizes and hence the price.
"What? Was there something wrong?"
"No, i'm in a hotel and don't really have anywhere to store or reheat it."
"Yeah, but... Are you sure you want it?"
Plenty of Americans barely know how to fry an egg, plenty of others cook everything they eat.
HN also has lots of articles about nutrition and exercise, etc. So I think some of us would love to know if these guys were head down coding surviving on soup for months because they were in the zone.
I wouldn't have qualms about doing it again. It was probably more expensive than buying fresh, but the time investment was low, it tasted way better than any frozen dinner, and it was way cheaper than doing any takeout.
But if you cut up that one hot dog and use it to make hot dog soup, you're now signaling that you're far too frugal for a second hot dog, a bun, or even mustard. But you're still not pinching that penny so hard that you just eat the hot dog, unheated and unaccompanied. Soup says "poor, but still trying hard, because it is only temporary".
~ Either that, or it says "following a fad diet based on the idea that people who eat mostly soup are not fat". ~
I think it's rather hyperbolic to have some strong association between the word "soup" and cultural icons like "stone soup" stories.
In your thought experiment, does the median price of a "soup" differ significantly from the median prices of "bisque", "stew", "chowder", "broth", "cream", "potage", or specifically named soups like "bouillabaisse", "gazpacho", "chili", or "pho"?
My hypothesis is that higher-end restaurants purposefully substitute "soup" with synonymous words to avoid the intrinsic association with frugality, and this practice lowers the observed median price of a "soup".
It would be for the same reason that some restaurants don't put $ or numbers with two decimal places anywhere on the menu. It's a psychological trick to prevent you from entering "cost-benefit evaluation mode" before ordering your meal, so you spend more. Compare the following to your own anecdotal restaurant experiences:
- Crab Bisque ..... -9-
- crab soup: bowl $4.00, cup $2.50So when you order pho at a restaurant they have purposely named it pho instead of soup in an attempt to sound more "high class?" I'm sorry, but this seems like an extreme view. Most of those words exist to describe something specific. Do you expect to see "A bunch of vegetables cooked in water" or "vegetable soup" on the menu? Is the later an attempt to charge you more?
Take gazpacho as another example. It's a specific type of soup. You can't complain about this anymore than complaining that the menu says "vegetable soup" instead of just "soup." They have to describe the food adequately to you so that you know what you're getting.
"Normal" restaurants don't know all the tricks to get customers to spend more money, but businesses for whom that marginal 1% of revenues is significant will absolutely pick over their menus looking for loaded words and design tweaks.
If you have ever seen a smiley face on your receipt, that is a psych trick. It is experimentally proven to increase tips for female servers in midscale casual dining restaurants. Squat, smile, mimic. Push appetizers, booze, and desserts. Say you enjoy a dish yourself. Touch customers on the shoulder. Tell a joke. Pose a brainteaser. If a server does any of those things to you, they may have done their tip-boosting research.
Menu tweaks are pretty simple, actually:
- put cheaper, high-margin items near the most expensive thing on your menu
- create seasonal specials
- introduce new menu items as specials, sides, or appetizers rather than as an entree
- draw boxes around the popular items, or highlight them in some way
- carefully match descriptive tone with the desired clientele
- destroy all currency symbols
- suggest beverage pairings with the entree listing
- make high-margin items more discoverable
- chunk your menu into graspable categories; a giant pile of items should form a tree rather than a flat list
- make the most expensive thing on your menu more expensive
But in your original post you included "pho" in the list of words that restaurants use to replace the word "soup." In this example "Pho" is not being used as a replacement for "soup."
Quite a lot of people do not know restaurant dishes by their proper names. If you invent a name for your menu item, or use an existing name not common in the vernacular, you avoid most psychological associations with those words. You can describe a Reuben without ever using the words "sandwich", "meat", or "bread", for instance.
Reuben: corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and Russian dressing on rye; lightly toasted
You can even avoid saying "beef", "cheese", or "dressing".
Reuben: cured brisket, sauerkraut, Emmentaler, and Thousand Island on marbled rye; lightly toasted
"Reuben" is not a replacement for "sandwich". That's what it is, after all. But for this particular menu item, no one ever reads the word "sandwich", nor are they likely to say it when ordering. And when that word is not present, people are less likely to associate the restaurant dish with the thing they can almost certainly make at home at lower cost. That's the whole point. You're trying to avoid activating certain areas of the human brain that tend to rein in impulses and encourage activation of areas that stimulate reward-seeking behaviors.
It isn't rocket science, but it is a science. People get paid to experiment on how to encourage people to spend more money in retail stores, and the results they get are often significant enough to sell to businesses. Once you can see these particular fnords, you notice them everywhere. It's one of the reasons why I can hardly stand eating in casual dining chain restaurants any more: I see puppet strings attached to everything, from the moment I see the building to the second I leave.
I had thought it was a signifier that the place is supposed to be high-class; the implication to me is that open discussion of money is slightly distasteful and should be done as briefly as possible. (And leaving off decimal places in particular says "no one here is so regretfully poor as to consider quibbling over mere fractions of a dollar.")
In the same way that freemium games elide your spends of real money behind a layer of invented virtual currency, the goal is to make the customer forget that they are spending actual money.