Tonight's Restaurant Dinner Fell Off the Sysco Truck
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The article discusses how consolidation in the restaurant industry has led to a loss of local identity and a reliance on mass-produced food from distributors like Sysco, sparking a heated discussion among commenters about the homogenization of restaurant food and the value proposition of dining out.
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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.
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.
I like places with negative reviews. The right people have to hate it in order for me to like it.
> 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.
The term “authentic” can be misused, just like “homemade” and many others...
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Yes, lots of people live in large-ish cities. But also lots of people don't.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bonus points - investigate WHY people/families are after cheap eating out, and not cooking at home.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisqó
https://youtu.be/rXXQTzQXRFc
Yes, big companies are bad. Sysco should be destroyed like all the rest of them.
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