Does /rich people food/ really taste that good?

Expensive restaurants produce dishes you cant compare to an average meal, much more thought, technique and care goes into them. Still there are awesome and horrible dishes and restaurants in the high-price segment. I had michelin starred meals where i would have much preferred a bowl of ramen or a döner kebap from my turkish butcher. Tldr, different but not necessarily better. Also you can try it by cooking it yourself, check out "coffee roasted carrots" on seriouseats for example, for a cheap appetizer that reflects high-end approaches to food

its a quenelle of ice cream that's melting.
i make 'rich people food's and, yes, obviously. Its not all amazing because surprise some chefs are assholes, but it takes actual effort. And believe it or not there are actual reasons we pair this with that or plate a certain way. Is it worth spending 50,100,250 a person before wine? Not if that's a lot to you.
But scared money don't make money you little bitch

this dude has eaten good food

t. sucker for some good food

here's the thing, pleb.

"rich people food" can tantalize all five senses. Sometimes the taste is the least important of the experiences. Yeah, it all tastes amazing. But it looks, smells, sounds, hears and feels amazing, too. the textures, the pops. the hots and colds on the same plate. the sweets and salties complimenting but not clashing.

Sure, you can go to mom and pop's steak joint and get a steak that tastes pretty damn good. but will it be a gastronomic tour de force that leaves all five senses exhausted from a workout? prob not.

so it takes a nice chef to have a good meal and a not so amazing meal from an asshole one?

explain

I make pretty good money and I have lots of disposable income but most of the stuff I eat is just some cheaper cuts of meat but take the time with them and prepare them properly and they come out awesome . Lamb shanks/shoulder or brisket for example.

I do have a weakness for oysters though, they're pretty expensive where I live and if I get bored I just go buy a dozen and a bottle of stout and chill out for a bit.
I think they were $25 a dozen last time I bought them and its not like a meal, you still have to eat a meal afterwards.

>Talks about skill, technique, and care to cook..

Then why do you go on about cooked rice and raw fish?

Middle class user with a very, very wealthy uncle here

One thing i will say is that sturgeon roe is good but not much better than salmon roe and people eat the former mainly as a status symbol.

But kobe beef is incredible, and id be lying if i said heirloom tomatoes arent the best tomatoes ive ever had. Also ive been served rich people scotch and ho boy let me tell you.

Small plating can be very impressive depending on the restaruant. You think itd be weird and not really like eating but they pack so many different flavors into about four courses and by the end of the meal youre just as satisfied as if you ate in a steakhouse.

So yeah, caviar is bollocks but most of the time rich people get good shit.

One thing I've noticed while eating at rich people restaurants this year is that a lot of them copy one another's menu, especially the pan-asian / fusion spots, which all seem to have ripped off signature dishes at Nobu.

I had Sushi Nakazawa this year and it was terrific, but honestly not worth the price and the ambiance was just not there. The front of house staff tries to hard at playing the part of the bitchy maitre d'. The place was full of obnoxiously drunk FinTech bros who probably couldn't even taste the fish. You get that a lot at high end spots in NYC.

Some of the stuff is a straight up rip off though. I actually almost committed a faux pas at Nobu over the weekend. The couple who normally takes me out to these places was raving about the mochi and asked me if I too agreed that it was such an incredible marvel that the Nobu staff is able to make such an amazing, stretchy rice cake. (This is what rich people talk about before dessert comes out) I said "I'm pretty sure it's made offsite and just frozen and sent over." Because honestly it tastes like the mochi I get from Trader Joes.
You'd think I just said "I want to assfuck your daughter." because the conversation ground to a halt.
Waiter comes over to take dessert orders, and my companions say "We loooooooove the mochi you guys make here sooooo much, but is there anything else you can recommend?"
And the waiter goes "Well, our mochi is actually not made in house, so if you really want something good, I'd recommend the Whiskey Cappuccino..."

>mfw I'm vindicated, dodging a social bullet AND my companions transition from disavowing me to praising me for my refined palate.

A good chunk of the 20th Century was spent making poor people food delicious. This has been done by balancing flavors against each other in specific food items. Nachos and chain pizza have appealing balances of flavor and texture. And you'd find a similar balance in a meal of raclette at some luxury hotel after a day skiing in the Alps. The difference is that the nachos and chain pizza are made from the cheapest possible mass produced ingredients, so while the balance of flavors is spot on the flavors themselves are simple, and don't have much nuance. At the raclette meal the cheese, air dried beef, sausage, cornichons and even the wine you drink with it are all traditionally made products, each with very complex flavors. So while the overall balance of flavors is similar the flavors themselves are more nuanced - there's a lot more going on in the meal.

This is really the difference between the food served at Michelin starred places and chain restaurants. The stuff at chain restaurants may have similar balances of flavor, often exaggerating each to compensate for the lack of nuance in each element of the dish. Upscale restaurant food is often (not always) more restrained examples of such balances of flavor because each element of the dish has a lot more going on in terms of flavor. Once you're used to food made with quality ingredients food made with cheap mass produced ingredients becomes less appealing because even when it strikes the right balances it comes off tasting artificial, cheap, false and overblown.

You have no idea, man. It's like eating the culinary equivalent of a goddamn Da Vinci. If that fish were any fresher it'd have still been alive.

I think the abalone liver sauce actually made me experience a psychic revelation, or maybe I caught a glimpse of god, that's how fucking good it was. Also sushi isn't just raw, there's plenty of cooked sushi too. in this case there was bonito, oyster and shrimp that was cooked, all of which was incredible. it almost makes you want to cry.

the price in that case was 100% for the chef's effort and experience and dear lord did it show. that's what I think of when I think "rich people food", it's not just expensive ingredients, it's the expertise of the chef. the pick of the ingredients at peak freshness, the preparation, the temperature, the flavor, the TEXTURE jesus christ the texture.

this guy gets it

Food is food. What rich people pay for is the environment, the ambience and the superior service

>Food is food.
You say that, but the video you posts totally undercuts your point. The dishes in that video use ingredients that aren't even available to the average consumer, presented in a manner that requires technique well beyond the ability of most home cooks. Not is it beautiful and delicious, it's also a parade of dishes that it would be almost impossible for someone who wasn't in the industry to replicate at home. These kinds of dishes only exist at this level of dining.

I guess its all about your reference point and how you value things.

My first experience of proper fine dining was Restaurant Gordon Ramsay which is 3 michelin star. It was incredible. I'd never tasted anything as exceptional. The idea that you could get so much flavour in to something as simple as a comsomme was mind blowing. I still remember all the dishes vividly, and its 7 years on.

After going there, I started trying to go as many places as possible. I went to 3, 2 and 1 star places. I really enjoyed it and I found places that showed moments of excellence. However, I dont think I found anything as good as my first experience, and a few times I felt it was a bit of a waste of money.

The menu costs £145 per person now. So about the same as I'd pay for 10 visits to a high street restaurant for one course, or maybe five 3 course meals somewhere slightly nicer. But I think having done it, and a lot of other places, I'm a little bit over it and Id sooner spend my money else where. Not because it isnt worth it, I just value things differently now.

Sounds like you were just starstruck the first time. Nothing will ever live up to your embellished, rose-tinted memory of that night

This. Imagine trying to do 10-20 separate dishes over the course of like 3 hours, each incredibly demanding in technique, plating, ingredient sourcing etc. No way you could do it at home, even if you were a top tier chef. It takes a huge brigade to pull that off. Even doing, say, four or five courses at home pretty well means you don't actually get to eat any of it, you just stay in the kitchen and cook.

Gf's family is super wealthy, I've visited a few times. I agree with essentially, the meat and cheese is super local/small-batch but produce is just as good as any farmer's market. The rest comes down to how good they are/their personal chef it as cooking. And her family and chef are pretty damn good.

The wine is noticeably better but when I look at the pricetags for some of the bottles they have, there's no way I'd pay it. I know a $12 bottle that's just as good as anything in their cellar and it doesn't have a chance of being oxidized straight off the shelf.

is at* not it as, lmao

Or he just burned out on paying the price. I'm a middle class guy who went through a few years of doing the fine dining thing during a particularly good moment in my career. After a while it resets your baseline. You just expect the food and service to be great, and you're almost a little disappointed when it's less than amazing. And when you find yourself starting to get jaded about what is for you an expensive indulgence you consider not bothering with it so much. These days I go to immigrant places where the food is often amazing, but the service, ambience and plating are often terrible. Dinner is always an order of magnitude cheaper than at a fine dining place. And I know a number of chefs I like draw inspiration from places like that. Turns out I'm happier eating affordable, inspiring meals in an imperfect setting than I am spending more than I really can afford for inspiring meals where every detail of the experience is spot on. So I guess I'm over fine dining until the next time I have fuck you money.

Probably some of both. I still enjoy it, but I dont get the same feeling I used to get.

I went for a taster menu a few weeks ago at a 1 star place, came to around £80 each. It was nice. But the day after I went to a little local Japanese place. Its extremely basic, the menus look like shit with words spelled wrong or scribbled out. But for £8 I can get a big bowl of pork fried rice, or £12 for sushi (pic related).

I think I'd rather go to the cheap local places, unless its somewhere exceptional with 3 michelin stars. Seems to be the way imo. Either all out, or nothing.

>taste is the least important
is this the Veeky Forums equivalent of "fun is a buzzword"?

>Its extremely basic, the menus look like shit with words spelled wrong or scribbled out. But for £8 I can get a big bowl of pork fried rice, or £12 for sushi (pic related).
These are the kinds of places I go to now. But I'm in Brooklyn, so the choice of immigrant places is fucking huge, because every neighborhood has a different mix of immigrants. Where I live it's Chinese, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Salvadorian, Polish, Italian, Greek, Turkish and Middle Eastern. I'm also within striking distance of decent South Asian, West Indian and Georgian. Not getting bored anytime soon.

I don't think he means taste is the least important. He's saying at a certain level of restaurant it's a given the food will taste great. It's noticeable and really jarring when a dish misses on that front. The idea is that the food is not just delicious, but stimulating on some other levels as well, with service and an environment that allows you to relax, feel taken care of and really appreciate the whole experience of dining there. Because when dinner for two casually sails past $200 and can hit $500 pretty easily anything less than that is going to feel like a rip off.

i want that milk and honey

Can't forget the service, I ate at the Gramacy Tavern once and the food was all fantastic but nothing specifically was that memorable the service was the best I've ever had in my life though. I think if how close other service comes to that standard when at other white table cloth places.

Think of it this way, pleb.

Wendy the truckstop hooker (you know, from Breaking Bad) can suck your dick for $10. You can also hire a $3,000 escort.

In both cases you will cum. the "feeling of cumming" is not the most important part of the experience.

Or, put another way, I've caught wild bluefin and eaten the chūtoro cut from a fish that was literally alive right on the deck of the boat. If it were just about taste, that would have been the finest fish experience i've ever had. But I've had better fish-eating experiences.

Or maybe, ugh, how can you explain this to somebody to doesn't understand. A $20 dollar steak is 100x better than a $10 steak. a $40 steak is maybe 20% better than a $20 steak. a $100 steak is maybe 10% better than a $50 steak. fractionally better improvements are more expensive - especially once you've maxed out the best possible ingredients. And, yeah, if you're the kind of diner that's happy at Olive Garden, you probably can't even notice the fractional improvements in the food. You're just too busy being stuck on the salt.

you know what, OP, don't worry about it. get the 2 for $20 special at Applebees and save the rest of your money for beer and a blow job from Wendy.

>Thinks sushi takes no skill

>fractionally better improvements are more expensive - especially once you've maxed out the best possible ingredients.
This is definitely part of it. But at a certain level other things play a part as well. Tasting menus, level of service, decor, wine programs, in house pastry chefs and the like all play a part in how many Michelin stars a place has, if it has any at all. The food at a one star place can be no less tasty than what's served at a three star, but the experience (and price) will be different.

Great explanation user

>quality of food peaks so now you need other incentives to spend more money
why not just fuckin say it then retard?

how those small portions can make you full?

Many courses.