Food Should Be Better

I was watching Hell’s Kitchen the other day and all the food on it just looks like shit. It was season 16 I think when everyone was bringing in their signature dishes to try to impress Ramsay in the first episode, and everyone brought in scallops and little steaks and whatever. They looked like crap, because they looked just like what they were: crap. Because they looked just like what they were: boring.

Steaks and scallops and chicken and salmon and anything that is an entree by itself should not be reducible to the name of the protein. Protein is one ingredient. No matter how you spruce it up it’s still only going to be one ingredient and it’s going to taste like shit.

Picture this. Going down the road, trying out a fancy restaurant. You’re excited because soon you will be breaking into a world of culinary dreams that justifies expense. However all that they have listed down is slab after slab of meat, nothing like these complex dreams of food that defies plebeian expectation. And I have to say, what the hell? Why would I ever go and eat a fucking STEAK at a fancy restaurant? I give you all this money and this is what you offer me? One ingredient with a bit of spice and a side salad? No, if I owned a restaurant, I guarantee that no entree would give the opportunity for the customer to order something wrong. And if you go to a fancy restaurant and are content, even excited, for its bland options, you are dragging us down into hell with you.

Let me tell you what should be obvious: more ingredients always means better food. One ingredient prepared well is always shit. It’s impossible for it to ever be tasty enough to be justified. Stew is great, and pasta, and paella, and dumplings, and stir-fries. Steak sucks, pork chops suck, salmon sucks, everything that is just the name of one prepared ingredient is always bad. Burritos, now that’s great, a lot of stuff in a tortilla. Thanksgiving dinner is secretly a huge blob of all different kinds of food. But anything that just involve sprucing up a meat is prone to failure. I myself have many experiences where they do attempt to enhance it a bit, putting on a couple of tomatoes or a light glaze, and those are very good- tomatoes are intrinsically quite flavorful, but they are ruined by every bite of a meat that does not explode in flavor. I’m disgusted to nausea by any food that’s bland. I think at any event, you must serve food that is as FLAVORFUL AS POSSIBLE TO THE POINT OF INFINITY WITH NO UPWARD LIMITATION. There should never, ever be any opportunity not taken to enhance the zest of a dish. When I make spaghetti, I put in meat, black beans, tomatoes, onions, water chestnuts, baby corns, mangos, mandarins, and every spice in the rack. Lots of flavor, lots of ingredients.

https://imgur.com/a/RP5ezUP

Food is supposed to be like this. One ingredient by itself does not have the flavor that breaks down walls and forces you into a swirling vortex of mental energy. Food always need to be loud, or it’s not good. It always needs to completely overwhelm the senses to the greatest possible ability. What about people that don’t like that? Who want mild little snippets of flavor that don’t have to distract them too much? They deserve to be punished with extravagantly tasting meals until they become better than the scoundrels they are. If you don’t like infinite, brain-exploding flavor, like it, or every extravagant tasting meal you eat that you don’t enjoy is your punishment, is the suffering you deserve for ever allowing yourself to strive for less in every meal than the most beautiful possible dream.