Have you ever gone to a restaurant of a professional chef and asked a dish to be changed? We look into if this is insulting to the chef or not.
Having your dinner cooked by a professional chef in a restaurant doesn’t come around often so when you do, you want it to be perfect.
Then when it comes you feel like you want some extra sauce, salt or pepper to make it to your liking.
But is this insulting to the professional chef you just went to the restaurant to be cooked by?
“If I have someone coming to my event, and they go ‘can we have something a little bit spicier?’ It’s just a no. And I don’t think any chef should feel bad about saying that.”
Masterchef The Professionals Winner Dan Lee
“It depends on the restaurant. If I’m going to Toby Carvery or Pizza Hut, it’s very much like you pick what you want.
“But if you go to a restaurant for the chef to eat the chef’s food or like a particular chef and how they do it because you like the idea of it, don’t ask them to change it,” Dan added.
So if you are someone who has asked chefs at your local Wetherspoons to re-cook something, you may have annoyed someone but it isn’t insulting.
According to Dan Lee, the biggest change people ask for in restaurants is for extra salt and pepper before trying the dish.
“This is a childhood thing that people pick up as kids. Where they get a plate of food in front of them. They don’t try it but salt and pepper is just straight on. That gets me badly.”
It annoys Dan so much that if he is doing an event at a restaurant, he will remove all the salt and pepper off of the tables so people enjoy the food the way he cooked it.
“Everyone hates that response and says ‘I really like salt’. I’m like how do you know it’s not salty already. Because I like salty food,” said Dan.
However there is one exception to this rule. Meat.
“People can be funny about how their meat is cooked,” Dan said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s all personal preference.”
This is especially prevalent when people eat steak as people like to eat steak rare, medium, blue and well done (even if well done feels insulting to chefs who love steak).
Dan finished by saying: “Apart from that, I’d say that if you go into a restaurant where you want to try that chef’s food, just let them do it. Don’t ask for adjustments, don’t ask to change it.”