An interesting psychology of restaurant menus is when they use the term ‘house made’ for an item. My assumption then is that all the other items came from the Sysco truck and will be suitably generic.
9x39 3 minutes ago [-]
It has to be because apparently you need a huge menu several times what you can prepare fresh in order to be a restaurant. Some of the best restaurants I've ever been to had only a few items on the menu.
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.
klodolph 1 hours ago [-]
Somehow this has been in the news recently but it’s been happening for a long, long time. There are some foods I just kinda dread and don’t order because they’re the same everywhere. If they’re the same everywhere, it’s because they’re little more than frozen bags and boxes shipped in from Sysco, and I can make the same thing at home.
randycupertino 49 minutes ago [-]
If you like unique local eats that aren't chains and have regional specialties I recommend Roadfood website and book. It was started by two food critics who loved roadtrips and hated chains so they wanted to find authentic local places: https://roadfood.com/
Tons of made from scratch, non-Sysco eats on there!
Sysco reminds me of how airplane, hospital and hotel lobby restaurant food tastes.
klodolph 7 minutes ago [-]
Maybe you’ll hate me for this but when I hear food described as “authentic” I assume that the place is touristy! Something about the word “authentic” stands out like a red flag in restaurant reviews, warning me away.
I like places with negative reviews. The right people have to hate it in order for me to like it.
lokar 56 minutes ago [-]
When I see a Sysco truck delivering to a restaurant I tend to start avoiding it
fzeroracer 42 minutes ago [-]
I think unfortunately this is a massive conflux of many negative rentseeking factors that creates a blackhole of mediocrity.
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.
dkga 45 minutes ago [-]
It's awe-dropping the lengths at which societies go repeating errors of avoiding market dominance because they are detrimental to consumers.
samdoesnothing 43 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean?
dkga 33 minutes ago [-]
What I mean is that it is not a newly observed fact that when companies grow very big and dominant, they obtain market power and this is often abused, to the detriment of customers and end-clients. Still, this happens time and again even in jurisdictions with powerful regulators such as the US.
ajross 12 minutes ago [-]
I don't think this is correctly capturing the issue. It's just price. Sysco is maximally scaled and cheap. Local weird stuff isn't. It's that simple.
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.
deadbabe 7 minutes ago [-]
Most restaurants these days are just serving unique presentations of various Sysco food, or other mass market food distributors.
pimlottc 1 hours ago [-]
> There’s even been consolidation among owners of chains. A large number of food options in and around American malls trace back to one private equity firm named for the main character in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead.
I don’t know why the author avoids naming the firm here, but it’s Roark Capital Group.
I just saw a YouTube video on a similar topic, with the host noticing that jalapeno poppers seemed to be the same no matter what restaurant he went to, and then it dives into the struggles of NOT using Sysco as your distributor if you want to have local goods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXXQTzQXRFc
Given that nobody is buying the US soybean glut, I'm surprised that a mass 'back to tofu' marketing campaign aimed at restaurants isn't taking place. The Sysco distribution network is already in place - 'Soy for Strength' maybe? Or has the carnivore culture made that impossible?
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.
asjldkfin 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
skort 1 hours ago [-]
How is an article that discusses the shortcomings of a mega corp vacuuming up competition, resulting in the majority of restaurant food being the same bland low quality stuff a union hit piece?
Maybe Sysco sucks and it's easy for the union to point out the same things about it? It seems pretty cut and dry that consolidation in many industries results in mediocre at best outcomes.
59 minutes ago [-]
typpilol 57 minutes ago [-]
I'm genuinely confused at the parent comment, and I don't understand how they came away from the article with an anti union sentiment lol
unsnap_biceps 53 minutes ago [-]
I think they mean that the union made the hit piece, not that it was anti-union.
ryandrake 1 hours ago [-]
The value proposition for restaurants is almost completely gone for me, by now. Why would I travel out of my house, sit down some place full of people, pay 3X-5X what I would for an equivalent meal from the grocery store, for commoditized Sysco Slop that every other restaurant serves, and then pay an additional 20% because the restaurant won't pay its workers properly? And getting it delivered with DoorDash? Even more of a waste of money, even more extortionate tipping, and on top of it you have to worry about it arriving cold or the driver eating it. There's almost no upside to eating in a sit-down restaurant anymore.
lokar 54 minutes ago [-]
Depending on where you are, there are still lots of restaurants that actually cook food, not just thaw and heat.
dfxm12 34 minutes ago [-]
I've road tripped across the north east, South East, Midwest, PNW. I don't even think it depends. Not finding a place that actually cooks food is the exception, not the rule.
49 minutes ago [-]
jrowen 38 minutes ago [-]
Amazing take! Would you say that you could comfortably afford it but are opposed to the costs on principle? What does your average home cooked meal look like? In my experience most people with the means rather enjoy eating out, but you sound a bit like my father.
ryandrake 14 minutes ago [-]
[Forgot how much HN loves restaurants -- that would explain the karma hit!]
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).
Rendered at 04:19:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Maybe Sysco sucks and it's easy for the union to point out the same things about it? It seems pretty cut and dry that consolidation in many industries results in mediocre at best outcomes.
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).