Dining Out Today?

 

Low-tech, time-tested tips for avoiding bad meals when dining out:  

Use your nose

One detail that links inferior restaurants is an absence of (good) cooking smells when you walk in. A steakhouse should be fragrant with beef, an Italian dining room should whisper garlic, and the air in a Korean venue should fairly tingle with chiles. A blank smell — or sometimes worse, a blast of bleach or ammonia from cleaning products — should send you back onto the sidewalk.

Listen for problems

Loud music early at night almost always signals a restaurant that doesn’t care about diners’ comfort or staff’s health. A boom box posing as a dining room isn’t prioritizing food. Exhibit A: the chain STK, so thunderous at the Washington branch that diners can’t tell whether servers are greeting them or asking their water preference.

Trust your first impressions

If a restaurant is short with you on the phone, chances are good the in-person service will match. (In fairness, diners should call at off-hours, not at high noon or dinner rush.) If a website fails to list prices or continues to post its Mother’s Day specials in summer, the restaurant is asleep at the switch. A good establishment wants to welcome diners, not send them to competitors.

Look for activity

See that beautiful host armed with menus outside a restaurant? Keep walking. A reputable restaurant doesn’t need to use shiny baubles to lure people inside. Inside a place, look for servers who appear happy (proud to work there) and some bustle (diners willing to wait for a table). A slow sushi joint, for instance, is best avoided. You want to see a busy counter and lots of turnover.

When reading reviews, use some skepticism

Particularly for glowing reviews from major publications, check out the date they were published. Anything older than a year is iffy; restaurants are like live theater, with the possibility of changing casts and scripts. It also helps if the author or endorser is still alive. If Julia Child or James Beard approved the place, well, she died 20 years ago, and he passed in 1985. As for Yelp and company, consumers are getting information from an anonymous crowd whose credentials aren’t always obvious. (Whether you agree or disagree with me, my bio and body of work are easy to find and I aim for fairness by visiting restaurants multiple times.)

Take hints from the menu

Be wary of places with menus that have lots of typos, exclamation marks or point out that a dish is “cooked to perfection.” Sloppiness and hyperbole don’t bode well for the rest of the dining experience. Nor do lists that go on and on, like Barbra Streisand’s memoir. Lots of photographs are suspect, too. See: Buffalo Wild Wings.

Keep it clean

I’ve eaten in some great places where the restrooms were less than tidy. But I’ve never had a memorable meal from a chef whose jacket is stained, or in a dining room where floors are sticky or tables go uncleaned for more than a few minutes. Such sights suggest inattention and understaffing.

Use the transportation test

Are there lots of in-state license plates in the parking lot? Step inside the restaurant, especially if Porsches and beaters are in the mix. (Seafood shacks are universally beloved.) Buses, on the other hand, should be viewed as a stop sign — a tourist trap of the first degree.

 -Tom Sietsema has been The Washington Post's food critic since 2000. He previously worked for the Microsoft Corp., where he launched sidewalk.com; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer; the San Francisco Chronicle; and the Milwaukee Journal. He has also written for Food & Wine.

P.S.

My additional advice: CHECK THE RESTAURANT'S BATHROOM BEFORE ORDERING FOOD.