Eating Out: Part 1

Becoming the Restaurant Regular that Owners Love

Good Day Frens, 🏝

It’s getting really ugly out there with massive price increases at the grocery store. If you are noticing this, then logic follows that when retail consumers are getting squeezed, that means wholesalers will also be getting squeezed, and passing a lot of that on. 

Check out this thread published yesterday [LINK]

BowTiedOctopod | Mr. Soufflé (3,3) @BowTiedOctopod

3 Reasons You Should Be Cooking More at Home Immediately A Thread/// 🧵

To be sure, the pain you are feeling at the grocery store pales in comparison to many mom-and-pop restaurants that are being crippled. It’s important to keep in mind that restaurants have historically been low margin and high labor/COGS business models. This means you work a lot and hopefully make a modest return. 

Octo has been saying since the beginning of this Substack (and Twitter genesis) that your priority should be cooking for yourself 80% of the time. Seed oils, HFCS, etc are present in every quality-tier of restaurants, so your longterm health will benefit greatly by controlling what you put into your body.

Some quick math: 3 meals a day x 30 days in a month= 90 meals. 20% eating out gives you 18 meals eaten out per month, for an average of eating out 4 times per week. This would include buying “ready made” meals. 

You can see in the numbers that even just eating 20% of your meals out, that’s still 4 meals per week. In times like these, if I’m going to be eating out, I want my USTT going to mom-and-pop restaurants that are making great food and most likely have high stress of price hikes and scarce available labor. 

So here’s a guide to becoming the Restaurant Regular that Owners Love

Finding Your Restaurants: 

So how do you find restaurants that you will enjoy frequenting? 

This is largely subjective, so here’s how Octopod has formulated his restaurant playlist over time. 

-Find restaurants that serve food you love to eat that you don’t want to, or don’t know how to, cook. This is important. Example: Octo rarely goes to Italian restaurants because if I want to eat pizza or pasta, I’m going to have a better experience/result doing it myself. 

-Frequent restaurants that feature exciting/interesting flavors that you won’t get bored of. For the last 5+ years this, for Octo, has been Asia. Some of the most exciting flavor combos on the planet are here: India, Pakistan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Korea, Taiwan, etc. 

-Look for mom-and-pop restaurants where the owners are consistently present in the hospitality and cooking. This is a big factor for me and has proven over the years to be a great indicator for finding a go-to, regular, restaurant gem. 

Octopods Current Playlist:

Thai: Owner is the chef, she is there most days. Small service staff with very little turnover. 

Sichuan: Husband-Wife team. Husband cooks, Wife manages dining room, only 3 other servers. 

Indian: Family Owned. Service staff all personally connected to owner. Owners monitor kitchen and dining room. 

Pakistani: Grumpy old man chef, who’s become a a teddy bear over time. Family is in from time to time to help with service. 

Note: These are all mom-and-pops with flavors I could crush on a daily basis. Many of these cuisines I make myself, but love to eat from others. For me, there is nothing more boring then the next “new” Modern American restaurant, with the over-wrought beet salad, avocado toast and chicken fried quail… 🥱 Again, this is my personal preference so use the above formula to find your favorite restaurants. 

Becoming a Regular:

Ok so you’ve to a framework to find restaurants that you want to frequent often. Now you can start exploring.

Picking Your spots:

So how do you find these gems? 

First and foremost, Yelp sucks… I never use that app even if traveling. It should be used for entertainment purposes only. You’ll have much better luck finding through word of mouth, asking staff at your favorite restaurants or even hitting your local FB City Restaurant Group (tbh, have to be careful in FB too, consider the source, aka poster). 

Once you find a good lead, check the menu. For the kinds of places I love to frequent, if there’s a heavy westernized-menu that’s a turnoff, unless they have another alternate menu that is filled with the authentic dishes representative of that cuisine. 

Easy example: I’m a fiend for legit Chinese food (regions have different specialities), so if I find a place and it’s all Lemon Chicken, Orange Beef, Sesame Chicken, General Tso, Egg Drop soup… I’m not going. But if I see Spicy Cumin lamb, Stir Fry beef and bamboo shoots, Spicy Savory Fish and fish fragrant eggplant… then I’ve found a potential candidate. 

And that concludes part 1… Watch out for the conclusion next week!

Coming up this Week… Paid Sub drop will be the best hummus you’ve ever had in your life.

Finally, Founders! I expect knives to be shipped out in the next ~10 days. Thank you for your patience! 🙏

WAGMI 🚀