Let’s say I decide to go to a nice restaurant for a meal. The dish comes out, and I ask for a salt shaker before I even taste it (I never have, btw). That is normally considered an insult to the chef or you are pegged as a neanderthal diner.
Why, then, is it normal for a waiter to offer you grinds of pepper all over your plate before you have even had your first bite?
Because the food is almost always going to be salted several times during cooking, but pepper is best put on very fresh afterward and isn’t necessarily used on everything.
But also: Where do you have to ask for salt? I’ve never been to even a fancy place that didn’t keep salt on the table.
Really? Where I live salt on the table or lying around is something in cafes, not restaurants.
In the USA I’ve never been to a restaurant that didn’t have salt on the table. Do you mind if I ask where you live?
I wonder what aspect of cultural differences are responsible with that, thats genuinely super interesting to me
New Zealand. Another cultural difference I know about is we also don’t really have filter coffee, except in really old-fashioned working class cafeterias.
The espresso culture in this part of the world is so well established that Starbucks struggled when it expanded into Australia and New Zealand and instead of proliferating, shrank to just a few stores that cater to overseas tourists.
Do cafes there serve more than coffee and pastries? I’m just curious why they would have salt on the table, but not a restaurant and I’m flooded with ideas that are probably really dumb lol
I think this must be a language barrier thing because cafes serve a lot more than that here.
A picture’s worth a thousand words, so here is a random article with pictures of some cafes,
and here is an article with pictures of restaurants in the same town.
Obviously there’s a bit of crossover.
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Thats genuinely fascinating! I love hearing about that kinda stuff, its always really neat to hear the life experience that folks get and how it differs in different cultures.
If you were to ask for a salt shaker, do you feel like it would be offensive to the folks working there, or preparing your food?
Thanks for sharing your knowledge of another culture with me ☺️
If I were to ask for salt for chips in a cafe or something, no problem. But in a proper restaurant, that would be the same as what @[email protected] describes: it would mark me as some kind of philistine that can’t appreciate the chef.
I’m fascinated by this stuff too! We share a language and consume a lot of your pop culture but there are still so many little things that are different.
Eg “tuna noodle casserole” sounded super gross to me because of the language difference. Here, casserole = a thin, liquid stew with chunks of meat in it, cooked in a ceramic pot, and noodles = only Asian noodles (ramen, udon, etc). But it turns out it’s more like what we call a “pasta bake”, a totally normal dish.