> The difference would be completely lost on them.

I've definitely heard the life advice to avoid trying this kind of thing in case you do like it, then everything less is permanently tainted with the knowledge that it's not as good.

However, western super-high-price dining tends to be one or both of "demoscene for food" or "NFTs for food"

- demoscene: a series of increasingly elaborate and labor-intensive techniques for showcasing skill in a constrained environment. The Heston Blumenthal/molecular gastronomy approach.

- NFTs: the process entirely about conspicuous consumption; the value of the food is determined by how many resources were expended in the process, not what it actually tastes like. Wines in particular have a value determined by rarity and the secondary market.

The best compromise is probably found around the "twice as much as a chain restaurant" price point; enough to find quality ingredients and staff who aren't too rushed off their feet, not enough that you start getting weird stunts.

(a fun read: Jay Rayner's negative review of the Polo Lounge https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/aug/15/the-polo-lounge... )

> I've definitely heard the life advice to avoid trying this kind of thing in case you do like it, then everything less is permanently tainted with the knowledge that it's not as good.

Does that actually happen though? I know a thing or two about wine and sometimes buy bottles in the 50-100 euro range, which I feel are totally worth it, but I'm still happy to drink cheap plonk with friends most of the time. This works because (1) you forget about what the high end experience was like quite quickly and/or (2) you drink it in a very specific setting so you're not likely to conclude "I now always need/want this" and (3) a lot of what makes high end cuisine / wine / spirits so fun to try is not just that they're better but that they're different from what you're used to, the scale is not just worst-best but also ordinary-extraordinary, and you're not always in the mood for extraordinary.

My guess would be that the phenomenon of permanently hankering for the good stuff after having tried it once is probably more likely to happen with everyday luxuries: good bread, slightly-above-average wine, etc. And in that case, you get a little bit more enjoyment out of your food for a little bit more money, which seems like a fair deal. But even in that case, I don't know anyone who, after trying craft beer, has vowed to never drink a cheap pilsner again.

It definitely happened to me with steak. After a year where I unintentionally climbed that hedonistic ladder, I ended up in a place where steak I would have formerly been fine with is now unpleasant to eat. So I just don’t eat steak much any more. I don’t think anything was really lost there - well prepared steak still tastes amazing, but the environment and my body could benefit from me eating fewer slabs of cow anyway.

It definitely also happened to me with coffee. I used to be able to drink almost any coffee straight, but over time my taste drifted towards more expensive stuff and I started adding cream and sugar to hide the taste of cheap coffee. That’s mostly thanks to all of the trendy coffee shops in San Francisco where I did meetings. So one of my small projects during covid was actually finding the cheapest bulk coffee I could drink straight. As proof that my tastes had drifted, what I settled on turned out to be a step above the cheapest cohort, but thankfully still several times cheaper than making a daily habit of single origin coffee.

Thankfully, it never happened to me with restaurants. Despite having paid hundreds of dollars for a meal on a few occasions, I haven’t lost the ability to enjoy stuff across the whole price spectrum.

I agree with you. I find that the amount of enjoyment I get out of the thing doesn't change, I just now need more a expensive thing to get the same amount of enjoyment.

That's why I choose to listen to music on my cheap $100 speakers that can still give me goosebumps and not listen to my friend's $5000 speakers. All that would happen is that I'd lose the goosebumps because I'd notice how shitty mine are.

It happened to me with speakers/headphones. I used to listen to all kinds of music on cheapos before I found a nice pair of cans with good balance across the frequency range. After that I couldn't help noticing all the distortions from the cheapos and how they degraded the entire mood of the music. When the nice ones broke I pretty much stopped playing music. Sometimes I would get the urge and start up a playlist but it would usually feel flat. After it was over I didn't have the motivation to put on anything else and would rather just be in silence. The music was so much nicer in my head that playing it through the cheapos was just too disappointing.

If you do a wine blind taste test I bet you'll discover you're throwing your money away.

I've done quite a few as part of courses, and I've also served expensive bottles to people without telling them. It's definitely a humbling experience and the most expensive wines are certainly not always the most liked, but that's why you study: to make sure that you don't just buy ostentatious expensive stuff, but that you buy expensive stuff that is actually good and noticeably different from supermarket wines.

I'm guessing your reply is motivated by the 2001 blind tasting where oenology students couldn't even differentiate between red and white wine [1], which is certainly an interesting bit of research, but not the kind of slam dunk you would think when you read third-hand reports about it in the media or rationalist circles.

[1] http://www.daysyn.com/Morrot.pdf

This is almost certainly true. Professional wine reviewers fail taste tests all the time.

> demoscene: a series of increasingly elaborate and labor-intensive techniques for showcasing skill in a constrained environment. The Heston Blumenthal/molecular gastronomy approach.

I’d add on: anything that’s difficult/time-consuming/etc. to make at home even if you could, but scale makes it a lot easier.

I know a Ukrainian guy that, without fail, orders borscht if it’s on the menu. He could make it himself, but his wife forbids him from stinking up the house with beets and cabbage for the afternoon it takes to prepare.

> I’d add on: anything that’s difficult/time-consuming/etc. to make at home even if you could, but scale makes it a lot easier.

True of restaurant food in general and even street food; what makes these things great is often lots of little bits and pieces of topping or flavoring that would be too time-consuming and wasteful to make at home.

But it's not limited to high end. "Indian" food is cheap but benefits from the scaling of cooking a lot of different spices in a large pot for a decent amount of time. Your borscht is another example.

(What the UK calls Indian food is often cooked by Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, the name is kind of a historical accident)

Borscht is like pizza to me. It’s just never bad.

The same with BBQ, beer and sex. None of it is ever "bad"; just better or worse than other times you had it.

I’ve definitely had some bad beer and BBQ that will never willingly touch my tastebuds again.

Analysis: true

Oh it could be bad with bad ingredients, same as pizza though.

Or sloppy execution

> avoid trying this kind of thing in case you do like it

I maintain that this is a good reason why no one should eat placenta. What if you find out it's the best thing you've ever had?

You'd have to go into a fake business processing them into pills for people, that's what.

Hey, just thought I'd reach out to you. I'm Tom from GoPlacenta.io (YC S21). We're out to make meaningful changes in the placenta market segment. We've already built a review platform and we're teaming with 23AndMe for an integrated vertical approach...

sorry

The other odd thing about placenta: "The placenta is unique in that it is an organ which arises from the tissue of two genetically distinct organisms; part of the placenta develops from the tissue of the mother’s uterine wall, while another part develops from the fetus’ own tissue. After the blastocyst which will develop into the fetus makes contact with the uterine wall, blastocyst and maternal tissue grow together to form a single, cooperating organ that links the two together."

I don't know whether mothers think of the placenta as their own body part or part of the baby, but personally I think it is in poor poor taste to eat baby parts.

I like the demoscene and NFT analogies.

I think you're missing the point on the compromise. It's not simply about the price.

Look for ethnic restaurants whose primary clientele is their fellow countrymen. (Easy to find in a large city. Less so in the suburbs.) This is where you will find the intersection of low price and high quality product.

Mexican and Asian places abound in this category. But you can find just about anything in a large city - Middle Eastern, South American, even European (especially eastern)

haha classic line "The three diminutive crab cakes for £32 have a rigid shell the development chefs at Findus would envy and taste only lightly of crab, as if embarrassed about the star ingredient. They come with a sauce reminiscent of school-dinner salad cream circa 1975."

It always makes me question whether it is good to have a well developed taste.

Having taste makes you require more dollars to get the same level of satisfaction from a meal or a drink.

> Having taste makes you require more dollars to get the same level of satisfaction

I have carefully avoided trying excessively high quality things because once I've experienced something truly luxury then it becomes an ongoing expense to keep up that level of experience. The irritating part is that before I was perfectly happy in my ignorance of something better being available out there, but aftewards I feel like I'm "ruined" because I'm constantly disappointed and frustrated if I can't keep up the level of quality.

I have had headphones ruined for me because I tried the Sennheiser HD 800 once and then there was no going back to cheap plastic cans.

I've had monitors ruined for me a long time ago because I got Dell PremierColor 4K display.

Food as per my previous post. I've had such great food in so many fantastic restaurants that I'm upset with mere "pub food" that used to make me perfectly happy before. I am now incapable of eating certain fast food unless literally starving to death.

Etc...

Thankfully, I'm still okay for wine. I believe it comes in two or is it three colours? Whatever, I'm still happy with a random $10 bottle. My boss for comparison now has to buy the $250 bottles at company dinners. Ouch.

>I have had headphones ruined for me because I tried the Sennheiser HD 800 once and then there was no going back to cheap plastic cans.

It's not really the same as being unable to appreciate anything but a glass of Petrus or DRC. For a one time payment of $1k the HD800s will easily serve you for the rest of your life. If you prefer fine food and wine that $1k might not even get you a single meal.

I've had the HD 800 for about ten years, but it's starting to fall apart. To put things into perspective, I've had to replace both the cable and the padding twice, and each of those spare parts cost the same as a typical pair of "decent" headphones. Then I had to get a dedicated headphone amp PCI-e card, because it turned out that "regular" soundcards are not good enough.

I've easily spent over $2K so far. When I replace it, I'll have difficulty resisting the temptation to upgrade to the "next level". Planar magnetic or planar electrostatic headphones are the next logical step. Those start at $2K and go up from there.

I'll be lucky to escape this with less than $10K spent...

For me it was music. Till this day I cannot stand MP3 audio, and can detect when it's played on the radio, because of one bored afternoon in 2002 experimenting with MP3 and CD audio quality.

Sure, you _could_ rip an MP3 with near-undetectable quality loss for most types of music (The Wall, yes. The Downward Spiral, no). But nobody does that, as apparently it was not the default on anything back then and today Youtube and Spotify and all others still use those horrible quality settings as people have gotten used to them.

I’m curious, have you done an ABX test recently? My wife swore up and down she could hear the difference too. An ABX test with expensive headphones in a quiet room across a few different genres and bitrates showed that she couldn’t.

I tested only with the headphones that I had at the time, with the types of music that I listen to. I'd actually be interested in trying again, but with my normal headphones (typical Sony over-ear), not something expensive.

For reference, I listen to mostly Pantera, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, early Nine Inch Nails, Led Zep. It's not too diverse, but there is a short period from about 1990 to 2005 where music recorded in that period does not transfer to MP3 well. Maybe because the digital artifacts that we cannot hear in the published recordings are amplified in the compressed MP3 - but after that period producers began to optimize their recordings to account for that.

How old were the MP3 files you were using? Early mp3 encoders were generally Not Very Good.

They were brand new, ripped myself and compared with the CD still in the drawer. Using different bitrates and other settings, whatever was documented for the CLI tools at the time. I was using some Red Hat variant, but this was before Fedora. In 2002 I believe.

Though I'm sure that the encoders got better, really, the quality of the common rip has not.

Yeah, the out-of-box encoders included with Linux distros in 2002 would likely not have been great. If you were lucky you might have gotten an early version of LAME. If you do the experiment again, it may be worth using either the likes of Spotify/Apple Music (okay, strictly speaking neither are mp3, but same general idea, and they'll put effort into encoding properly), or using a decent modern encoder (LAME, the Apple one, etc).

Yes, now that you mention it, it was in fact LAME. I'll try again sometime with abcde in its default settings.

By the way, I once made a GUI for abcde called abcdefg (A Better CD Encoder For Gnome) but never did anything with it - it was really just an exercise to learn the GTK libraries because Zim Wiki used them too. But I now regret not publishing it just because it had such a cool name.

Makes me glad to be a simple person with simple tastes - sometimes I taste a more expensive wine, and it's good, but then I ask myself "is this really worth paying 3x or 10x more than for a regular glass of wine?", and most of the time the answer I give myself is no...

> Having taste makes you require more dollars to get the same level of satisfaction from a meal or a drink.

I don't know. It's not really the same level of satisfaction. Eating well is very enjoyable.

I think food is one of the product categories in which spending just a bit more raise the quality drastically. Buying fresh vegetables from the market and butcher meats from time to time rather than everything from a grocery store was transformative for me and it's not actually that much more expensive. I guess I could sustain myself on canned peas and frozen chicken but it wouldn't bring me much joy.

Hedonic adaptation

Yes I do think upbringing does come into play, cause you subconsciously just don't care enough to distinguish the differences. Our family is decently well off but I was sort of raised like we were poor due to my parents upbringing. When I eat out I'm happier eating in hole-in-the-wall places cause I just feel better not "wasting" money on something more expensive. Sometimes I actually feel cheaper stuff really does taste better though since environment and marketing also does factor into the price tag, and cheaper places focus more on just making the damn stuff. Doesn't really help me much when I try to go on dates though Lol.

What on earth do people do besides eating at home from a rotating set of straightforward recipes? Honestly curious. I’m the main cook in my home and we do eat out every other week, but who has time for that much experimentation?

The pandemic has had us eating in for the last year. There's a variety of food blogs/sites that have easy "can't miss" type recipes that are safe enough bets that you don't have to worry about making something else if they're failures.

We try to swap in one or two new recipes a week and the rest are the standards. You get an occasional hit new recipe and then it becomes a standard.

I cook new things by googling "Simple X recipe" and removing anything that doesnt feel essential and adding random stuff I want to get rid of. Usually cant replicate it later.

I love doing this. Some of the best things I've ever eaten were otherwise normal recipes that I spruced up with whatever I had in my fridge.

For me the worst thing was when I invited my parents to more expensive restaurants (more the $50 category in a cheap country) that my father was complaining about how small and expensive is the food, and making jokes about it to the waiter. They got used to it after 10 times going to these places, but I still felt ashamed for some time.

There's a very specific meaning to price rangers of restaurants, I always use Yelp $ sign ratings as an example; they categorize every place into 4 price ranges from $ to $$$$. Generally, the breakdown is as follows:

$ - counter/fast-food/food truck/sketchy

$$ - regular

$$$ - regular, but very small servings and artfully arranged

$$$$ - fancy

The key is to avoid the $$$ places ;)

The Japanese don't necessarily agree with the Michelin guide for rating their restaurants. Some claim that the inspectors didn't proprly understand Japanese food and culture.

https://trulyexperiences.com/blog/the-asian-apathy-to-the-mi...

I wonder if there is an analogy here to classical music. Most lay people would probably not be able to appreciate the technique, difficult, and musicality of certain pieces, but trained ears would appreciate the fine details.

As a consequence, most people prefer “easily digestible” music such as pop music rather than highly refined classical music.

Counterpoint: I know absolutely nothing about music, and generally prefer classical to modern pop.

I know a lot about food/cooking, and think McDonald's makes a great burger.

Sure, but I think the analogy is more appreciating the difference between the best orchestra playing a piece and a more average one. Or why one Bach composition is "better" than another one. I like classical well enough, but I wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars for good seats to hear a specific soloist in a specific theater.

I found Michelin stars in Japan came with way less pretense (and by extension / in conjunction – way smaller price tag) than in Europe / US.

Most things in Japan seem to come with less pretense.

I would argue that it is likely different type of pretence. Just watch some films about food and how many years of training it needs and so on.

Care to elaborate?

There was a documentary on netflix (someone dreams of sushi, Hiro?) that leads me to believe sushi is an art form using food.

If you don't appreciate the art form then it might not matter what dollar level or Michelin stars a place has.

I've never been to a Michelin star restaurant but do watch cooking shows where they make food like that and I don't know if I'd appreciate it.

You're thinking of Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

That's the documentary that inspired me to try Michelin starred Sushi restaurants in Japan. I went to Jiro's son's restaurant, which is by all accounts better, but nobody will say so because they don't want to disrespect Jiro while he's still alive. It's a Japanese culture thing.

My father asked me why I spend so much money on raw fish and rice.

I tried to explain to him that the high-end sushi restaurant experience is really a magic show that also includes food.

Have you heard of the placebo effect? Shamans "treat" their patients with practised rituals that make people feel better. Sure, nothing has ever been cured through such methods, but it sure does feel nice!

I have a personal pet theory that this is a side-effect of our evolution: little kids that sat quietly mesmerised watching the elders perform their arts and crafts would pick up the skills and eventually master them themselves. Kids that didn't sit quietly didn't get to be as skilful and would in turn fail to be good parents and hence had fewer children.

Some people call it ASMR, which is a fun term to search for on Youtube if you can't sleep at 11pm.

Watch any magician, or master craftsman at work, and you get the same tingly feeling on your scalp. You sit still, quietly mesmerised as you follow the swift and sure movement of their hands.

THAT is what good sushi is about. You sit at the table with the sushi master in front of you and observe as he slices the fish with rhythm and precision. You're entranced as he picks up the rice, moulds it, applies the wasabi, places the fish, and coats the assembly with sauce. It's like watching a magician dealing cards!

People pay hundreds of dollars for a magic show in Vegas. In Japan, you get the same experience except you also get fed in the process...

Japanese sushi is one of those foods that have almost no chance to be replicated at home.

First there is almost no way to get the rice to consistently taste anything close to how they do it in restaurants.

Second, it’s unlikely you will buy dozens of different high end top quality fish, prepare the fish, and then just make a few slices for your meal.

Finally, sushi is made to be eaten immediately. So if you want to make your own meal of 20 to 30 different types of sushi, you will have to either make and eat as you go, or make them all then eat them after they have sat for too long.

At least for many Western dishes, I can replicate maybe 80 percent of the taste. Sushi is a completely different level.

Last time I did it (my ex-wife is hafu), I didn't find the rice particularly difficult, but yeah, from a variety perspective there is no real option: you pick 2-3 types of fish and mix them up in as many different ways as you can. You are effectively forced to prepare for 5-6 people minimum. This is probably why sushi, in Japan, was traditionally considered festive food, not an everyday staple: there is no way to make it well for a single family.

I've been to a few michelin-starred shushi places in London and Europe. A regular shush place in Tokyo was much better. Even a cheap place with no waiters (conveyer belt). It was the greatest difference between food X and food X in the country of origin.

The biggest disappointment was the michelin-starred stall in Singapore. The food was just... bad.