At less formal restaurants, the staff are chill enough to immediately tell you what they eat.
At high end restaurants, they can tell you because they've had tastings and ingredient drills.
In the middle? You run into the weird "just enough training to pretend to be formal, but not enough to actually have comprehensive menu knowledge." Hence a lot of refusal to make recommendations or braindead "Do you like steak? The steak's good." (And yes, I know all the ways that customers are assholes about recommendations)
I nearly eat daily at my Thai restaurant near work and itβs delicious and I joke with the cook, that what I would call spicy he would not even notice.
Such lovely people, so grateful and caring. I always tip, which is not common in most my country for a meal at a fast food place.
Whenever I eat somewhere new I ask what the staff would have if they were me. It's almost always a very good decision. They tend to enjoy making recommendations, and I often try something I wouldn't have picked myself.
Unless it's a Thai restaurant staffed by native Thai or Korean staffed by Koreans. I can't keep up with that spice.