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30 Foods That Are Not As Good As The Hype May Make You Believe, According To Folks In This Online Community
Oh, food is an amazing thing. Yes, of course it's one of the basic necessities of life. Food contains nutrients - substances essential for us. But it can also be a very effective medicine to cure sadness!
There are people who are really obsessed with food, and I mean in a good way. They love cooking, trying new recipes, experimenting, analyzing nutrition values and so on, but there are also folks who don’t really care. However, all of us have some cuisines, types of food or specific meals that we enjoy the most and could eat every day without stopping. But there are also things that we can’t understand why others enjoy as much as they do as it’s not even tasty to us!
Somebody asked in one of the Reddit communities to share cuisines that they believe are overrated. Here, you can find 30 answers that are not all necessarily “standard” cuisines but people don’t find them impressive.
More info: Reddit
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#1
Fancy cupcakes. Every ‘designer’ cupcake I’ve had has been incredibly dry. I just don’t get why they charge $5-$10 per serving, but the quality of the cake is below a Walmart sheet cake.
Sonja 1 year ago
That's true and as a baker I can tell you why. You can't get that impeccable, perfect and artistic look with grannies recipes. They aren't stable enough. A tasty, moist cake would crumble and break if you tried to make it look like Harry Potter's right sock standing up or a unicorn's booty. You can't whip a standard buttercream frosting into the shape of Yoda's toothbrush. You need recipes that are more stable and more malleable to create something that looks like that. That's going to take away from the taste. Those cakes and frostings are mostly sugar. They bake dry and crumbly because that's more stable if you stack it and the frosting is usually just butter or cream cheese with tons of sugar. If you're lucky some freeze dried, powdered strawberries. Because adding strawberry puree means you'll get somewhat softer cream that you can't dress on looking like roses. It won't give you those sharp edges you need to form the petals.
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#2
Not really a cuisine per se, but ‘shock food’
You know those giant milkshakes with whole slices of cake and candy on top, or quadruple cheeseburgers with so much cheese it’s running everywhere. It’s just not practical/tasty and really only exists to get a cool picture
#3
The damn banana-flavoured food and cherry-flavoured food.
Banana is delicious but banana-flavoured stuff tastes so fake and weird.
Cherry-flavoured food just tastes like chemicals and cough drops.
#4
Gold-flaked cuisine
Sami-Jo Ross 1 year ago
Literally just there for people to waste money. "I'm so much richer than you peasants, my food is coated in pure gold!"
#6
Deconstructed anything.
glennok added:
I once ordered deconstructed salmon cream cheese bagel from a diner, it was 5 dollars more. Was literally just all the ingredients for the regular bagel spread out on a plate. Never again.
#7
Steak. I call it the steak cult. For the life of me, I cannot understand it.
Don't get me wrong - I like a good steak. I eat it relatively often. It is sometimes exactly what I'm craving. And there's absolutely a difference between a good steak and a bad steak.
But the steak cult is way beyond that - people fetishize it as the 'best' meal you could ever have. On a menu, they'll be willing to pay double or triple the price for any other main dish, just because it's steak. They fall for every silly, cheap marketing trick in the book (Oh this one isn't just Angus, it's BLACK Angus beef - that'll be 30% more expensive; this one here is 5 million hour aged Wagyu beef and the cow was slightly cross-eyed - I'm afraid you'll have to remortgage your house to afford this prime slice of meat).
It's dumb. On an objective level, the complexity that goes into cooking a steak is far less than a really good risotto. The flavours are less complex, and you can simply do less; it's less innovative, and less overall impressive.
It's also completely decoupled from supply and demand - a saffron risotto should cost significantly more than just about any steak - saffron is actually rare, whereas cows are everywhere, and there's no shortage of even the 'prime' beef cows.
Plus then all of the fetishization around how you 'insult the chef and the meat' if you order it any other way than medium-rare....
Agh the whole thing is just infuriating. It's so wrapped up in last-century ideas of meat being rare and precious, and the more meat you ate the richer you were.
But I just want to shake people and say - do you really think that the $130 steak you just bought is four times better than any pasta dish or coq-au-vin or sushi or paella or pizza you've ever had? Seriously?
ShaZam Beaubien 1 year ago
sorry, I lost focus. For some reason, I am still picturing cross-eyed cows bumping into each other and I'm giggling 🙄
#8
Expensive Italian, a 30 dollar pasta is straight robbery
Mila Preradović 1 year ago
Been to Italy recently, had the best spaghetti with clams in my entire life. 17€. Borderline expensive but worth it.
#9
The most expensive dishes. “Yeah, man these diamonds sautéed in truffle oil and emerald dust are good, but do you have a cheeseburger?”
#10
Any of the artsy-fartsy stuff where they care more about appearance than taste
#11
Any foam or mousse from a Michelin star restaurant.
Pigeon foam. Wtf did I just pay $200 to eat?
#12
“Something for everyone” restaurants. Anywhere where the menu has a ridiculously extensive offering. If I’m flipping multiple pages and not even halfway, I just know everything is about to taste questionable.
Brandi VanSteenwyk 1 year ago
When common sense tells you that the entire restaurant couldn't fit all of the FRESH ingredients to cook all of those dishes properly from scratch upon order, you KNOW that they got some big-a$$ freezers in the back and many microwaves in numbers.
Nikki Sevven 1 year ago
More importantly, these restaurants aren't cooking most of their menu; they're just reheating frozen c**p from some food service company.
René Sauer 1 year ago
Yeah, for some reason in my city there are quite a few places that offer both italian pizza and pasta AND chinese/thai cuisine. I always wondered how these two cuisines fit together.
#13
isn’t a cuisine, but ranch. everybody rants and raves about it, i even had a friend who put ranch on grapes. some ppl put it on EVERYTHING, which is fine because it’s not bad i guess? but idk i just never got the hype, i’m not the biggest fan of it lol
#14
Lobster. It’s fine, it’s just not really worth it’s cost imo. I also like eating it in things rather than by itself. The lobster rolls I had in Maine were much better than lobster straight up.
Edit: yes, as many have said, crab is delicious and the superior choice by a mile
Sami-Jo Ross 1 year ago
Lobster used to be considered peasant food. Still wanna know how we went from that to overpriced sea bug.
#15
cake.
ignoring coffee and booze, it'd have to be cake. people care more about how it looks and photographs than how it taste. it has it's own reality show.
Donkey boi 1 year ago
I care more about the taste of a cake. The appearance means nothing to me.
#16
Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant was s**t. It genuinely made me question everything I’ve seen him criticize and wonder “does this guy just have horrible taste?”
Amy Taylor 1 year ago
I had an amazing meal at one of his Vegas restaurants. And I’m picky as hell, lol
#17
kid cuisine. The brownie usually comes out hard as a rock and the mac and cheese is watery
#19
Insanely unhealthy Southern food.
As a life long resident of the South, a ton of popular Southern food is mediocre meat that is breaded and deep fried. The primary flavor is fried breading. Given astronomical rate lifestyle-related disease in the South, elevating food that is both super unhealthy and also uninspiringly flavored is just mindbogglingly.
There is some truly delicious and inspired Southern food, and some of that is healthy or at least ok in small quantities. However, most of what I hear people talking about as "great" Southern food is boring and super bad for you if eaten on a regular basis.
Elle Lian 1 year ago
My grandma ate all this southern food every single day of her life. So did her family. My grandma passed at 97. Her brother was 93. My grandpa was the young one to die at 83. The majority of the elderly people I knew passed around the age of 85-90. Their diet was mainly casseroles, biscuits and gravy, and potatoes cut up and fried so heavy you could rub them on a sheet of paper and see through it. However, their life wasn’t sedentary. Even into advanced age, they farmed, took care of grandchildren (and greats), and helped in the community.
#20
The Dutch are so crazy about their meat croquettes and frikandellel, but it's just frozen meat that has been mashed together.
#21
Our family has been restaurant investors for 40 years. High end French cuisine using offal or organ meats.
These dishes are pushed because the costs of these types of meats are very low and produce a huge profit margin. Also, the lack of experience with guests cooking these types of dishes for themselves mean very few patrons complain about authenticity. Usually a chef will throw his/her twist in the menu.
Most customers can tell the difference between a great pizza and a mediocre one. They'll remember a great steak - but a restaurant may be paying huge premiums to fly that Waygu in from Japan or for your Flintstone tomahawk. Whereas, a local butcher shop will gladly unload offal and such with glee due to low demand. You'd be surprised as to how little we paid for cow brains for example.
Auntriarch 1 year ago
It's bloody annoying. Used to be able to get trotters and cheeks etc for next to nothing, then chefs started on them and they're expensive now
#22
"Free from" everything. B***h, I only have celiac. Before I got my diagnosis, I ate steak medicinally (I was severely anemic). Give me all the dairies and meatstuffs.
Absolutely overrated cuisine-type thing that I still love anyway? Mixology. Give me the intricate cocktail that requires table side presentation, and I'm a happy girl. I don't drink much (see above re: celiac, I was a beer drinker), so I'm down with one stupidly expensive cocktail at a nice dinner.
Huddo's sister 1 year ago (edited)
Well I get frustrated that it is so hard to get both dairy (or lactose) free and gluten free. Everything is either one or the other. That's not even taking into account my other intollerances! EDIT: I should say this is the situation in Australia
#23
Fusion food. Overpriced and overrated and only occasionally done well
crowspectre (he/they) 1 year ago
There's a place I love that's an Indian flavours/food and American-style burgers place and it's probably some of the best food I've ever had, other than like cheap gyros or actual Indian food.
#24
Chilean sea bass. Just awful.
Spellflinger 1 year ago
Fancy name for Patagonian toothfish - guess you can charge more if it sounds fancy.
#25
French. It's considered super fancy, but every time I've ever seen it, it looks disgusting and sounds like it only tastes good because of everything drowning in butter.
Ace 1 year ago
Sounds like you've never actually tried it though. And presumably you're talking about American French, which probably (based on the two or three times I've experienced it) bears as little resemblance to what we get in France as your pizza does to what you'd find on the streets of Naples.
#27
Korean BBQ- If I wanted to cook my meal...I would just stay home & save my money
#28
Sushi. It’s very pretty and I like the conveyor belt they sometimes use(more foods should have this), but those are by far the best parts.
Highwaytozen 1 year ago
I could eat sushi morning, noon and night. My cat is named Sushi, but that is unrelated, as I have so far resisted eating my cat.
#29
Mexican… it’s all beans, cheese, rice and tortillas presented in different ways
#30
Greek cuisine. It’s just a bland version of Turkish food, but anything to do with Middle Eastern people is scary to some white people, so Greek food is highly overrated while Turkish and other Middle Eastern food is very underrated.
Donkey boi 1 year ago (edited)
I don't think Greek is anything like Turkish food! 1 or 2 things are similar (if not inspired by) in concept, but execution is different. I'll probably get attacked for this but... I found Turkish food to be much the same throughout the country, the same few flavours on everything. In Greece, each island specialises in something, and the mainland serves a dish to accompany any emotion. 'Middle Eastern food' is ridiculous term! The food in each country is completely different. I loved the food in Iran, wasn't that keen in Egypt, Jordan surprised me (They know olives better than anyone!). Israeli seems to take a bit from everywhere, creating some kind of middle eastern super tapas.
What do you think ?
crowspectre (he/they) 1 year ago
These were pretty normal until people just starting outright admitting that they're too white and American to even give foreign cuisine a chance.
Monique Rosewood 1 year ago
Those are a specific shade of white lol. A lot of us like foreign cuisine.
Load More Replies...
Monique Rosewood 1 year ago
A lot of these are really good and the people are just picky. Like, Greek and Mexican food. Really? Both of those are amazing.
Chris Sprucefield 1 year ago
Got a few simple but effective rules when it comes to cooking. * No more than 5 ingredients in a single dish, unless absolutely necessary, spices excluded, as it tends to kill/mask the flavors of the ingredients, not tickle your taste buds.... * Use multiple individual dishes in combination if you want more tastes. * Make Individual tastes that can be combined - don't mix it all up. * Avoid the salt where possible initially - it's the one that can be added at any time, without loss of taste. Add it to taste later... * Deconstructed anything is just silly. * Serving on "fancy" and odd things like a shovel is just a huge no... A nice, stylish and fancy proper plate, yes...
crowspectre (he/they) 1 year ago
These were pretty normal until people just starting outright admitting that they're too white and American to even give foreign cuisine a chance.
Monique Rosewood 1 year ago
Those are a specific shade of white lol. A lot of us like foreign cuisine.
Load More Replies... Monique Rosewood 1 year ago
A lot of these are really good and the people are just picky. Like, Greek and Mexican food. Really? Both of those are amazing.
Chris Sprucefield 1 year ago
Got a few simple but effective rules when it comes to cooking. * No more than 5 ingredients in a single dish, unless absolutely necessary, spices excluded, as it tends to kill/mask the flavors of the ingredients, not tickle your taste buds.... * Use multiple individual dishes in combination if you want more tastes. * Make Individual tastes that can be combined - don't mix it all up. * Avoid the salt where possible initially - it's the one that can be added at any time, without loss of taste. Add it to taste later... * Deconstructed anything is just silly. * Serving on "fancy" and odd things like a shovel is just a huge no... A nice, stylish and fancy proper plate, yes...
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