Do restaurants really serve microwaved 'ready meals'?

[AtleastitsnotMonday]

As it says really. This has come up several times on threads about eating out recently. Basically people saying they are not paying restaurant price for microwaved food. Is this really true? What's the point in having chefs if it's a case of sticking things in a microwave? Surely they wouldn't get away with it. It's often mentioned in discussion about pasta dishes in Italian chain restaurants, surely buying in ready made meals would cost them a whole lot more that cooking a bit of pasta and sauce anyway.

A bag of good pasta will cost a fair bit bit more than 40p...but I agree, I never eat anything but pizza in an Italian restaurant for that reason. I can cook it just as well myself, and it’d be freshly made! I’d maybe have seafood, if it was a restaurant by the coast.

I no longer have steak at a restaurant either - I’d much rather eat it at home where we can have the quality grass-fed steak from our local farm shop, with a very good bottle of wine, and still pay much, much less.

A friend of mine is Coeliac and we had a very encouraging experience in Côte where they were happy to make all sorts of substitutions and swaps to make sure her meal was free of gluten. Couldn't have been more helpful.

Of course that doesn't mean they're not guilty of microwaving everything else, but we certainly didn't experience a 'computer says no' blanket response to our requests.

When you say surely it's cheaper to make things from scratch - they will have been made from scratch and batch cooked by the supplier, it's not as though they're buying full cost M&S ready meals.

Yes, more expensive than making everything from scratch, but when you're working in a busy kitchen with an extensive menu, you can't always get everything done from fresh.

Wetherspoons are one of the worst for serving ready meals, and I honestly love it!

I don't see why you'd pay for pasta in a restaurant - it's so cheap to buy and very easy to cook at home, especially if you use a jar of sauce.

I'd always assumed that pasta at restaurants was there for the fussy/particular person in a group - the same as when you get a small section of British dishes on the menu at a Chinese or Indian restaurant: if all/most of you just wanted standard British food, why on earth would you specifically choose to go to a Chinese place?!

Point 2 is the only thing I miss about going out to eat less frequently.

When I worked in Wetherspoons c. 2010, absolutely all of the food came in frozen of a morning, and was then microwaved or deep fried accordingly. Even the jacket potatoes came in frozen ffs.

The only exception to this was the steaks which came in fresh, and the salad. I doubt it has changed radically since then.

In general if it's a long and varied menu, then it's all coming in pre-prepared. If it's a shorter menu then it's much more likely to have been made on site. Support your local independents - the ones that take pride in their food. They may be more expensive than a plated ready meal, but that's because it costs more in labour to do what they do, and typically the ingredients are higher quality too.

What's apparent is that the veggie choices are all shit
Maybe it's because they are bought in. Maybe it's because they are not that arsed because most people eat meat.

It's because vegetarian/vegan is STILL a complete pain in the arse/afterthought to 90% of chefs. Generally they begrudgingly admit that they need to provide a vegetarian option because a table of 10 who have one veggie with them won't book to come in the first place, but I've worked in quite a lot of independent nice restaurants where the menu changes based on seasonality and to keep it fresh and interesting with fairly talented and imaginative chefs, and they go and stick the same old mushroom or butternut risotto on the menu for the vegetarians, (even on the christmas menu, no roast for you!) or some piddly quinoa salad that might be nice enough but leaves you still ravenous when everybody else is having a hearty dinner. As a front of house person, it drives me mad!

What I'd like to know, though, is, if a lot of places serve ready meals that many people can't identify as ready meals, why don't supermarkets sell those same ready meals to the general public, instead of the often lacklustre and disappointing ones that they currently do?

Or is it partly psychosomatic - where it seems to taste much better when you're out with friends and the food is brought out to you by a server than it does when you get it out of the freezer and put it in the microwave yourself?

This thread is such an eye opener -

I’ve learned all my efforts of simple homemade food are worth it and when we have had family/ friends for dinner they are getting a better meal than maybe The Ivy as it’s freshly made!!

We don’t eat out that often but I’m going to do that even less and spend more on my ingredients for special occasions at home.

Naively shocked, but happy as I will save money in the future !!

Oh there's definitely a large psychosomatic element to the taste of food. I was horrified when a chef I worked with realised that he'd run out of (properly made) soup and sent his KP to buy the cheapest tin of soup from the local petrol station. 49p knock off cream of tomato. i was certain the customer would notice and complain and furious with the chef because he put me, the only person working front of house in a really awkward position. Shouldn't have worried. £6.95 later and the customer was waxing lyrical about how he could tell we only used fresh ingredients and how wonderful the damn soup was.

I expect that the commercial ovens and grills make a big difference - especially pizza. Pizza ovens were very popular last summer. Do they give results closer to restaurants?

Just to say this isn't always the case.
Our menu is pretty extensive, think 10 starters, 10 pasta dishes, 4 Risottos,10 pizzas, handful of salads, 10 mains (chicken, veal, calves liver etc)
All of it is freshly cooked, from scratch. The key is making sure you use ingredients in more than one dish to minimise waste. So for example; king prawns are in a Gamberoni starter, linguine gamberoni, risotto gamberoni, spaghetti marinara and Gamberoni All'acquapazza (main)

In fairness sometimes things are made on-site in big batches and are then reheated for each customer or kept hot for a few hours. It's often not practical to make a new batch for one customer, due to time constraints, staffing or other practicality (like a cake shop - they might make everything on site but, even ignoring the economics, the time taken to make a fresh cake just for you would be far in excess of how long you'd be willing to wait for a cuppa and a slice).

If you can call ahead it can sometimes help; if they know they've got a GF customer coming in who will order the X and it's a minor variation like not sprinkling breadcrumbs on, then it's quite easy to do (but FFS don't change your mind and not turn up or order something else off the menu, if a few people do that then they'll rapidly start being less flexible).

Out of interest, how do you manage risotto from scratch? When I'm on holiday in Italy on my own, you can often only get risotto for two or more people because it's a faff to cook for one person. I had to hunt around for somewhere selling single portions of risotto (it was divine, btw). In France they put risotto on the menu and it's . . . not. I've had basmati rice cooked in cream and called risotto in France and bloody disgusting it was too.

Is there a way of cooking the rice beforehand and it not going claggy?

There was a Wetherspoons employee showing this on TikTok.
metro.co.uk/2020/09/16/wetherspoons-chef-suspended-after-revealing-kitchen-secrets-in-tiktok-videos-13277969/

This sort of thing can catch almost anyone out.

I've won a few Great Taste Awards which are fairly prestigious industry awards, based on blind taste testing by the great and the good of the food world. As part of the process you get written feedback.

On one occasion I got my best result yet in those awards - two stars. They commented on how they could tell I'd used a particularly high-quality ingredient. That particular ingredient was Asda's own brand... in fact all the ingredients in that product had been bought at Asda or Lidl... 🤐

I'm often complimented on the quality of the chocolate I use. It's all from Lidl, and it's 49p/100g.

I seem to recall a few years ago a programme about this and one restaurant owned by a very, very high profile chef used pre prepared food, prepared by his own staff but then chilled ready for use.

@ColdHandsHotHead yep - rice is precooked an hour before service starts and cooled in a large tray spread out (almost flat across the tray) When someone orders a risotto, the sauce is cooked up first let's say veggies (mushrooms, courgettes peppers onion etc) in olive oil and a splash of white wine, when nearly cooked the portion of rice is added to pan and if it's creamy sauce, the creamy bechamel might be added or pesto for example.

My husband has worked at Nandos and Wetherspoons. Nandos the chicken is cooked fresh and put in a hot hold, most other stuff is microwaved, garlic bread is made from yesterdays burger buns. Wetherspoons stuff like burgers, pizza, fish and chips is cooked fresh but chilli, curries etc are all microwaved from a bag. I imagine most cheapish pubs and chains are similar, I doubt many are making a fresh batch of chicken tikka masala on a regular basis.

An ex boyfriend of mine used to work in wetherspoons and accidentally left someone's rice in the bag 😂😂 who knows maybe it was your friends 😁

Same, I’d asked for small vegetarian breakfast but was told they didn’t have any poached eggs. Yet saw Fried eggs being served.

Trace lodge and Wetherspoons do. I used to work in a Travel Lodge and even the scrambled egg comes frozen in a bag and is microwaved

I did know this for chains but I didn't realise quite the extent of it even in midrange restaurants. How sad.

I just looked at the Brakes catalogue and picked out one dish which was quite distinctive: Carrot Wellington with Spiced Marmalade. Try Googling it and you'll be shocked at the variety of places offering this exact dish on their seasonal menus. It's very depressing and puts me off going out to be honest.

@LastOfTheChristmasWine tbf LIDL/ALDI chocolate is much nicer than a lot of other chocolate these days! It’s hard to find a good chocolate.

Is guess it depends on the food