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.

In cheaper restaurants with extensive menus, you can be pretty sure that much of it will be out of the freezer. A limited menu is more likely to be freshly cooked.

Chain places do but a decent independent doesn’t.
I went to a Hungry Horse pub with some friends, I went to the bar and ordered my food and a drink, my food got to my table before I got back.

Zizzi and Prezzo both do
I refuse to eat in either as they're both still reasonably expensive

Very hard indeed if you don't have a frying pan, as someone mentioned upthread! Frozen omelettes are nothing new. I was astounded when I first came across them, but that was (gulp) 43 years ago in the student union bar.

Sous vide is a phrase that amuses me. Boil in the bag was very fashionable and novel back in the 1970s. Now top chefs do it and get away with it by using the French translation. The amount of plastic waste must be phenomenal.

It's not that I expected everything to be cooked to order, obviously for something like lasagne you'd be looking at a two hour wait. But I would have thought it would have been prepped and cooked on site in advance. (I don't even object to freezing.) And yes, I did think when you ordered eggs or an omelette the eggs may have actually been cracked in the kitchen. I guess one thing it's really made me think about is the ingredients in the dishes. Those Brakes items linked by a PP have all manner of peculiar preservatives, additives, stabilisers etc.

Our favourite local pub the head chef and some staff worked 9-5 batch cooking and freezing a lot of food. He explained the sous vide to OH. To be fair the sous vide duck was to die for. They had a daily specials board for fish, game etc. In the evening less experienced staff would microwave the dishes needed. The pub had an international reputation.

Now it's part of a chain uninspiring, expensive so we gave up going.

We tend to have fish or salads whenever we eat out.

Afternoon tea is a good bet

Not just what's in the food but additives on plastic boiling??

I had to eat at a Hungry Horse recently and the chicken tikka masala was honestly the most revolting thing I have ever tasted. People think I'm being snobby when I say I don't like those type of restaurants but then I don't like ready meals. I don't even like Dolmio etc. I just can't stand the taste of overly processed things and that's what these places sell.

We have a Bryn Williams restaurant, very limited menu. A sharing fish pie takes 45 minutes. It's lovely though

My DD wanted a nando's and we were seated near the semi open kitchen. There was a grill for the chicken but the salad came preshredded in huge bags and all the sides, corn, rice, potatoes etc was frozen in bowls that were put in the microwave. Known as "ping" cookery in Hong Kong as so many Chinese eateries use it. If your meal comes suspiciously quickly out of the kitchen this is how it has been reheated.

I saw a documentary about restaurants. They filmed at the Rainforest Cafe in London. All the food was cooked then meticulously weighed and put into 1 portion plastic bags, so each person would get exactly the same amount of spaghetti and bolgnaise sauce as another. Some was fridged and others frozen to be used later.The chef argued it was for "fairness"

In the defunct Jamie Oliver Italian chain nearly everything was actually prepared offsite - frozen ( lasagne's, rottolo, desserts etc) or prepacked and just put on a platter to look nice such as charcuterie, olives - no real skill involved.

Gordon Ramsey was also "caught out" using an off site "dark" kitchen in an industrial estate to cook a lot of dishes supplying a few of his eateries, some even had "open kitchen/chef's tables" . Some quick food was cooked fresh onsite but he argued it was fine to cook the "slow" dishes such as lamb shank off site as they took many hours to prepare and to then deliver them around the place to be "boiled in the bag" aka sous vide eheated

It's hard to get properly qualified chefs as the wages are so low and the hours so long with often a useless gap in the late afternoon/early evening. Many places want cheap labour not skill.

Went once to a frankie and bennys on way to cinema and ordered a pasta meal…it was the most shocking cheap ingredient microwave sludge ever and it wasn’t cheap

never been back

I go a pretty cheap Thai place where you see them fresh cooking everything. I can but a ready meal to eat at home.

We had lunch in a pub which I'll never forget because their excuse for a cauliflower cheese was boiled cauliflower with a packet cheese sauce chucked over the top, not even browned under the grill.

there is no excuse in the world for that abomination. We've never been back. And we didn't leave a tip either,

Ah, this explains why in Wetherspoons I couldn’t have a vegetarian small breakfast as they only had any poached eggs! I was baffled, seeing cried eggs being served to the next table…an egg is an egg, fried or poached they get cracked, one goes into water, the other into a frying pan.

YES this post is a great summation

Yes. As people have pointed out a lot of chain restaurants will do so that their food is consistent across all restaurants. My DH is an accomplished chef and has spent most of his career working at fine dining/high end restaurants. They cook everything from scratch, there's not even a microwave in his current kitchen. The only exception is a pasta dish, they will half cook the pasta during prep and drop it to finish off once the dish is on order.

All the large chain restaurants and pub restaurants use pre prepared food known as sous vide. Which is vacuum packed and is reheated in a water boiler or in a microwave. Such as curries, pasta dishes, roast dinners, any meat in a sauce dishes. This ensures consistency & enable the restaurant to have an extensive menu.

This has been the case since I started out in hospitality, so a good 25 years ago.

Any pub chain will be ping cooking apart from the burgers, steaks etc which come frozen and go on the grill. Anything like macaroni cheese, mash, will come in bags frozen. Even garlic bread comes pre prepared.

At one point in one restaurant the freshest dish we served was chorizo and patatas bravas, the entirety of that dish was as ‘from scratch’ as if you’d cooked it at home. But everything else came pre portioned and reheated.

But if you don’t like it, don’t eat out. Or spend £££ on real restaurants. Overheads are mental and paying actual chefs/raw ingredients would be outwith the budget of most chain pubs.

Big you can get 24 poached egg portions from Brakes for £15! That's actually a good deal considering it's no mess and a good result.

Ping chefs

as others have said not everywhere dies and not all food on one menu - steak is still very popular and that isn’t microwave food

i eat at the Ivy in November and the food was delicious

I am sorry to tell you all that I did an advanced chef skills course about six weeks ago and the chef-tutor told me that in big London hotels, your freshly poached egg had probably been held for 48 hours. I was a bit nonplussed because DS was the breakfast chef at a very smart small boutique hotel in Devon, and everything was cooked fresh for every service, and eggs were started with each new order.

This wouldn’t surprise me in the least. I always find the Ivy rather disappointing.

Ivy Covent Garden is a bit meh food wise, beautiful surroundings, pleasant ambience

I wouldn't have the slightest problem with a restaurant cooking slow-braised lamb or similar in advance, even if Restaurant Branch A did the cooking and it was then taken over to Restaurant Branches B, C and D later in the day. Nobody expects slow-cooked food to be made on demand, that's obviously going to be re-heated. Same would apply for a proper Italian ragu to go into lasagne. When I watch Masterchef contestants going into high end restaurant kitchens, it's clear the chef and other staff have worked out a menu where almost everything is done in advance and then one or two elements are quickly cooked when an order comes in and added to other elements which are re-heated at the last minute. Plenty of skill involved there and the ingredients would mostly have been fresh and top quality, even if some of them had been frozen along the way.

Extremely expensive, though. It doesn't surprise me that most restaurants can't do that. As somebody pointed out earlier, it's not just that skilled staff cost more. Since Brexit, we don't have enough skilled staff.

*Didn’t have any poached eggs that should say.
Saw an episode of The Hotel Inspector where Alex Politzi showed how to batch cook spaghetti Bol, portion it out into bags, freeze then reheat to order.