Is there still a best day to eat out?
Ten years ago if you wanted the best possible restaurant meal it was key to know when the A-team were in the kitchen and all the ingredients were fresh. Have things moved on?
‘Never order fish on Monday’ – how much of Anthony Bourdain’s advice of 10 years ago still holds true?
Which day of the week is the best to eat out? In a pub with a group of friends recently, we tried to work out the answer – specifically because we were trying to decide whether ordering snails on toast in a half empty gastropub on a Wednesday would be a good idea or not. (A badly handled serving of snails is, after all, a thing of tooth-squeaking horror.) Would the best chefs be working that night? Was it always quiet on a Wednesday? How fresh would the snails be?
A decade ago I started working as a very junior restaurant manager, and it was ages before I was let loose on my own on a busy Saturday night – instead I got midweek shifts and Sunday evenings to start with, with the A-team front-of-house and kitchen staff understandably saved up for Friday and Saturday nights. Equally, though, I knew of other restaurants where the most experienced staff pulled rank and regularly demanded Fridays or Saturdays off – they were salaried so it didn’t matter financially if they missed the busiest shifts and the biggest tips. There’s at least one acclaimed restaurant group today where the executive and head chefs routinely do doubles all week and take Saturdays off. And of course there’s the also the idea that everyone working on a Sunday morning has a brutal hangover.
Next day, having failed to resolve the question over several bottles of wine and a very safe beetroot and goat’s curd salad, I thought I’d try and find an answer more useful than “don’t eat out on Valentine’s day”. Around the same time I was yearning to work a buzzing shift, Anthony Bourdain was mulling over a similar question in his book Kitchen Confidential, so I went back to see what he was thinking then.
A few things have changed since he was worrying about how long the hollandaise has been festering. I still wouldn’t eat discounted sushi on any day of the week, but as chef Henry Harris from Racine pointed out to me, “You can now happily eat fish on Monday nights – as long as you trust the restaurant has a good supplier who gets fish from day boats delivered fresh that day,” as he does.
Bourdain didn’t like the idea of leftovers being turned into new dishes, but diners’ feelings have changed on that front too, with 25% of us saying we’d be happy to take our leftover food home with us. London’s restaurants alone create 250,000 tonnes of food waste every year, according to the Sustainable Restaurant Association. I’m not bothered if my Sunday night shepherd’s pie nibbles off a tiny bit of that figure.
Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of the Leon chain, worked in chef Bruno Loubet’s kitchens at the beginning of his career. “You want to be in at the beginning of a busy night; the head chef will be there and they will all be fired up. But they won’t be so busy they will be making mistakes.” Charlie McVeigh, who owns Draft House pub group in London, also reckons the busier the night the better. “Everyone will be on their A game. There’s a fantastic energy to a busy night but when it’s quiet everyone virtually goes to sleep because it’s boring. Of course, that does assume the restaurant is functioning well and the food is fresh. The only time I’d say otherwise is with somewhere like a country gastropub that only gets busy on a Saturday night but which has 20 main courses on the menu. Then you know the food either isn’t fresh or is straight out the freezer, which is just scary.”
At Fergus Henderson’s restaurant St John Bread and Wine, head chef Lee Tiernan works hard to make sure it doesn’t matter which day of the week you go in. “The way I like to work is buy in small quantities, cook it and sell it. The menu changes pretty much every day. We have repeats, especially during game season, but that’s because we order those birds continually over the week. I try to run the fish out by Saturday night if possible and maybe desalinate some salted fish for Sunday if we have it to hand. Some nights if we’ve been really busy we will get the confit lamb tongues or pig cheeks out of their fat and put them on the menu. That’s one of the many beautiful qualities of confit. Firstly it’s something that is cooked and stored in fat, alleluia, amen, and it tastes wonderful when resurrected.”
According to both Tiernan and McVeigh, a regularly changing and fairly short menu is the best indicator that you’ll get good food on any day – and feel free to ask how often a restaurant alters what it serves. Restaurants that employ foragers or who have ad hoc relationships with small-scale suppliers are also worth keeping an eye out for as, again, they’ll be generally skilled at adapting their menus to make use of the freshest ingredients.
It is true that some chefs hate working on Sundays, especially brunch. McVeigh points out “If they only do brunch at weekends and there’s no other bacon on the menu you might wonder how long it’s been hanging around.” Another chef told me, anonymously, that his team vie to get Sunday day shifts off. “Brunch just isn’t exciting to cook and people tend to be very fussy about what they want as well.”
As far as hangovers go, Tiernan says, “Most chefs I know are pretty resilient creatures and hold it together on the outside even if they’re dying inside.” Dimbleby agrees: “I once cooked New Year’s Day lunch for about 100 at The Four Seasons Inn on the Park with Bruno. We had cooked for New Years eve the night before and the staff had been allowed to stay at the hotel for the night. We had terrible hangovers. It was the worst day of my life. Although, if I remember correctly, the food was actually good.”
It would seem then, that while there isn’t a perfect day for eating out, making an early booking on a night you know will be busy later, at a restaurant with a short menu that changes all the time is your best bet. And perhaps avoid that Sunday brunch. When do you tend to eat out?
