#cheap restaurant

[evilkaeya]

pm and ada on truce missions in different cities and they keep coming across restaurants that have signs hanged outside saying "banned for life" with teen skk's faces on them

[humhowellujah]

i'm drunk off two lavender martinis what the fuck do you MEAN dan and phil went on a step by step recreation of their japan trip as a part of a HONEYMOON episode for their sims. be so fr rn be so serious please. dan howell you have 4 minutes to respond . phil, keep it up babygirl. lavender martini recipe in the tags

[mycological-mariner]

So I bought this painting of the Cutty Sark in a charity shop for 50p. And on the back it’s got this placard - pretty cool, right? Obviously it’s staying

Obviously the frame is a little busted and it can’t hang but that’s a 10 minute fix.

So I remove the card first thing to save for later and —

It’s a fucking menu. And apparently a really fancy one - it got French words. I’m laughing my ass off because some guy cut out a description of the Cutty Sark from a restaurant menu and stuck it to the back of a painting of said ship. At this point I’m having a blast and joking that “Oh, what’s next, the painting itself is gonna be from the dessert menu, I bet!”

IT WAS THE FUCKING WINE MENU. And this has to be ancient because £1.25 for a bottle of wine?? 20p for a glass?!

So quite a few decades ago some guy stole a menu, took it home, then cut out the painting of The Cutty Sark and it’s description and framed it to presumably hang on their wall. And now it is in my home, on my mantle and whenever I have guests over they’ll go “Oh what a nice picture of a ship!” But they won’t know. Only I will know that it is in fact the front piece of a wine menu. Like. The process behind how this came to be.

I’m keeping this forever.

[lastoneout]

this is my entire stance on the "american food is bad" discourse summed up

[sejarcus-archive]

Modern AU in which Sejanus is a famous Michelin star chef, and one of Marcus’s friends manages to book a reservation/somehow wins a dinner for two at his restaurant, and they invite Marcus to go with them.

Marcus kinda really doesn’t wanna go, cause he finds high end restaurants pretentious and not actually worth the price they make you pay (“Have you seen those portions? I gotta go there and pay like $400 or more, just to come out hungrier than I walked in? Hell no. And I gotta dress up like I’m going to a wedding to eat a single meal? No, thanks”).

In the end, though, his friend manages to convince him to go with them. Before going, the friend researches a bunch of stuff having to do with Sejanus’s personal life, the type of cuisine he does, ethics he abides by, etc, and tries to tell Marcus about it, but Marcus really doesn’t care to hear it.

Then the time comes, everyone is seated at their table, and right before they begin serving the dishes, the chef walks out to introduce himself and his cuisine, and “oh, he’s really young”, “shit, he’s cute as fuck”, and suddenly Marcus’s interest is peaked and now he cares to hear more about the chef.

Turns out the stuff his friend had also tried to tell him about is actually very interesting (especially the stuff the chef talked about the couple of times they locked eyes for a second longer than normal). And you know what? Maybe high end cuisine isn’t that much of a scam, now that he thinks about it.

(*months later* “How the fuck did you manage to get a date with a Michelin star chef, Marcus?!”)

[salvadorbonaparte]

Would you mind sharing your views on backpacking? 👀

Take all of this with a grain of salt because I'm mostly just bothered by backpacking content on Instagram.

I think the concept is fine. I'd actually like to do some backpacking some time.

But backpacking content, as well as most overland* content, always has a really weird vibe. It almost feels like cosplaying poverty if you know what I mean??

It's almost always young people from the so called "West" and almost always they're somewhere in South or Southeast Asia. The most popular backpacking destinations I'm seeing at the moment are Bali (exclusively that part of Indonesia for some reason), Thailand, Vietnam and Sri Lanka. The algorithm has recently also started showing me content from Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.

Since flights to these destinations are usually quite expensive, and many of these people stay abroad long enough that they might need a visa and that accommodation and food would also add up, it can be safely assumed these people have a certain amount of financial stability. Some of them are full time influencers too.

And while travelling with a backpack instead of a suitcase makes sense, and while you want to have an "authentic" experience, the vibe on those videos is often sooooo weird.

They're always like "I just spent 45h standing in a cramped bus without AC because it was only $1. I'm sleeping on the floor of this abandoned building that costs me $4 a night. I only carry 2 t-shirts with me, can't find a laundromat and I'm travelling for 3 months. Yesterday I got scammed and got food poisoning."

And I'm like why are you doing this? Is it really more "authentic" just because it's a foreign country? You can find the same uncomfortable situations and people who live like that all the time in your home country, but when you're abroad it's cool and authentic and #humbling #eatpraylove. Meanwhile there's also people in that same country you're backpacking through who, like, have a comparable standard of living you're used to. Your holiday doesn't have to be luxury resorts but it also doesn't have to be absolutely god awful.

And of course there's also the factor of adrenaline and stepping out of your comfort zone but with these videos it seems like they're almost glamorising having an awful time in an "exotic" country because that's what it's supposed to be like? I guess?

Idk I feel like I should get the opinion of someone living in one of those backpacking hotspots to make sure I'm not just getting annoyed at nothing but I think the vibe is off.

*overland content as in "travelling from XY to YZ without flying - Day 420" type videos. They're often interesting and I follow some of those people and I actually have some ideas for cool overland or long distance train trips but some of the accounts also have a weird vibe. Most of the ones I saw were men and they're like hitchhiking through some desert somewhere and I'm like oh this would feel so unsafe to me as someone perceived female. And obviously they also make lots of content where you know they have lots money because they've been travelling for several months but it has that same fake low budget backpacker vibe.

I hope this makes sense. I'm not sure it does.

[housecow]

Fav sushi place? Thoughts on HEB sushi?

idk if this counts. kura. the conveyor belt sushi place—ppl shit on it but omfg. crunchy hand roll, aburi eel, crispy rice… it’s SO GOOD and i actually need to go asap

but heb sushi is hit or miss tbh. personally, i don’t enjoy it much anymore after having a lot of other good sushi 🫣 LOVE the $7 shrimp and cocktail sauce things tho!!!! like a lot!!!

[dioynsus]

my family are such fkn cheapskates like im mostly grateful to be raised to be pretty thrifty and sensible when it comes to money (out of necessity) but god forbid i want to go out to a semi-nice restaurant after receiving my fucking MASTERS degree and all anyone can do is complain about the prices of the food

[minionwater]

don’t like the hand that feeds me. gonna do something fucked up to it

[ladylingua]

I have a very genuine question about the tipping post I promise I didnt read it in bad faith: are people who simply cannot afford to tip not “allowed” to eat out? I’m just thinking about how it works where I am from and while tipping is the norm here if someone doesn’t tip because they can’t afford it it really isn’t a big deal (+tipping norm here us only 10%). so if a poor family goes out to eat to celebrate something and they can barely afford the meal would they still be expected to tip 20% because they shouldn’t eat out if they cant afford it? thank you in advance I’m really curious

If it helps, don’t think of the tip as a separate thing. It is part of the cost of your meal. So if you cannot afford to pay for the cost of the meal including the tip you cannot afford to eat at that restaurant. This is something I myself have to calculate when I’m deciding if I want to eat at a particular restaurant- if I have $15 I can’t go to a restaurant and order a $20 entrée and then refuse to pay the remaining cost, and likewise if I have $15 I can’t order a $15 entrée and expect not to pay the server for their service.

Now that doesn't mean families who can't afford a pricy restaurant can't eat out at all. Since it is a % of your bill you can try to go for a cheaper restaurant (smaller bill = smaller tip), or if you go to a counter service place where you serve yourself you’re not expected to tip 20% (sometimes they have a jar out you could kindly throw a dollar or more in, but there is much less expectation to tip because the workers at a place like that receive a full minimum wage, more on that in a sec). I will also say in my lived experience poor families in America understand and tip well, I’ve almost exclusively been under tipped by wealthy people (which is what kicked off the debate on twitter- if your bill is $700 then you obviously can afford to tip a full 20%, no destitute families are spending $700 on one meal).

Technically speaking you can get away with 18% as a tip, and if you go down to 15% your waiter will think you’re cheap and be annoyed (15% definitely implies you were unhappy with their service) but that is the lowest possible threshold of acceptability. 10% is not an acceptable rate here, and 20% is now the expected norm for good service, and going up from there for great service. And I would never, ever not tip at all. I can only imagine not tipping if like the server had done something deeply offensive or dangerous or something. I've never encountered a situation where I felt the server didn't deserve any tip at all.

Because you’ve asked in genuine good faith I’m going to provide some more context to help you understand a bit more why this is the way it is-

Waitstaff in america are wildly underpaid. Our federal government assumes the tips are part of their expected income, and so a) they are taxed on assumed tips and b) it is legal to pay them less than standard minimum wage. Currently the tipped federal minimum wage is $2.13/hr. Now, states set their own individual rates so some states do better, but $2.13/hr is the lowest they can all legally go. And you’ll notice in that link it mentions the assumed tips and taxing them. I said on my original post, when I worked as a tipped waitress I made $2.68/hr and sometimes my biweekly paycheck was like $60 total. Imagine trying to survive on $120 a month, you absolutely cannot. Tips made up my actual wage, and were the paycheck I depended on to pay for my basic needs. I relied directly on customers to choose to do the social convention of tipping for survival, and when someone would choose to do otherwise it was utterly devastating.

Another thing customers sometimes don’t realize is your waiter may not be allowed to keep all of the tip themselves. It’s a common practice to pool tips amongst all the waitstaff and then divide them equally, and many places require that you tip out other employees there. So if you give me $10 as a tip I might be actually giving a large chunk of that to bussers, bartenders, etc. Or maybe we pool tips and someone else stiffed my colleague so now all of us are sharing your $10 tip. So also keep in mind that the money you leave as a tip very often does not go entirely to the actual waiter, so a big tip can actually become pretty small much faster than you would think.

(and that's just legal practices, wage theft and illegal practices run rampant in the restaurant industry, just fyi)

If you are wondering why tipping culture here is so grim, it is because of slavery. Tipping got big here as a way to keep forcing Black Americans into working for free, now with a small tip but still no actual wage. It was designed for oppression. Waitstaff are overwhelmingly not wealthy people. It is very common for them to be on food stamps, require housing assistance, or to otherwise be living under the poverty line. If you are eating out and not tipping because you yourself are poor, you are taking money out of someone else’s poverty wages to do so. When we debate minimum wage here in america, conservatives are really good at painting a picture of waitstaff being perky middle class college kids making an extra buck, or teens from wealthy homes wanting some spending money. There is an implication that they don't really need the money that badly. That is not the reality of who makes up most serving jobs in america. Minimum wage workers are likely to be in poverty, they’re likely to be women and specifically they’re likely to be women of color. Americans of color are significantly more likely to be working at minimum wage than white americans. There is a pretty sizeable number of minimum wage workers who are over 50, and a not insignificant amount of them who are mothers who support their families. There are also those teens who just want extra cash, and they deserve good compensation for their hard work too, don’t get me wrong, but they are only a portion of who makes up the minimum wage workforce.

If you’re like “But that’s such a shitty system, you’re saying it’s pitting poor people against each other for basic human comforts!” yup. I 100% agree. I am a vocal proponent of raising the minimum wage for that reason. I also advocate for a Universal Basic Income, because I understand that when it comes to small mom & pop restaurants the owners aren’t always making a ton of money either and it seems like truly no one is winning in this system. It is set up to oppress and to demean and to grind us all down. There are lots of orgs in America that are fighting to improve the system, or to radically change the system. There are also restaurants that have tried to do things differently- there’s a wine bar in my city that says specifically on their menu that their wine is more expensive because they pay their workers a true livable wage so there is no tipping there. Instead as a customer I pay a higher upfront cost that covers the true expense of running the bar- including server wages. I love that, I wish more places would do things like that. In the meantime, when I’m choosing where to eat I factor in a tip of 20% when calculating my estimated bill, because paying for service is part of the cost.

Refusing to tip fully in america is not doing anything to change the system. It does not make restaurant owners rethink their pay structure, it does not put pressure on our government to fix minimum wage, it does not make a political statement. It just means your server is going home wondering if they can afford their own meal that night.

Thank you for asking for clarity, I hope this helps. Please feel free to ask more if you have any remaining confusion or are curious about other aspects of american culture. If I can answer and the questions are respectful, I am happy to reply!

[winged-wolf-s-collection-of-arts]

hey if somebody could manifest me being crushed to death by a bookshelf or something that’d be great, thanks

[eleventeenthealbum]

I do not understand getting mad at going to a fast-casual for a date. I love dinner and savings

[burningcrab]

liv was born to be in one of those fast food positions where a bunch of baby queers learn your shift schedule and develop insane crushes on you

[barksbog]

i´m so excited to show yall the slugs i made this week

they are bowling alley carpet themed (:<

[puppydogmushy]

Not my cooking but i wanted to upload this octopus i had at a bar while in Valencia, probably the best octopus I've ever had (though I've never been to Galicia xD)

[cyborgrhodey]

people really falling for Big Blood Diamond like why are you mad that your engagement ring is just 38$ because you think it's a reflection of how little your fiancé cares about you? he literally proposed? whats in a ring