Well Fed Network

Posted by Greg Bullard on Well Fed on the Town.

Last week I had the pleasure of dining at Spezia, in Omaha, NE. Now, I have written about Spezia before, so I won’t cover that ground again. Suffice it to say, I had an enjoyable business dinner with great food and company.

However, while I was looking over my available choices from the menu, I kept coming back to the fact that I just did not want any of those things that night. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great choices on their menu. Nothing was just reaching out and talking to me though.

So I asked myself, if I order something not on the menu, will they indulge me? You cannot expect that service from just any restaurant. Large chains, including fast food restaurants and restaurants designed around good convenient food (Chili’s, Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, etc.), often will only entertain mild substitutions.

Sometimes the limitation or restriction is more culturally oriented than it is a question of convenience. I have eaten in numerous Japanese restaurants, especially Sushi places that did not allow even basic substitutions. As if to say, this is it. This is what I make, take it or leave it.

The more a restaurant prepackages its food, the harder it is to get a substitute. You will notice that a lot of chain restaurants offer various pasta dishes, all with penne pasta. Among those pasta options which are most forgiving to freezing, thawing, variances in storage temperature and the like, penne is the most kitchen friendly. This short, round, sturdy pasta can roll with the punches. Long, delicate noodles like linguine would break apart while your penne is still plugging away. Ask one of those restaurants if your pasta can be changed to spaghetti and the answer is almost definitely, “No.”

That brings us to the best places to eat though. The food is prepared fresh, from fresh ingredients with loving care paid to little things like making your own pasta, cooking from a selection of fine ingredients and offering a variety of choices and options. These places are much more likely to indulge your urge to travel off the beaten path and onto tenuous, “can you make me this” territory.

This brings me back to Spezia. I looked around the menu to get an idea of what items were available on other dishes and to understand what may be handy in the kitchen to be tossed in my dish. I finally went with grilled chicken breast over fettucini with alfredo sauce, peas, crimini mushrooms and prosciutto.

The server worked with me to find the dish on the menu that came closest to that dish, so we could assign a price. Then she wrote up my order gladly and the kitchen did an outstanding job of preparing it. Each person I was dining with paused at least once to look at my plate and ask me, “What did you order again? That looks great.”

You may not get just any old restaurant to throw what you want in a pan over some heat, but if you are wise in your choices and work patiently and politely with the wait staff, you might get some choices that go beyond fried, baked, mashed or rice pilaf?