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Are you going to be able to indulge your funny little eating habits when you venture into the unknown? Probably not! If you're a foodie, that probably doesn't worry you, because part of the fun of travel for you is trying all things new and exciting on the culinary front. But for the less adventurous or those who tend not to like surprises when ordering their nosh, maybe some of the things we've learned up will help soften the blow. These mostly relate to the eating experience in USA.
America has a lot of "family style" restaurant chains. Many people scoff at the thought of eating at this kind of place. The menus as more varied and more up-market than KFC or McDonalds (you get to eat with real cutlery!), but yes, the food is pretty much the same across all of them and it would never be described as gourmet or trendy. Well that's part of the point, really - you know what you are going to get and it won't be too challenging. And you get a lot of whatever it is, at a reasonable price. You can usually find one of these places wherever you travel, they are open for breakfast, lunch and dinner (some are open 24hours) and when we are driving around in USA we use them a lot. Denny's is probably the most well-known, but there are many others. By the way, meals everywhere in America tend to be big, so don't be surprised if you find you can't eat all you order. People really do ask for the remains of their meal to be put in a "doggy bag", so if you are into this, go for it (maybe not at a classy restaurant though!). Tip:
Try a local, authentic "diner" if you can find one - NOT one of those places that has recently been constructed to LOOK like a diner in the style of "Happy Days", but a REAL one. You can still find them in very small towns on minor roads. The owners, cooks and servers tend to belond to the one family. These places always have a great atmosphere and we've had some terrific home-cooked meals at them. Dying breed though. USA "family style" restaurant chains
USA - Coffee rules!
Coffee still seemed to be the universal hot drink in USA last time we were there. Asking for a cup of tea would probably make them think you are a pommie, and it always tastes revolting, so just go with the flow, drink coffee. You can get decaf everywhere if that will make you feel less guilty on the caffeine front. (I'm not going to enter the debate about whether American coffee tastes good or not, that's way too hot a topic!)
Often you will be served a tiny portion of something called "half and half" along with your coffee. It is a white liquid inside a little thing you have to pull the paper lid off. We have never been able to identify what the halves are half of, beyond the fact that the label proudly declares that it is a "non-dairy product". If you want milk in your coffee, ask for cream (otherwise they are likely to bring you a glass of milk). If you want cream in your coffee, give up, they'll think you're weird.
If you want eggs for breakfast, "sunny side up" means it is fried and not turned over, ie the yolk will be sitting up as a yellow blob in a sea of white, and it will be soft or even maybe a bit runny. Some resturants won't serve runny eggs, they are scared of being sued if the egg is too raw and you catch something from eating it. If you ask for it to be done "over easy" it will be fried on both sides, and the yolk will still be fairly soft but probably not runny. If you want it hard ask for "over hard". Scrambled egg (sometimes made from real eggs!) and omelettes (especially with lots of cheese and other stuff in them) are popular, and I think I've seen the option of having your egg poached, but I can't say I've ever seen anyone eating a boiled egg (might be something they do in the privacy of their own home).
Toast is a very rare thing. In both senses. You will hardly ever see it, and if you do see any, it will be very pale in colour. I can only assume Americans don't like to turn their toasters beyond the very light setting. However, some breakfast buffets provide slices of bread that you can toast for yourself on one of those conveyor-belt grill machines. If you are clever, you can set this so that it comes out the right colour. If there are no knobs on the machine, you can pretty much expect it to come out either pale or completely burnt.
Finding a sandwich is just as difficult as finding toast (and if you ask for one, often you get a hamburger roll instead). Easier to give up on this one. Supermarkets have them in those plastic see-through packets sometimes if you are desperate.
Instead of toast for breakfast, Americans seem to like hot cakes. These are big round things with a similar consistency to pikelets (but the size of bread & butter plates). They are also less sweet. However, Americans make up for this by piling a whole lot of sweet stuff on top - maple syrup, strawberry sauce or whatever, and they also seem to like a big ice-cream scoop of butter on them as well. Very sweet pastries and muffins also feature prominently on most breakfast buffets and menus.
Butter is generally the colour of milk, not yellow as it is in Australia. It comes in many forms: little peel-top packs, little paper cups (like the ones dentists sometimes give you with water to swill your mouth out) and "ice-cream scoop".
If you see two "scoops" of something white on your plate, it's not two lots of butter. One will usually be sour cream. (This happens a lot when you ask for baked potato. If you are not into a big cholesterol fix with your spud, you can ask them not to put all this on - and sometimes you will be asked if you want it on in the first place).
Cheddar cheese is generally either very pale yellow or lurid orange in colour - to me, both versions taste the same (ie yuk). When you see a pile of grated orange coloured things in your salad - for more on this see below - it's a fair bet it will be cheese, not carrot!
If you are a big morning meat eater, then you will salivate over breakfast choices. Often you can get not only sausages, but chops and steak as well! Their bacon comes in thin, very crinkly stips that are usually so crisp you can't get a fork into them. I don't know if you are supposed to pick them up in your fingers, but that's what I do when no-one is watching. They are sort of nice, quite salty and very fatty. You sometimes get a choice of having "Canadian" bacon. This is shaped more like our "middle rasher" bacon but has a much nicer flavour.
In our experience, steak and roast meat in America are always wonderfully tender and full of flavour - especially a cut they call "Prime Rib". This is not "ribs" (they serve them too), it is (we think), a cut of meat taken from the eye fillet.
Tip: I'm not going to tell you what "chicken fried steak" is. Why should we have all the fun? Live dangerously, try it for yourself!
If the menu lists "Entrees", that is the main course, not a starter as it is in Australia (if you want a starter, it's called an Appetiser).
When it is time to order your meal, be prepared for an interrogation - you don't just order the meal here, you get to customise it - at least at the family restaurants and diners. This happens via a series of questions which you need to answer correctly if you don't want any surprises. The first will often be whether you want soup or salad. When they ask this, don't assume they are asking if you want salad (as opposed to, say, cooked vegies) on your main meal or soup instead of both. What they want to know is if you want a separate bowl of salad (or soup) which will be served while you wait for the main meal to come.
If you don't much care for iceberg lettuce, then in most instances you'll find this part of the meal less than exciting (but it's a green veg, and you don't see many of those when you're travelling, so eat it!).
They they will usually ask you what dressing you want served with your salad, and if you ask what is available, they will reel off what seems like an endless list and unless you are attuned to the accent, you probably won't be able to discern anything you recognise. A safe bet is "Italian", because that is on nearly everyone's list. If you pick "French", don't be surprised if what you get looks pink and creamy instead of translucent. It isn't Thousand Island, even if it looks like it. Once you get your "ear" in, try some of the other kinds. Be a devil! The dressing usually comes in little packets like the fake milk (so if you don't happen to like whatever you ordered, you don't have to bury your iceberg in it). Check out the salad when it comes. If you score more than two slices of tomato with a salad you have hit the jackpot, tomatoes seem to be treated like gold in USA.
Tip: As well as being asked about the soup or salad and then which dressing, and sometimes what sort of bread you want with it all ("dinner roll or herb bread", or in some locations, whatever their specialty might be, for example, corn bread), you sometimes get to pick what vegies you want with your main meal. There might be three different kinds of spud (avoid "mash" - always tastes like that reconstituted stuff). If the choice is between green beans and anything else, order whatever the other thing is. They just seem to do really sad things to beans.
One of the weirdest things we've seen is how Americans deal with buffets. The vast majority (but not all, we admit) seem to assume that you can only visit once, and so they stack everything on the one plate. It is really quite amazing watching someone put, say, a bunch of crab claws, roast meat and vegetable, various salads and a portion of cheese cake all on the one plate. Sometimes they pop a bowl of soup in the centre of it.
They must think we are really odd when we go and get our courses on separate plates, and eat one before returning to the buffet for the next. Maybe we aren't doing this buffet thing the right way!
We have fallen into a pattern for this that is probably not the usual one, but it works well for us and is very cost effective. In many places, cafes and restaurants offer a relatively cheap hot meal (aimed at tourists, and often featuring the regional specialty) at lunch time, so it would make sense to eat your main meal at this time. However, we mostly skip lunch. Instead, when we book our accommodation, we pay a lot of attention to the breakfast arrangements, and aim to find somewhere with a full buffet breakfast included in the price or available at a reasonable cost. It need not be an "English" or "American" style buffet - we just aim for there to be some good protein choices and if possible, some form of hot food, rather than just a "continental" assortment, although if there is cold meat and/ or cheese or eggs available with that, it would be fine too.
We eat plenty at breakfast, and then do all our sightseeing during the day - occasionally indulging in a pastry mid-afternoon - and then find a light dinner, such as a filled roll or a salad, somewhere not too formal. Quite often, that will be at the food court at a large railway station (and we might eat there or take the items back to our hotel room), or sometimes in the cafeteria of a major department store. These can be utterly amazing places, especially in Germany.
Oh dear, this is getting more and more miserable with every passing year (um yes, we fly cattle class, don't know what the situation is up the pointy end), although I must say the Asian airlines beat the pants off many of the others.
Often you'll feel better if you by-pass one (or more) of the meals, or just eat some of it. There always seem to be a ridiculous number of meals served in the available time anyway. We've considered asking for one of the "special" meals when booking our flights - vegetarian or something, just to see if they are any better. These meals normally get served ahead of the ordinary ones, but the down side is that they are also often missing. Could go either way, couldn't it!
Tip: This one's from personal experience at an expensive resort: Seen those beautiful displays of luscious tropical fruit set out on gleaming platters? Give them a miss if the fruit is peeled. You're risking food poisoning.
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