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10 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Every Asian Restaurant Meal
Rate it! Votes (1) | Comments (0) By Steven A. Shaw Posted October 23rd, 2008 This article is reprinted with permission from Asian Dining Rules: Essential Strategies for Eating Out at Japanese, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Korean, and Indian Restaurants, by Steven A. Shaw, (2008, William Morrow Cookbooks)	Asian Dining Rules: Essential Strategies for Eating Out at Japanese, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Korean, and Indian Restaurants

TIP NUMBER ONE: Become a Regular
The best restaurant isn’t the one that got a good review in the local paper, or a high score in the Zagat survey. It’s the one where you’re a regular. Being a regular affects every aspect of the dining experience, from being seated right away on a busy Saturday night, to getting the waitstaff's best service, to getting special off-menu dishes. That’s especially true at family-owned restaurants, which most Asian restaurants in North America are. This news can be discouraging to some, but it needn't be to you: by being a proactive and knowledgeable customer – by taking the tips above to heart – you can start getting treated like a regular on your very first visit.

A special relationship with a restaurant is one of life's great pleasures, and such a relationship can be far easier and quicker to establish than many people think. You don't need to be wealthy, a celebrity, or great-looking to be a regular. (I’m none of the three, and I do pretty well in restaurants.) The benefits of being a regular will, of course, increase with each visit to a restaurant.

Eating a first meal at a restaurant is like a first date: it's a preview that helps you decide if you're going to want a second date. Most every restaurant, like every dating partner, keeps a little something in reserve for subsequent encounters. The first meal won't expose you to the full range of an establishment's capabilities, but it will give you a taste.

TIP NUMBER TWO: Do Your Homework
A family of four going out for sushi is likely to spend $150 or more on dinner. That’s as much as many people spend on a digital camera or a computer printer at Costco. Yet few people take as much time to research dinner as they would to research a consumer electronics purchase. They should. A little advance work can not only help you choose the best restaurant, but also the best dishes to order. Depending on where you live, there may be local guidebooks, newspaper restaurant reviews, and online resources. Pay special attention to the Internet, because traditional print media have historically not done a great job staying on top of the ethnic restaurant scene. Online, you may very well find comments from people who’ve eaten their way through the whole menu at a restaurant you’re considering, and sometimes you can find English translations of foreign-language menus.

TIP NUMBER THREE: Go at Slow Times
The worst time to visit a restaurant is when everybody else is eating. On Saturday night at peak dinner hours, yours is just one table in a busy restaurant. But early Tuesday night you’ll have the place -- and all the attention -- to yourself. This is a great time to meet the waitstaff and management, learn their names, and make sure they learn yours. It will be quieter too.

TIP NUMBER FOUR: Ask Lots of Questions
Unless you’re an Asian food expert, or you love surprises, you’ll often need to ask questions in order to learn what you’re ordering before you order it. Asian restaurant menus are typically large and not particularly descriptive, so ask your server for details.

TIP NUMBER FIVE: Say You Want the Real Stuff
Servers in Asian restaurants have learned through experience to assume that most non-Asian customers have conservative palates. If you ask for recommendations, they’ll steer you towards the menu items that are popular with Westerners. While these dishes can be delicious when done well, they’re more often bland and generic. So if you want to eat outside the box, you’ll have to make it clear that you want the real stuff. Don’t take no for an answer.

TIP NUMBER SIX: Fine-Tune Your Restaurant Radar
When you’re walking or driving around and trying to pick a place to eat, look for restaurants that display individuality, not ones you recognize as chains. Also, attention to detail and clean premises demonstrate a standard of care that should carry over to the food.

TIP NUMBER SEVEN: Just Because it's Popular or a Bargain Doesn't Mean it's Good
If popularity were the be-all-end-all of judging restaurants, the best restaurant in the world would be McDonald’s. So beware of popular surveys and full parking lots -- they don’t mean nearly as much as a referral from a trusted acquaintance or critic. A corollary: cheaper and bigger isn’t better. A couple of dollars extra per dish can often elevate your meal far above the lowest common denominator.

TIP NUMBER EIGHT: Speak Up!
I know many people who were raised believing that it’s poor form to complain in restaurants. But a restaurant meal isn’t dinner at a friend’s home -- it’s something you pay for with your hard-earned money. So if you’re not satisfied with your experience, speak up. Be polite but firm and, most of the time, you’ll get what you want (the rest of the time you’ll at least know you did what you could). When complaining, however, tell it to someone who can do something about it. Your server usually has little power to fix a situation, and of course complaining the next day or week won’t solve anything. Instead, as soon as you see a problem, excuse yourself from the table (as if you’re going to the washroom, which also saves you the discomfort of complaining in front of your guests) and find a manager. There’s a flipside to complaining, though: you should also offer praise when things go well.

TIP NUMBER NINE: Don't Sweat the Language Barrier
Unless you grew up in Asia, you’re probably not going to be able to pronounce the names of Asian-restaurant dishes all that well. Even people from one part of China can barely pronounce the dishes from other parts of China. So don’t worry about it. Smile, speak up, and do the best you can. Nobody is going to hold it against you. They may even find it charming.

TIP NUMBER TEN: Keep an Open Mind and Take Some Risks
If you order the same five familiar dishes every time you go out for Asian food, you’ll always be safe but you’ll never discover that sixth dish that you like even better. Try something new each time you go out to eat, and don’t be disappointed if you get the occasional dud. It’s like dating: you need to meet a lot of people before you find the one you love. Except, with food, you don’t have to be monogamous: you can love as many dishes as you want and the others won’t complain.

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