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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4460 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

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There's something I wanted to talk about for a while. Desserts.

No, not the arid terrains with sand dunes and camels. The sweet things people sometimes eat at the end of the meal. Those ones.

So, when I came to live in the US (a while ago), I found the dessert game in the most restaurants - even upscale ones (not the Michelin level - I am not rich enough to go to those) - is pitifully bad. In general, in the States, you can have a good meal in many places, serving wide variety of cuisines. I have had hundreds of excellent meals. Finding an excellent dessert was much harder.

Most places have chocolate cake, maybe a cheesecake, maybe ice cream. Crème brûlée if they are fancy (over half of them won't make it right though). Maybe couple more options, but that's it. Nothing to write home about.

Cafés are even worse. Unless it's one of those rare specialized shops, you get muffins, croissants, maybe lemon loafs, and those enormous cookies whose point I still can't get. If they feel fancy, maybe some French macarons. But usually that's it. For any real variety - and the world of pastry and patisserie is no less varied than the world of main dishes - you need to go to a specialized shop. Which are quite rare. I have probably a dozen of cake shops around - but I don't need a whole frickin wedding cake! I just want something small and nice to have with my coffee. But within at least 20 minute drive of my place, I see maybe one place with decent variety (which is also closed half of the week - probably because lack of patrons?). Despite over half a million people living around. Back when I lived in Silicon Valley (~3 mln people?), I knew some decent places, but also not too many, especially outside of SF.

So why is this happening? Do Americans hate desserts? Do they just not care? Or am I just not looking at the right places and it is my ignorance that is causing me to suffer (as usual)?

I remember when I first visited the US (even longer while ago, over 20 years now) it was nearly the same situation with beer. It's not that you couldn't get a decent beer at all. It's that you can't expect a random or even upscale place to have even a half decent beer game, and you needed to go to special places for weird people to get a good beer. Now the situation has been, thankfully, greatly changed. Even in a random pub you can have one-two decent beers on draft, more in cans/bottles, any self-respecting restaurant would have some local crafts and some nationally popular choices, a good pub would have dozens, and it's not unheard of to encounter a multi-page beer menu in a non-specialized place. And even the most mundane supermarkets would bother to present a respectable selection.

Could this happen to the sweets too? I understand the complexities (beer is much easier to pack and preserve than sweets), but maybe there's still hope?

What would you consider a good selection of desserts? I took a look at a fancy Moscow restaurant's dessert menu (it specializes in fish, so its selection of desserts should be good, but not stellar), here's what they offer:

  • Basque cheesecake

  • Crème brûlée

  • Something weird

  • Pistachio strudel

  • Pavlova

  • Mochi

  • Choux

  • Lemon tart

  • Baba au rhum

  • Ice cream

I assume you mean Moscow, Russia, not Moscow, Idaho? ;) I've not been to Moscow (the former) for a couple of decades, and probably won't ever be again until a certain guy who will remain nameless in this topic will meet the fires of hell awaiting for him, but I remember the food quality there was pretty decent, including the dessert game. Of this menu, I'd say a good start. For myself, I'd add a couple of cake types, maybe some eclair, some flan or maybe pana cotta, maybe a mousse. The main thing though for me I won't ask a lot from any single restaurant - just as I won't ask a single restaurant to have all the variety of cuisines at once. I'm rather looking at the aggregate choice among the various restaurants. So, I'd rate the selection for a restaurant above as decent - and provided there are a dozen restaurants around each providing 10 dessert options, which are not all the same among them - I'd say I'm pretty good on that. But on my observation, that's not what is happening - at least not in my experience.

P.S. BTW, coincidentally that reminded me of a local Russian restaurant within 10 minutes drive of me. Their selections: honey cake, pavlova, chocolate ganache cake, lemon mousse, cookie platter. Not too bad, actually. 5 options, and neither of them repeats what other restaurants offer. I rate it as a good contribution to the cause.

I've heard Moscow, Idaho is a QAnon stronghold these days.

The semi-cult with Doug Wilson? Yeah that isn't Q-anon. It also isn't much more cultish than your average megachurch.

That’s Langley.

I didn't think QAnon is a geographically localized phenomenon. Also, Moscow ID is a college town, in 2020 the majority voted for Biden, while Idaho went 2x to Trump. So I'd rather expect to find BlueAnon than QAnon there.

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