Dupe du jour

Myth: Specials are slop

Rumor has it that nightly specials are a way to unload practically rancid food on unsuspecting rubes. Is it true? Yes and no. “That’s always been the case with restaurants: They have stuff they need to sell,” says one Soho restaurant insider. But if your waiter is pushing garbage, at least it’ll pay off one day: “They use it as a test, to see if a new dish will go well on a menu,” says another insider. Still, dishing up old goods isn’t unheard of; at the Culinary Institute of America, one chef who would “serve anything” was known as Professor Mustgo.
VERDICT Partly true

Myth: Women don’t belong in the kitchen

Is the macho kitchen atmosphere really unwelcoming to the fairer sex? It once was, but “nowadays there’s a much more enlightened view,” says Chris Giarraputo, an executive chef for B.R. Guest restaurant group, who’s worked in kitchens for 25 years and oversees 16 restaurants. “I find that having a woman in the kitchen makes it much calmer.” It can still be intimidating, especially around male owners, claims another chef, who adds that European chefs tend to be somewhat chauvinistic. More intimidating are the stats: According to a recent StarChefs.com survey, 89 percent of executive chefs are male, and only in the pastry chef position do women outnumber men. “I’ll hire anyone who could get the job done,” says one top-name chef, who asked for anonymity. “That being said, I did work for a major New York restaurateur who would tell managers, ‘Ask yourself this, Would you fuck her? Would I fuck her? That’s the important question.’ ”
VERDICT True & false

Myth: Fish is bad on Mondays

Anyone who’s read Anthony Bourdain’s best-selling 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential knows not to order fish on Mondays, days after the last delivery. “It’s a widely held myth,” says Ian MacGregor, president of the Lobster Place, a wholesale distributor of seafood. “At the time it might have been accurate, but the supply chain in the fish market has evolved quite a bit.” Fish is safe pretty much any day now—when $1 billion of fish business moved from Fulton Fish Market to Hunts Point in the Bronx in 2005, the old way of packing fish with ice was replaced by a complex system of refrigerated loading docks and holding facilities.
VERDICT Totally false

Myth: The customer always comes first

Isn’t it sweet that your server whisks away your dish when you point out that it’s too cold, too salty or too rare? Ha. It’s a mind game, says a waiter who asked to be identified only as Andrea, and sometimes it’s outright war. “When customers say, ‘Oh, my soup’s not hot enough,’ the kitchen will make it extremely hot—we call it ‘asshole hot’—and send it back out. Really screaming hot.” For meat, especially, “they’ll just rearrange it on the plate and send it back out.” The deviousness can extend to the front of the room, too. At one Upper West Side restaurant, the waitstaff purposefully places stuffy folks next to canoodling couples, to cockblock.
VERDICT Totally false

Myth: You’re eating sloppy seconds—or somebody is

You’ve declined a doggie bag and sent your leftovers back with the busboy. What happens to your food next? Food rescue organization City Harvest estimates that about 12 percent of its goods comes from eateries. As for the stuff that’s not donated—most of it ends up in the garbage, in some waiter’s mouth or...on the next table, which isn’t just gross, it’s illegal. Bread is often broken into crumbs for cooking or prettied up in a new bowl. Butter too may make as many trips between table and kitchen as your disaffected server. “Sometimes the buspeople just take butter, put it in the fridge and let it solidify,” says the blogger behind Waiter Rant (who goes by simply Waiter). “That’s why I like the foil packs. They look cheesy, right? But at least you know that’s your butter.”
VERDICT Partly true