Shocking Secrets From Inside a Restaurant Kitchen
Me, I like to think I know how to navigate my way through a restaurant menu when it comes to making the healthiest choices. However, recently eDiets got the inside scoop on common restaurant practices that can sabotage your diet that you might not have considered.
Here are a few practices that shocked me the most:
- Even steamed veggies are high in fat. “Fat is what sells food in restaurants,” says Deborah Fabricant, a Los Angeles-based restaurant consultant, former chef and author of Stacks: The Art of Vertical Food. “That’s why it ubiquitous, even in vegetable dishes.”
- Egg-white omelets aren’t necessarily better for you. If you’ve been to a fancy buffet brunch with an omelet bar, you’ve seen the chef generously ladle a clear liquid into the pan before making your mushroom-and-spinach favorite. The liquid is fat, and the ladle holds at least 2 tablespoons. That’s 22 grams of fat (16 grams saturated) and 200 calories added to an otherwise healthful dish.
There are more shocking revelations so read more
- Those “plain” toasted buns are covered in butter (or worse). It’s pretty obvious when you take a bite of garlic bread at a steakhouse that it’s dripping with butter. But butter or other fat is added to bread a lot more often than you know. It’s common practice to slap sandwich buns with some form of grease to keep them from sticking to the flattop grill. You may think you’re having a plain grilled chicken sandwich, but there’s a good chance those wheat buns were smeared with margarine before being toasted. This adds 5.5 fat grams (4 grams saturated) and 50 calories.
- Meat, chicken and fish get a fat rubdown before cooking. At culinary school it was drilled into chefs that before any piece of meat is cooked – no matter how it’s to be cooked – it absolutely must be rubbed on both sides with olive oil. Rubbing a 4- to 6-ounce chicken breast, steak or piece of fish adds up to 10 grams of fat (2 grams saturated) and 90 calories. And if it stops there, you’re getting off easy.
