For the ultimate control freak: cook-it-yourself

While sitting in my dentist’s office recently, I noticed a March issue of Time magazine with a page-long story that said, “Cook-it-yourself restaurants are booming....”

Huh?

“Cook-it-yourself restaurants”? Boy, talk about an oxymoron -- with the accent on the last two syllables.

Why would you go to a restaurant to cook your own food? Don’t we go to restaurants in large measure so we won’t have to cook, so we can eat without worrying about shopping, chopping, boiling and broiling? What’s next -- restaurants where you clear your own table and wash your own dishes?

Well, according to Time, “restaurants where diners chop, grill, boil or dip their food are hot in the heartland” -- which, based on the examples Time provided, includes everywhere from Florence, Ky., to St. Paul to Houston to Las Vegas (surely the first time anyone has called Las Vegas “the heartland”).

Although Los Angeles isn’t mentioned in the Time story, we have quite a few cook-it-yourself restaurants here, including one throwback to the 1970s -- La Fondue Bourguignonne in Sherman Oaks. But Asian restaurants tend to dominate this category.

Locally, these include such Korean barbecues as Seoul Jung in downtown Los Angeles, Soot Bull Jeep in Koreatown, Woo Lae Oak in Beverly Hills and Gyu-kaku in West Los Angeles. You can also make your own Japanese hot pot dishes at Tsukuba Restaurant in Torrance and Sanuki No Sato in Gardena, and you can do shabu-shabu at Kagaya in Little Tokyo, at TT Shabu in Monterey Park, Mizu in West Los Angeles, California Shabu Shabu in Fountain Valley and Gyu-shintei in Torrance.

Many such establishments in other cities have a decidedly Asian flavor as well. But Time also mentions restaurants in which customers grill their own steaks and roll their own pizza dough.

So why do people want to cook their own food in restaurants? It’s not because they think most chefs are overpaid underachievers. It’s because “Americans want control,” the vice president for research at the National Restaurant Assn. told Time. “The cook-it-yourself experience embodies the quintessential American values of freedom of choice and independence.”

Really? I would think you could best exercise your freedom of choice and independence by choosing a favorite restaurant and a favorite cuisine and the dishes you like best and leaving the cooking to the experts.

Other authorities quoted by Time said some people just like to play with food -- to feel “a little involved.” Now that families spend 46% of their food budgets on meals outside the home, “family members miss the cooking experience.”

Another element in the equation is probably the do-it-yourself attitude of many Americans -- and that may explain why the phenomenon so baffles me. I’m not a do-it-yourselfer. Oh sure, I like to plan my own vacations rather than use a travel agent. For me, part of the pleasure of vacation is making airplane, hotel and rental car reservations, writing to various restaurants weeks in advance and buying theater tickets online; all this heightens my sense of anticipation and, in effect, prolongs the vacation experience.

But when it comes to fixing a leaky faucet or a faulty light switch -- well, I figure that’s why God invented plumbers and electricians. I’d rather work extra hard, make some extra money and use it to pay someone who knows what he’s doing to take care of those things for me -- just as I’d rather pay more in a restaurant to have the chef cook for me than to cook for myself.

I realize, though, that just as I am not a typical homeowner, so I am not a typical diner. And that brings us to the larger question:

Just why do people go to restaurants?

I go for the food. Whether it’s a hot dog stand, a barbecue pit, a trattoria, a dim sum parlor or a fancy French restaurant, what counts most for me is the quality of the food. If necessary -- and if the food is good enough -- I can put up with rude (or slow) service, high prices, ugly decor, difficult parking and even a poor wine list.

One of my favorite restaurants in Los Angeles, for example, is Phillips barbecue in Leimert Park. Before I can sink my teeth into their wonderful, small-end pork ribs and beef sausages, I always have to stand in line in the parking lot to order, stand in the parking lot again to await delivery and then -- because Phillips has no seating on the premises -- take my food around the corner and sit on a cold stone bench in a park that’s often frequented by friendly panhandlers and hostile pigeons.

I go as often as I can.

But I know from talking to friends, fellow diners and restaurateurs that most people do not, ultimately, go to a restaurant for the food. They go for the experience -- the ambience, the buzz, the sense of being where the action is, the feeling of being waited on and catered to. That’s why complaints about service far outnumber those about food quality in most restaurants.

Last fall, when almost 100,000 of the “surveyors” who contribute to the Zagat dining guides nationwide were asked what “irritates” them the most about dining out, 74% said service; only 6% said food.

People also go for the social nature of dining out -- to be with friends and family, away from home and office -- and that I do get. Although I have often eaten four-hour multi-course extravaganzas all by myself, both here and abroad, there is almost nothing I like better than sharing a good meal with my wife and son or good friends.

But when I do that, I want to focus on them and our conversation and on the taste of the food and wine, not on cooking the food and worrying about when it’s ready and whether we’re all at the same stage of cooking and consumption.

So, Time magazine notwithstanding, I won’t be going to any cook-it-yourself restaurants. I already bring my own wine to most restaurants, which means I can never send back a bad bottle; if I started cooking my own food, I could never send back an overcooked piece of salmon or any dish with a sauce that’s too sweet.

What kind of fun would that be?

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.