Waitresses May Be Last Thing Still Fresh : Instant Foods Steal Show at Restaurant Expo

A recent survey said that San Diegans now spend about 51% of every food dollar on restaurant meals. Why?

Convenience is a big factor; often, many of us are willing to pay to have someone else do the cooking. But most important, we expect restaurants to supply us with excellent meals cooked by experts who insist upon using the freshest and finest ingredients.

The question today is: How many restaurants really are giving us what we pay for?

The 40,000 attendees at the annual Western Restaurant Convention & Exposition, presented recently by the California Restaurant Assn. at the Los Angeles Convention Center, learned that all a restaurant kitchen needs in these happy-go-lucky times is a freezer and a kid skilled at opening cans and boxes and tossing the contents into deep fat fryers and microwave ovens. Admittance to the show was restricted to exhibitors, restaurateurs and the press--groups generally known to possess strong stomachs.

To be fair, it must be admitted that very high quality goods were displayed at some of the 1,800 booths packed into the center’s 400,000 square feet of exhibit space. But there were a sufficient number of pre-processed, preprepared and presumptuous (can predigested fare be far behind?) products to give anyone who ever eats in restaurants a bad case of the shakes.

Is Anything Fresh?

Think of some of these items as foods that go bump in the night. All are available to every type of food service operation, and they are turning up on dinner plates--typically presented as freshly cooked fare, prepared to order for you by loving, talented hands. Of course, there are many restaurateurs, both small-time and grand, who never would consider serving anything but fresh food, freshly prepared.

My own award for Worst of Show would go to a rather innocuous-seeming item, the Ore-Ida brand Prebaked Potatoes. What are these spunky spuds? To quote from the promotional brochure, they are “whole Russet Burbank potatoes that are oven baked and then quick frozen. Already scrubbed and sized, they require virtually no preparation or handling.” (“No preparation or handling” seems to be the cue phrase used these days to attract the restaurateur who only wants to be a middleman between processor and consumer.)

Susceptible to microwaving, steaming, or re-heating in either conventional or convection ovens, these talented taters can go from freezer to plate in anything from 40 seconds to 50 minutes. But, one must ask, why? As in why not spend 50 minutes baking a fresh potato, since oven-heating a 7-ounce Ore-Ida Prebaked Potato takes the same length of time? Why not always give the customer the fresh food he thinks he’s paying for?

Can frozen, precooked prime rib roasts be far behind? Worry not (or a lot), they’ve been on the market for years. Over at a rather showy booth in Aisle 3, Excel Foods of Wichita, Kan., proudly displayed its 10-pound precooked roasts, entombed in see-through packaging and ready to be either reheated whole in conventional ovens, or by the slice in microwaves. How to spot one of these babies if it turns up on a plate in your favorite eatery? Note the absence of the crisp exterior fat and charred edges normally associated with prime rib roast. And where’s that bone that Mom always said polite people did not gnaw in public? It’s been carved away at the packing house and sent to one of several barbecued rib chains, where frozen, precooked ribs now are being test marketed.

No Help Needed

Even a cursory tour of the 1,800 displays would have made it clear that a meal of as many courses as a restaurant wishes to offer can be sent to table without calling on the help of anyone with the title--or paycheck--of cook.

Here’s how to assemble a three-course meal in a hurry: For the entree, naturally, just slap a frozen prebaked potato, a slice of frozen precooked prime rib and some frozen vegetable medley on a plate, and microwave. Don’t bother adding a sprig of fresh (heaven forbid!) parsley as garnish, since the vegetables have been dyed in eye-pleasing shades. For dessert, defrost and heat a frozen, fruit-filled crepe and add a splash of canned custard sauce.

Whoops! We forgot the appetizer. But no problem, this course can be served with equal ease. Simply defrost six or seven Claw d’Oeuvres, a trademarked product imported from Japan and marketed by The Berelson Company of San Francisco. Made of the Sea Legs brand of surimi, a paste in this case composed of 80% ocean fish and 20% crab meat, these reddish morsels look quite like shelled crab claws but only cost 10 cents each. The trompe l’oeil effect and low cost are equally important, but the general idea apparently is that if something looks real, it is real enough.

(Other manufacturers, several of which only use shellfish extracts to flavor their ground fish products, presented myriad lines of surimi paste disguised as shrimp, scallops, crab flakes and so forth. Their uses are legion--in soups, entrees, sandwiches, etc.--but menus should always specify that surimi has been substituted for real shellfish built by Nature. The sad truth is that some restaurateurs do deceive their clients. Both caveat emptor and semper vigilans would seem to apply here.)

Frozen List Grows

In addition, there were frozen precooked meatballs (Mama mia!); a new chocolate liqueur called Truffles; Itza Pie meat pies from New Zealand, whose national trade commission featured an immense range of products; Uncle Ben’s Rice Florentine, a rice-spinach combination that can be converted into cream of Rice Florentine soup (if one really insists); frozen pasta sauces almost beyond count, evidently one of the hottest items around; frying oil life extender; cans of frozen Calavo brand guacamole, and if you’ve dined around at San Diego’s Mexican restaurants, you can bet your last enchilada you’ve tasted this product; breaded ravioli; frozen breaded vegetables, meats and seafoods of more variety than would seem possible (some also more ghastly than would seem possible), and finally, to the shame of honest chickens everywhere, frozen omelets.

As a final note, the old debate over what constitutes “fresh” food seemed to have been muscled aside by quite a number of the producers represented at the convention. Webster’s New World Dictionary remarks that fresh food, among other things, is “not salted, preserved, pickled, etc.” Frozen food is described as “preserved by rapid refrigeration.”

The prize in the “fresh-is-what-you-want-it-to-be” competition probably was won by San Francisco’s Armanino Foods of Distinction, Inc., whose brochure billed its pasta toppings as “frozen fresh sauces.” It doesn’t seem necessary to call in Aesop to solve the riddle of how something can be both frozen and fresh--it can’t be.