Why do all restaurants have the same desserts?

Aside from not wanting to spend $15 for a slice of frozen Sara Lee with a scoop of bottom dollar ice cream and a drizzle of Hershey’s, American restaurants usually have huge portions. Who has room for dessert?

A lot of restaurants outsource dessert and buy them in from a distributor. That’s why you see the same thing at many places. Not many average sized or smaller restaurants have the staff and time to make everything on their menu, or to store all the ingredients or utensils/items needed to make every item. Dessert gets ordered in and the finishing touches are added when an order comes in.

Restaurants seem to purchase (outsource) their desserts. (R2, I was typing this and then your post came up.)

Not sure why they don't get more creative with their desserts menus. Granted, people can usually only eat one dessert, if at all. It's not like cocktails, where the markup is huge and you can drink more than one.

Cheesecake is a pretty safe bet, for a restaurant. People like it and they can keep unsold portions in the fridge for quite a while.

A long time ago, the Hard Rock Cafe used to serve a large slice of brownie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, plus some syrup. It was simple, but was a perfect dessert, IMO.

WHET fried ice cream?

Dessert? What is that?

Did you mean "desert"? I live in the desert.

There's a Mexican place near me that still sells fried ice cream, R4.

I feel like eating a pot du creme.

Desserts have lower margins compared to other courses. Older generations order less than younger. Presentation and virality is needed to get noticed.

Seems like desserts might have a higher profit margin. I think this is an untapped situation. I used to go to a place that had personal-sized chocolate souffle on the menu. You had to order it 20 minutes in advance. I ordered one and my friend kept sticking her spoon in my souffle and eating it. I was getting kind of pissed, but then she ordered another one and I got to eat half of that one.

Desserts do have a higher profit margin, R9, but only if they're made in house. Many restaurants don't have enough talented help to provide a high-quality, house made dessert list that coordinates with the rest of the menu. Your typical line cook could not consistently pull off a dessert soufflé. You'd need a dedicated pastry person to plate and serve those desserts.

The other problem is, most people for the last few decades seem to only order one desert for the table instead of everyone having their own. Everyone takes a bit or two but does not feel guilty about the calories. At least in the circle of friends and family I move in it's been that way.

You need to go to different restaurants

At the Olive Garden level of restaurant, almost nobody orders dessert. Big helpings fill you up and keep you happy, and all-you-can-eat breadsticks make sure you are as full as you desire.

As you go higher, though, the portion sizes shrink and the number of courses grows. This gives you more new things to experience. You love your first bite, but is the 50th just as good? Smaller portions but more variety are more fun. However, it does drive up the cost of sourcing more types of food and labor to prepare a larger variety of dishes per customer. Thus the dining experience becomes more about exploration and less about just calories. The dessert then becomes a decadent end to the experience and is much more important.

Lava cake is just a convenient, freezable very poor substitute for a proper chocolate soufflé. Once you've had the real thing...

How dare you talk about The Blondie at Applebees that way!

I’ll never forget dessert at a restaurant called Chabrol in Nice, France. It was a lemon basil sorbet with a cream filled mille feuille on the side.

Who eats desserts, you fat pig. Oink! Oink!

OP types fat.

R16 Hi Greg!

Back in the day, the occasional crème caramel or crème brûlée...very nice. Well worth an extra couple of workouts.

There was a period when any flan with a biscuit crumb base filled with gelatinised milk was called a cheesecake by various restaurants. It was very disappointing that there was no cream cheese used.

Stealth Greg thread.

I'm not in the U.S. but this is the "viral" dessert in my city: toast (or brioche) fried in sweetened milk (flavored with anise and/or cinnamon), served with a small portion of vanilla ice cream served on toffee (syrup and/or crumbs).

There are some other variations, but mostly in the serving.

Even an inferior version is delicious though I have seen a couple of places fuck It up. A favorite restaurant had it on the menu then, during Covid, it seemed every restaurant followed suit. It's based on flavors associated with the region from the.Middle Ages, so geographically it does make more sense than tiramisu, say -- which is another popular item on menus.

Deserts in many restaurants have the taste and texture of food that has been sitting for a long time. I remember when I worked in a restaurant as a dishwasher back in high school, they would ask me to set up the salads and deserts (they called it “mise en place”). Back then, they’d add berries, mint leaves and maybe a swirl of sauce from a Nalgene bottle to give the desert a fresher appearance.

Years later, I find most restaurant deserts a “whole lotta nothin’ special”, or an expensive heaping scoop of m’eh.

Also, they list ingredients that actually appear in trace quantities. You may see “caramel sauce with charred pineapple and toasted pecan” and discover a stupid squiggle of the saucer and three tiny squares of pineapple and a few fragments of damp pecans. Fuck that!

We don't do sugar, dear.

R23. DESSERTS!

I had terrible cheesecake at Ruth’s Chris last week. The steaks and sides were good, but the dessert was incredibly disappointing. Cheesecake shouldn’t be dry and crumbly.

They’re all a bunch of liars!

Every fucking place has tiramisu.

I remember first eating tiramisu 25-30 years ago and it was a revelation. Whatever passes for it now is crap

R28 I agree, tiramisu was never THAT good (often too soggy) but now I am extremely over it. I love sweets but I’ll skip dessert before I’ll touch a tiramisu.

There's a 'restaurant row' in my city thar offers the finest foods imaginable, but the worst desserts. (popular with locals and tourists from the hotels in the area). About five years ago (right before COVID hit) a young pastry chef who graduated from our local culinary school had the great idea to rent out one of the empty store spaces on the street and open a 'dessert cafe' with some of the most creative, delicious desserts. She's open Wednesday - Sunday from 11 am - 9 pm (a little longer on Friday and Saturday nights). She had said (in interviews this past November, her fifth anniversary open) it was very slow during COVID when the restaurants weren't fully open, but she stuck it out and it gave her time to 'experiment' with what worked and what didn't. A year later, when the restrictions were lifted, her business boomed and all the 'kinks' were fully worked out. She focused on desserts and offered a small beverage menu (she didn't want to turn into a place which offered a hundred coffee drinks; just the basics). She rented out the newly vacant space next door and plans on increasing her seating by the summer. Smart businesswoman ! She paid attention to what was missing and filled that void.

R31. I could care less.

I miss how moderately upscale restaurants used to have fake deserts on a tray in the 80s and 90s so the dining patrons could see what they looked like.

R30, what's the name of that desserts place? Sorry, don't mean to stalk you, just interested. It's okay if you don't want to answer.

Tommy Bahama had an absolutely delicious butterscotch pudding. It came in a huge footed glass. Chocolate ganache on the bottom. Whipped cream on top. I think they reduced the size.

TB also had a desserts tray with the real desserts on it. I was always wanting the layered coconut cake, but couldn't not order the butterscotch pudding.

Not a huge fan of tiramisu, too many soft textures, like trifle.

However, mascarpone cheese, alone, is absolutely delicious.

They are likely buying frozen desserts from a supplier or their own corporate headquarters. I believe desserts have a high profit margin, not a low one. Restaurant desserts can be low quality (previously frozen) too sweet, or hacky (bomb them with 1,000 calories and three kinds of chocolate). They put them on a plate the size of a hub cap, over-garnish them and charge you 12 dollars. They figure you won't know the difference. It's similar to the same bad corporate wine selections in every restaurant. High profit margin and they assume you won't know the difference.

If you think about the ingredients in desserts, it's not crazy expensive: flour, sugar, butter, maybe some chocolate.

I still love tiramisu if it's made well with a zabaglione and not whipped raw fucking eggs.

I beg your pardon OP, we make one dessert table side flambe and served. But then we invented Bananas Foster so there is that.

My goodness some of you have baby tastes.

You should rephrase & ask "Why are American desserts the same"....... America has cheesecake, ice cream, pie etc. Not the case elsewhere in the world. Americans are "dessert retard".

That’s why I carry a snack purse.

It’s a family sized bag of M&Ms R42 but you go ahead and call it a purse, you wonderful fat whore.

Don't order dessert. You can't fight this industrialisation but you can decline to pay for it and consume it.

R44: Everything that comes before dessert is fine, then? So long as you draw the line and rise up in a display of righteous indignation against the creep of Industrialization but say no to dessert?

Most restaurants buy their desserts from bakeries. Only top end eateries can afford to have a pastry chef on staff.

I hate when I get served dessert that is still somewhat frozen

Here it’s

• a sticky date pudding or some sort of apple dessert • the compulsory chocolate option • something eggy like panna cotta or crème caramel and • maybe something with meringue.

Unless there’s pavlova or plain cream on offer, I’m not interested. I would certainly order something fresh and fruity but it’s rarely on offer, even in summer.

I usually go for a walk and buy a gelato cone or sorbet.

It's like Mexican restaurants. Pretty much all of them get 75% of their dishes from distribution centers. The dishes come in frozen and all the restaurant has to do is microwave them. Ever wondered how you get your food so fast in Mexican restaurants? Now you know. I've only been in one Mexican restaurant where the fried their chips in house. Years ago one of the companies we owned had a facility in an office park. I'd go do site visits about once a month. There was always a pervasive smell of something frying. I asked one of the managers what the smell was and he told me that right behind their building was a Mexican food distribution center and that smell was all over the place on the days they fried thousands of pounds of chips.

Panna cotta is not eggy. It's gelatin-based.

Nothing is more disappointing than a mediocre dessert—honestly, it bothers me even more than a lackluster entrée. Dessert is meant to be an indulgence, a treat you don’t need but choose to enjoy. So when it ends up being forgettable, it feels like a waste. Not just of calories, but of the experience itself. If I could have skipped it and been just as satisfied, it’s hard not to feel angry.

All restaurants don't, OP.

YMMV.

OP wants her floating island and she wants it NOW!

This why everyone is on a fat pill, to stave off the black leg.

A lot of you sound like idiots. Just because OP’s bf is French doesn’t mean he can only cook Coq au Vin and Ratatouille. OP isn’t living with Julia Child.

In Glendale AZ, a few miles west of me, about a year and a half ago, some factory opened up. It makes ice cream cakes Vienetta-style, and various desserts and cheesecakes, in single serve and multi serv versions. So somebody opened a business making the shit we're talking about. I just spent ten minutes searching on googs and apple maps and can't find the place. Six months ago I found a description of it on some business news website. It's not open to the public. The article said they made stuff for airlines and restaurant chains. Now I can't find anything and I can't even find it on the map. Do I remember its name? No. LOL somebody get me some memory cells.

r23 you hit it on the nail about how I feel about desert at most places.

Sorry, but what kind of garbage restaurants do you go to, r49? A decent Mexican restaurant is not hard to find in most areas. Also, busy restaurants may not want you to order dessert. They want you to get the fuck out of there so that they can seat the next table. Oh, and it's not butterscotch pudding anymore, it's a budino.

OP? You type fat. No, really really fat.