Default Food

Let’s say you stop at an unfamiliar restaurant and don’t have a lot of time. You don’t know what’s good. You pick something more or less at random.

A crisis, surely.

Or you go someplace where the menu is full of foreign words, and you literally don’t know what you’re ordering. Or the menu on the wall is big and complicated, and there’s an impatient line behind you. Or you’re at the drive-thru, squinting at your choices in the pouring rain.

These sorts of tragedies are all too common – and I think they are preventable.

I think restaurants should have a default option.

Anytime you don’t know what to get, whatever the reason, you should be able to ask for the default – the thing that the restaurant will give you in the absence of any preference. Probably something that’s reasonably priced, reasonably tasty, and will appeal to a wide range of customers.

Diet restrictions? Well, ideally, someone who is vegan (or whatever) would ask when they order, but the restaurant could bring it up too, and perhaps even have a backup default for special cases.

What say you, hypothetical reader? Would you like to have a default option? (We could call it something a little sexier, like house favorite. Also, it’s possible I don’t know what “sexier” means.)

Can we finally end the long nightmare?