Food: Cook-It-Yourself Restaurants

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Cook-It-Yourself Restaurants
Saturday, October 22, 2005

There are many reasons that people go out to restaurants for a meal. For example, they might be too tired or too busy to cook. Or, they might want to celebrate a special occasion at an upscale establishment. Maybe they just want to have gourmet meals that they simply can't cook for themselves at home. Whatever the reason, going out to eat is obviously a very popular form of entertainment and is not likely to go out of fashion anytime soon.

One thing that I love about living near a big city like Chicago is that there are so many different restaurants to try on any given night. Plus, since the competition for dining dollars is so fierce, the restaurants that don't make it are soon replaced by new ventures that hope to score big in its place. So it seems like there are always grand openings events going on as well.

Well, some of the new restaurants I've been to in the past few years have a twist to them. Instead of ordering a meal and waiting for it to be brought out to you, you order some raw food and then cook it up yourself. I'm not talking about pizza places that allow you to cook your own pie. I'm talking about places where you cook foods like steak, ribs, and fish.

First, I have to say that this concept is not at all new. If you've ever dined in Asian-style restaurants you might have cooked your own food before. For example, when I lived in Japan, I thought nothing of seeing a big grill or hot plate sitting in the middle of the table or booth so that you can cook your own okonomiyaki (a traditional Japanese food that is usually described as a cross between a pizza and a pancake, but which I personally found to be totally unlike either).

Anyway, there was one restaurant out in the suburbs of Chicago that was a do-it-yourself place. My husband and I had heard about it from some friends and decided to try it. We went in the summer, so grilling our own food over the big barbecue wasn't a problem. I'm not sure what the patrons would do in the sub-zero temperatures of the winter months, though.

The strange thing about this restaurant was that we paid full prices for our meals even though we cooked them ourselves. For some reason, I was expecting the food to cost a bit less and be more in line with what you would pay at the grocery store. That was not the case at all.

I have to say that I didn't really like the restaurant. For one thing, the food tastes just like it does when you cook at home. That's not good because, as we all know, things taste better when other people make them. This is true of everything from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to prime rib. It's not a perception that will change just from charging a lot of money and setting up big barbecue pits for people to cook over. So it was an interesting experiment, but one that we aren't likely to repeat.

If you have an urge to try a cook-it-yourself restaurant, just bear my experience in mind!

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