30 Foods That Are Not As Good As The Hype May Make You Believe, According To Folks In This Online Community

Fancy cupcakes. Every ‘designer’ cupcake I’ve had has been incredibly dry. I just don’t get why they charge $5-$10 per serving, but the quality of the cake is below a Walmart sheet cake.

Not really a cuisine per se, but ‘shock food’

You know those giant milkshakes with whole slices of cake and candy on top, or quadruple cheeseburgers with so much cheese it’s running everywhere. It’s just not practical/tasty and really only exists to get a cool picture

The damn banana-flavoured food and cherry-flavoured food.

Banana is delicious but banana-flavoured stuff tastes so fake and weird.

Cherry-flavoured food just tastes like chemicals and cough drops.

Gold-flaked cuisine

Salt bae….

Deconstructed anything.

glennok added:

I once ordered deconstructed salmon cream cheese bagel from a diner, it was 5 dollars more. Was literally just all the ingredients for the regular bagel spread out on a plate. Never again.

Steak. I call it the steak cult. For the life of me, I cannot understand it.

Don't get me wrong - I like a good steak. I eat it relatively often. It is sometimes exactly what I'm craving. And there's absolutely a difference between a good steak and a bad steak.

But the steak cult is way beyond that - people fetishize it as the 'best' meal you could ever have. On a menu, they'll be willing to pay double or triple the price for any other main dish, just because it's steak. They fall for every silly, cheap marketing trick in the book (Oh this one isn't just Angus, it's BLACK Angus beef - that'll be 30% more expensive; this one here is 5 million hour aged Wagyu beef and the cow was slightly cross-eyed - I'm afraid you'll have to remortgage your house to afford this prime slice of meat).

It's dumb. On an objective level, the complexity that goes into cooking a steak is far less than a really good risotto. The flavours are less complex, and you can simply do less; it's less innovative, and less overall impressive.

It's also completely decoupled from supply and demand - a saffron risotto should cost significantly more than just about any steak - saffron is actually rare, whereas cows are everywhere, and there's no shortage of even the 'prime' beef cows.

Plus then all of the fetishization around how you 'insult the chef and the meat' if you order it any other way than medium-rare....

Agh the whole thing is just infuriating. It's so wrapped up in last-century ideas of meat being rare and precious, and the more meat you ate the richer you were.

But I just want to shake people and say - do you really think that the $130 steak you just bought is four times better than any pasta dish or coq-au-vin or sushi or paella or pizza you've ever had? Seriously?

Expensive Italian, a 30 dollar pasta is straight robbery

The most expensive dishes. “Yeah, man these diamonds sautéed in truffle oil and emerald dust are good, but do you have a cheeseburger?”

Any of the artsy-fartsy stuff where they care more about appearance than taste

Any foam or mousse from a Michelin star restaurant.

Pigeon foam. Wtf did I just pay $200 to eat?

“Something for everyone” restaurants. Anywhere where the menu has a ridiculously extensive offering. If I’m flipping multiple pages and not even halfway, I just know everything is about to taste questionable.

isn’t a cuisine, but ranch. everybody rants and raves about it, i even had a friend who put ranch on grapes. some ppl put it on EVERYTHING, which is fine because it’s not bad i guess? but idk i just never got the hype, i’m not the biggest fan of it lol

Lobster. It’s fine, it’s just not really worth it’s cost imo. I also like eating it in things rather than by itself. The lobster rolls I had in Maine were much better than lobster straight up.

Edit: yes, as many have said, crab is delicious and the superior choice by a mile

cake.

ignoring coffee and booze, it'd have to be cake. people care more about how it looks and photographs than how it taste. it has it's own reality show.

Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant was s**t. It genuinely made me question everything I’ve seen him criticize and wonder “does this guy just have horrible taste?”

kid cuisine. The brownie usually comes out hard as a rock and the mac and cheese is watery

American Italian. It’s heavy and repetitive.

Insanely unhealthy Southern food.

As a life long resident of the South, a ton of popular Southern food is mediocre meat that is breaded and deep fried. The primary flavor is fried breading. Given astronomical rate lifestyle-related disease in the South, elevating food that is both super unhealthy and also uninspiringly flavored is just mindbogglingly.

There is some truly delicious and inspired Southern food, and some of that is healthy or at least ok in small quantities. However, most of what I hear people talking about as "great" Southern food is boring and super bad for you if eaten on a regular basis.

The Dutch are so crazy about their meat croquettes and frikandellel, but it's just frozen meat that has been mashed together.