My friends have told me that if I have a special ability with food and wine, it is not a gifted palate nor an especially deft hand in the kitchen; rather it is the treatment I receive in restaurants despite the fact I am basically destitute financially and not particularly good looking or well connected. Essentially, I receive the treatment restaurants give their regular customers, and that is achievable from your first visit to any good restaurant (a good place being one with a vision and a mission beyond making money.) This is a series about the behaviors I see as natural that some do not.
Don't get hung up on what you think a dish should be. When you go to a new place and order something called by a name you have used before, you have the unique opportunity to judge how this chef's vision jibes with your taste. If his version makes you happy, go back to his restaurant. If it doesn't, go back to the other place where you had the dish with the same name that you liked. Your only mistake can be believing one guy did it wrong.
There is no Tuscan Chicken in Tuscany. No matter how many ads The Olive Garden buys during the Super Bowl talking about some silly finishing school for microwavers they send their staff to in the greater Florence metropolitan area, the food they serve is not actually Italian. I would contend that their food is also not Italian-American just because it is the most soulless food I have ever seen (to be fair I have never been inside an Olive Garden, I only know what I have seen styled for TV commercials). So, while going into another place and ordering Tuscan Chicken is fine, expecting it to be what you saw in the Olive Garden commercial is insane and shows poor taste on your part.
There are no rules in food. No two dishes by the same chef will ever taste exactly the same. Heck, food tastes different at the end of service than it did at the beginning, let alone as the produce that makes it varies from month to month. As a result, names of food mean nothing. A cassoulet is a cassoulet whether it is duck or goose or partridge. Insisting it should be as you have had it before limits your exposure to new things. Either a chef has come up with his variation on someone else's dish and calls it what they call it, or he has named it something that means something to him or that he thinks will cause it to sell. There once was a guy in Sea Bright, NJ in the early nineties who sold a trio of grilled meats he called a Tribeca Grillé his hope being to invoke thoughts of the then-famous new restaurant in NY, and thought he was safe because tri was in one of the words and the dish had three components. I greatly enjoyed explaining to him at the end of his shift one night that the Tri in Tribeca is actually short for triangle (the Be being Below and the Ca being Canal).
The point is, names of food mean very little, so don't walk into a new place, order something with a name you are familiar with, and get upset that it is not what you expected. Celebrate the variation and appreciate each chef's different choice as he applies his touch to the dish. Appreciating a chef's handling of a dish is an opening to developing a regular dialogue with the chef and his place. When you have his attention, discuss the choices you see him making or not making, and explore his process. You will learn, and he will be flattered. This is the win-win situation of being a regular.
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