Chefs Admit It: 6 Restaurant Dishes They Avoid Ordering Completely

Ever wondered what culinary professionals really think when they scan a restaurant menu? These folks spend their lives mastering the art of cooking, understanding ingredient quality, and knowing exactly what happens behind those swinging kitchen doors. Turns out, their insider knowledge means they skip certain dishes entirely when dining out. Some menu items raise red flags for freshness concerns, others scream inflated prices for minimal effort, and a few simply can’t live up to the hype no matter how fancy the restaurant claims to be. Let’s get real about what chefs are silently judging on your table.

Daily Specials That Seem Too Special

When executive chef Alberto Morreale from Farmer’s Bottega in San Diego goes out to eat, he never orders the specials, explaining that some restaurants create their daily specials based on ingredients about to expire or items they’re trying to get rid of faster. The special board might sound enticing with its exclusive limited-time offerings, but here’s the thing: it’s often a clever way to move inventory before it goes bad.

Chef Gordon Ramsay told Cosmopolitan that specials are there to disappear throughout the evening, and when restaurants list ten specials, that’s not actually special. Think about it logically for a second. If a restaurant truly has that many amazing off-menu creations ready to go, why aren’t they confident enough to put them on the permanent menu? The answer often lies in economics rather than culinary inspiration.

Well-Done Steak Orders Get the Worst Cuts

According to Anthony Bourdain’s article in The New Yorker, chefs have a tradition called “save for well-done,” where meat they would otherwise throw out is saved for customers who order a cut well-done, since overcooking meat can disguise toughness, bad smells, or otherwise unsavory elements while saving restaurants money. This practice has been an open secret in professional kitchens for decades.

More than a third of customers at LongHorn Steakhouse prefer their steak medium-well or well done, which means this isn’t exactly a rare request. One of the primary reasons chefs prefer not to cook steaks well-done is the loss of flavor, as the steak cooks longer and loses more of its natural juices and fats which carry much of the meat’s flavor. Most seasoned chefs see requesting a premium ribeye cooked to oblivion as missing the entire point of ordering quality beef in the first place.

Anything Labeled with Truffle Oil

Here’s where things get genuinely shocking for most diners. In recent years, truffles have become something of a fad in restaurants, but most truffle oils actually contain no truffles at all. Pastry chef Saura Kline from Local Jones in Denver advises to never order anything with the word “truffle” in it, because unless you’re at a high-class fine-dining restaurant, this usually means truffle oil which is very rarely made with actual truffles and tends to be used aggressively while immediately increasing the price of any dish regardless of its actual quality.

Chef Daniel Patterson explained in the New York Times that most truffle oils on the market are actually made only of olive oil and lab-made compounds that mimic flavors found in real truffles, with synthetic truffle oil lending its flavor almost exclusively to a chemical called 2,4-dithiapentane. Martha Stewart made it clear on the “Today Show” that she would never use truffle oil, describing it as synthetic, fake, and a hideous thing. So that extra seven dollars you’re paying for truffle fries? You’re basically getting petroleum-based chemicals drizzled on potatoes.

Monday’s Fish Special Might Be Days Old

Anthony Bourdain wrote that if you like four-day-old fish you should be his guest, revealing that chefs order seafood on Thursday night to sell over the weekend when the restaurant is busiest, with the goal of completing that entire seafood order by Sunday night since there are no weekend fish deliveries. This warning became so famous that it practically entered dining folklore.

Honestly, though, this advice needs an update. In 2016, Bourdain retracted that warning in a video, stating his new position as “Order that fish on a Monday,” explaining that the restaurant landscape had transformed and food standards had risen dramatically with diners expecting much higher quality across the board. Chef Thomas Pfeifer, Executive Director of Food & Beverage at Mattos Hospitality which includes Michelin-starred Estela, contends that in modern times it’s okay to order fish on Mondays or any day, as they source for each day of the week and try to maintain daily inventory levels to keep things as fresh as possible. Still, if you’re not at a coastal restaurant known for outstanding seafood, you might want to be cautious.

Chicken Breast Cooked Any Style

Executive chef Ryan Ososky of The Church Key in West Hollywood confides he will order almost anything when dining out but never chicken because it tends to be overcooked at most restaurants, and according to the Food Network’s website, chefs avoid ordering chicken in restaurants for many reasons including overinflated price and lack of originality. Chicken has become the safe, boring default option that restaurants can stretch across multiple menu items.

Chef Luke Shaffer notes that the odds aren’t in your favor when ordering chicken at a restaurant as it may come out “sawdust dry,” and most restaurants have something far more interesting to offer so you can save the bland, boring chicken breast for when you’re at home. Restaurant chicken has a reputation among chefs as a safe but dull order, and many rarely choose it unless the restaurant is famous for a particular roast bird. The markup is astronomical, the execution is typically mediocre, and you’re wasting your dining-out budget on something you could easily nail in your own kitchen.

Pasta Dishes Drowning in Cream Sauce

Pasta dishes at non-Italian restaurants are often overpriced especially if you calculate the cost of ingredients, and executive chef Marcus Mooney of Seattle Sutton’s Healthy Eating has high standards for pasta and rarely orders it at restaurants, recalling his time at an Italian restaurant group in Chicago where they charged $20 for a plate of rigatoni with marinara sauce when the cost was $1, saying he can’t bring himself to pay that much knowing what’s involved and how it’s prepared, only ordering pasta if he knows they do it well or make it to order.

Executive chef Brian Motyka of Longman & Eagle in Chicago says the number one main dish he never orders at a restaurant is any sort of risotto, explaining that most of the time risottos are pre-cooked, heated up, finished with cream which is a big no, and then over-cooked beyond the al dente texture that you’re looking for. The problem isn’t pasta itself – it’s that restaurants know they can charge premium prices for ingredients that cost them almost nothing. Those heavy cream sauces? They’re often masking mediocre execution or reheated components that should have been served fresh.

So there you have it. Next time you’re scanning a menu, maybe think twice before ordering that truffle mac and cheese special with a well-done steak on the side. Your wallet will thank you, and honestly, so will your taste buds. What dishes do you think deserve a spot on this list? Have you ever ordered something that made you wish you’d listened to chef wisdom?