A Bad Taste in Your Mouth

by Mark R. Vogel

Sometimes though, there's nothing wrong with the food. All cooks, from the amateur to the professional must remember that everyone's taste is different. A chef is not a tailor. A tailor customizes your suit by fabricating it to your exact measurements and body profile.

A chef cannot take a bio-chemical analysis of your taste buds and a psychological profile of your food sensitivities. A chef is more of an artist following his own innate creative proclivities. He can produce a masterpiece and there will still be some people who just don't like the painting.

Finally, sometimes it's the food recipient whose brain is a couple tacos short of a combo meal. One day I witnessed a man returning a ham sandwich at a fast food restaurant because there was some visible fat on the ham.

He stated his diet restricted him from eating fat. Hello. Anybody home? If you can't consume fat, why the hell are you ordering a ham sandwich, in a fast food restaurant of all places?

But the ultimate dread of people disliking your food, is that the fault lies squarely in your cooking skills. That the problem was not due to individual variation in taste or some quirk in the food rejecter but something you did. Yikes! What do you do then? I'll tell you.

You muster up the fortitude to put your ego on the shelf and you strive to learn what you did wrong and how to correct it. You don't throw a tantrum like emotionally-challenged-chef. You shrug off the fact that your puttanesca sauce wasn't a hit and move on with life. That's what you do.

And what if you're one of the poor souls gagging on the grim food while the host is inquiring if you like it? What do you tell them? Well, the truth of course.

Put on your best smile and cheerily reply: "I've never tasted anything like this!" Then ask them how they made it, and then change the topic.