You Won’t Believe These 20 Cheap Tricks Restaurants Use To Fool Us

Cheating.

Everybody cheats. But cheating which amounts to a white lie for someone’s good is okay. Cheating when it comes someone’s health which largely depends on the food they eat is and should be unacceptable.

Here are a few examples of the deceit we receive and should’ve known about.

1. Restaurants keep the temperature cool to make eaters eat more

Restaurants try to keep the ambiance dim and the temperature cool so that the customer feels like eating more and more warm food to feel warmer inside.

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2. The menu is designed to make us look at their most expensive dishes first

The designers of the menu have many tricks up their sleeves. There’s a separate science behind it.

For example, they place their most expensive dishes in the middle of the menu as they know we as consumers look at the middle of the menu before we bifurcate towards the two directions of the paper in our hands. Also, they place their slightly cheaper (yet pretty expensive) offering right next to its similar but very expensive cousin so that you end up paying a lot anyway.

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3. Restaurants don’t use currency symbols next to the price

Even though there’s really one currency throughout a country, it’s easier to spend more if there’s no indication of the value of the number in front of the item you’re about to order. That in turn, makes the restaurant wealthier.

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4.  They use haphazard, and many a times nostalgic sounding adjectives to their dishes

Crunchy, juicy, delicious are just gimmick words to entice your already hungry stomach to give your brain orders to get that dish right this moment.

Also, they sometimes add a family member to the food like, Grandma’s Pie has a heavy nostalgic value and it would do the same for the food because that trigger will make you order it.

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5. Restaurants introduce social attractions to make you think that you’ve been eating for a longer time

These distractions make you feel like you’ve eaten a lot and been there for a much longer time which works very well in the favor of the establishments, ergo, makes you pay more for less amount of food.

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6. They confuse you by offering ambiguous portion sizes

It’s confusing and boggles your mind, and rightly so. That’s what they want.

They offer you different sizes of portions so that you chose the slightly larger one which you think has more food that the smaller one and end up paying a much larger amount of money than that portion of food, which is hardly any bigger than the previous, deserves.

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7. While serving dessert, the white plates actually make us think that it’s sweeter

According to a research, people who ate desserts in dark colored plates said their desserts weren’t too sweet as compared to those who ate in the round, white plates. Restaurants very well know this. So to make you feel that you’ve been satisfied, they serve on light colored or white plates.

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8. They can make anything remotely green colored and sweet, pass off as lime soda

Our brain is wired to assume that a green drink has to have lime in it and if we are served sugar water added with just green color, we can very well imagine the taste of citrus in it.

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9. Making the stale food crunchy makes us believe that it’s fresh

The sound of the crunch is enough to make us believe that the food is fresh which restaurants and manufacturers take full advantage of.

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10. They add soda to the rice you order to make it seem more fulfilling

The baking soda makes your stomach expand making you feel fuller than you would’ve felt eating the same amount of rice without the baking soda. This is their way of saving serving you smaller portions at higher prices.

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11. They use corn starch paste to pass off as the cheesy white sauce

The cheesy white sauce pasta you eat so lovingly has nothing but chemically modified corn starch paste in place of your dear cheese sauce.

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12. The put soya chunks instead of chicken in momos

The next time you eat chicken momos, check whether it’s processed soya minced instead of the poor chicken you wanted to eat. It’s pretty easy to get and much cheaper than chicken.

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13. They deep fry everything so that the original taste and smell of it is masked

Frying is the answer to everything. Even to getting the rotten goods off the shelf for a few restaurants. You’ll never know, well until next morning.

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14. They add sugary dressings on your salad which makes it no healthier than a burger and fries combo

Tons of sugar adds as much calories to a dish as oil does. Maybe slightly higher and these dressings are made mostly of sugars. Are you really making a healthier choice by eating that salad?

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15. They offer you cheaply available fish and pass it off for the savory seafood delicacy you ordered

This happens a lot with fancy dishes like sushis but it may happen as commonly with your regular fish dishes. You may order something but restaurants buy the farm bred fishes which they get for cheaper prices and aren’t exactly wild as the menu might suggest.

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16. The meat you’re eating right now might be just glued together scraps of leftover meat

‘Transglutaminase’ is a substance that is used to glue the meat scraps together which almost looks like a big chunk of meat after finishing, as if the scraps have melted into each other. It’s quite a regular practice to sell the easily available cheap scraps as meat.

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17. The olive oil which is apparently healthier than other oils is seldom purely olive oil

It is said that olive oil is one of most trafficked oil around the world. Which brings it under scrutiny. It is sold in cheaper prices mixed with sunflower oil and 80% of what you get is sunflower oil instead of pure olive oil.

Now, is olive oil really a healthier choice?

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18. Those berries in your dessert you were promised on the menu? Might just be colored jelly

Most restaurants offer these tiny delectables as desserts with inviting names of fruits especially those colorful berries. The trap you might fall into is called colored and flavored jelly carefully incorporated in the muffins and other desserts which are adorned with strawberries or blackberries.

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19. Your food which looks deliciously red is colored with bug scales

Red is inviting. On the menu, in the food. It’s our mind that is at fault.

But the colors used to give them this color are made from the scales of a poor little female cochineal bug.

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20. Nothing they bake is fresh or hand-made. Nothing.

Any baked product, however, publicized as the freshest of the lot, never freshly made unless it’s made right in front of you.

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When’s the next time you’re eating out? 😛

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