A friend once confessed that she was intimidated by the whole idea of doggy bags. Specifically, of asking a waiter–especially in an upscale restaurant–to wrap up the remnants of her unfinished-yet-delicious meal so she could cart them home.
Let me assure her, and any other misguided souls out there, that doggy bags are nothing to sniff at.
I speak from experience. I am, let me humbly suggest, the Doggy Bag King.
I have traveled the length and breadth of the Chicago-area dining scene, and I take home doggy bags more often than not. I have had leftovers wrapped to go at Le Francais, Carlos’, Trio and Tru. I have doggy-bagged at Charlie Trotter’s.
This summer, I got a doggy bag at Taste of Chicago.
Why? For one thing, in my line of work, doggy-bagging is a medical necessity; if I ate everything I ordered in the course of reviewing restaurants, I’d soon be sleeping in the garage, as it would be the only place with a doorway I could squeeze through.
For another, my mind still rebels at discarding what my mother would term “perfectly good”food.
And so I ask to have things wrapped up, and I’m not the least bit apologetic about it, either. Why should I be? As far as I’m concerned, I’m paying the kitchen a compliment: This stuff is so good, I’m willing to eat it again later.
At home, my refrigerator looks like an employee-lunchroom unit–bulging with polystyrene containers, foil swans and aluminum boxes that hint of adventure and potential danger. On our weekly Adventure Dinner Night, we don pith helmets and sift through the haul, searching for buried treasure. All of us have different notions of what constitutes treasure, of course; I’m as amazed by what my sons will eat as I am by what they won’t. (Dill-sprinkled salmon? Not a chance. Ten-day-old farfalle in congealed cream sauce? Gangway!)
“I think doggy bags are so cool,”says Scott Barton, general manager of the four-star restaurant Tru. “They let you remember, in a small way, how special that meal was the night before.
Barton concedes that Tru patrons seldom ask for doggy bags, but he has them at the ready–expensive, shiny silver bags emblazoned with the Tru logo.
“More than anything, we do a lot of wrapped petit fours, “Barton says. “After eating dessert, many customers decline the petit fours, so we wrap them up and say, `Possibly you’d like to enjoy these tomorrow.’ Not once has that been turned down.”
At Bin 36, just about anything goes, says wine director and partner Brian Duncan. “We provide room service for the House of Blues Hotel,”he says, “so anything on the menu pretty much can be carried out. Of course, when it comes to a really perishable item, we try to get some idea how long it’s going to travel, so we can package it appropriately.”
Are there some things that shouldn’t be carried out?
“I think that taking home fish is a mistake,”says Barton. “It’ll never taste the same.”
To that let me add that asking for the remains of the complimentary breadbasket is more than a little tacky, on the order of grabbing a fistful of mints or a Scouts Jamboree’s worth of matches on the way out.
But, Duncan concedes, if the customer asks for extra bread, he’ll provide it. “The whole idea in the service industry,”he says, “is that we find fewer ways to say no.”
