Learn how to cook well at home and you can eat like a king seven nights a week

It doesn't even take that much effort to learn!

“[F]ine dining,” Zoe Strimpel writes at the Spectator, “is over.” By that she means “fine dining at restaurants,” or more specifically what she calls the “era of obsessive authenticity and sentimentality” that has marked the last roughly decade and a half of popular cuisine in the United States. And I think she might be right. This whole restaurant thing has just gone too far. Restaurant culture is just over-the-top and exhausting; it’s just too much. The haughty and complicated menus are exhausting; the insane, overworked chefs are just really weird and grating; the “restaurant scene,” once one of the prime indicators of a city’s economic health and vibrancy, now often feels boring and played out.

Most or nearly all of the shift may be due to COVID, which took a huge wallop out of the restaurant sector and sort of turned everything on its head. But I’m not so sure. I think people might be kind of done with it all. And you know what, it happens. Things come and go. Maybe the era of the cutting-edge, chef-driven, Netflix series-generating restaurant truly is coming to a close, and that’s not really a bad thing, because the whole culture was always kind of overthought and tiresome.

I myself really hate all the Mason jars being used as tumblers. I first encountered that at a celebrated southern restaurant nearly 20 years ago and it seemed quaint and delightful. Now whenever I see it I just think that they wanted to pay Mason jar prices for drinking glasses. It’s not fun anymore.

But here’s the good news: Just because all the good restaurants are going away doesn’t mean you have to stop eating well. In fact, you can eat even better than anything served as those places, all the time—and for pennies on the dollar of what you’d pay eating the same thing cooked by chefs with names like Duncan Gordon and Antonio Serrano. All you have to do is learn how to cook well. That’s it. That’s literally it.

This will require some adjustments for a lot of home cooks. You will have to move away from selecting recipes and dishes based solely on ease of preparation. American cooks in particular are obsessed with this style of food: They love “one-pot” cooking, and 10-minute recipes clipped from People magazine, and dishes that use pre-shredded carrots and pre-grated cheese and cans of condensed soup with odd little meat cubes in it. I’m not saying there isn’t good food to be had from easy prep; I’m just saying that you’ll never become a good cook if that’s all you want to do or all you can bring yourself to do. There’s a whole unfathomable world of good eating out there. Much of it requires some work. It’s worth it.

Still, I understand this can be an oddly tough pitch, even in an era where it’s never been more easy to (a) find and purchase high-quality food, and (b) prepare it in a clean, gleaming, well-appointed home kitchen. People bristle at the thought of being told to cook more; many times they positively balk at the idea that they should learn how to cook well. But it is insanely easy to learn how to cook good food these days. It requires exceptionally little effort. Most food is very cheap, even amid high inflation. Even really high-quality top-shelf food is relatively very cheap, at least compared to historical food prices. Equipment is also very easy to come by: Go to a thrift store and outfit yourself with a decent set of knives, a few cutting boards, some bowls and cooking pots and pans, a baking sheet: Done, you’re on your way for $25.

The options available to you when you’re “learning how to cook,” meanwhile, are myriad beyond belief. Historically most people, when they’ve wanted to learn how to cook, have been limited to just asking someone nearby for help, or else referring to, like, one single dusty cookbook with forty different recipes for beef and onions. Now the resources are limitless. I barely even have to list them, they’re so obvious. Go to the bookstore and pick out any one of the 900 cookbooks they have available on the shelf. Specially order any of the ones you want that they don’t have. Find specific recipes online with a nine-second Google search. Look up recipes and techniques on YouTube. Sign up for online or in-person cooking classes. Watch cooking shows. You can learn how to cook whatever you want, in any form, with just the investment of time and maybe a few bucks.

Do these relatively easy things and you can eat like a king. Take it from me: I did and we do. We eat exceptionally well in our house pretty much every night of the week. This has required some effort—but not as much as you might think, and certainly not enough to offset the considerable pleasures it brings about. Eating well is one of the great pleasures of life, never more so than when you’ve prepared it yourself. And with relatively minimal effort you can prepare more satisfying and rewarding meals than many if not most of the chefs at the most popular haute cuisine restaurants that cost $150 for a piddly little prix fixe meal anyway.

I’m not saying restaurants can’t be fun or valuable or worth it; they can be all of these things. Sometimes. Most of the time restaurants—even the less-prestigious ones—are very expensive and of lower quality than something you could make at home for much cheaper. It’s rare to find a restaurant that comprehensively justifies the cost. It’s comparatively easy to cook something at home and have it be well worth the effort. Do more of the latter. You will be happy you did.