Why do restaurant salads taste so much better than any salad I try to make at home, even if I use the restaurant’s dressing?
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As someone with ~15 years in the restaurant industry, I’m going to disagree with all of these answers. In most cases, our produce is *not* better than what you could find at a Whole Foods or even a regular grocery store, and the techniques we use to make salads are no different than what you would use at home. Using a fancy commercial gizmo to annihilate heads of iceberg lettuce does not make that lettuce taste better.
The best answer I’ve heard for this question that (in my opinion) seems reasonable is that our sense of smell ruins our homemade meals to a certain extent. Essentially, as we prepare a meal, we become familiar with and desensitized to the odors of the component items, and by extension, the final product. We just get used to it, and it removes some of the magic. When you drive by a barbecue place, the smell is amazing, right? It smells SO good – it might make you salivate. I promise you that someone who has been working at that same barbecue joint for awhile does not have the same reaction.
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