People Online Have Revealed 30 Overrated Foods That Are Not Worth The Hype And It's Quite Surprising

Let's go on this hyped food journey together

Maryjane

• Published in Interesting
• March 16, 2024

There is no doubt that food is a wonderful thing. In fact, it should be among one of the wonders of the world as there are a lot of cuisines with new ones emerging everyday.

It is no secret that food is one of the essentials of existence. Our bodies require nutrients that we need to survive and it can all be found in the foods that we consume.

However, it can also be a very powerful antidepressant! There are people who have a serious food obsession - and I mean that in a positive way.

There are people who don't really care much about what they eat but then, there are other people who enjoy cooking, experimenting, trying new recipes, evaluating nutrition values, and other activities. All of us, however, have certain cuisines, food varieties, or particular dishes that we adore and could eat nonstop every single day.

However, there are some things that we find inexplicable because we don't find them to be as tasty as they do! Someone posted a request for people to discuss their overrated cuisines on one of the Reddit communities.

These 30 responses may not all be considered "standard" cuisines, but they aren't very noteworthy either.

More info: Reddit

1. "Any foam or mousse from a Michelin star restaurant. Pigeon foam. Wtf did I just pay $200 to eat?"

2. "Mexican… it’s all beans, cheese, rice and tortillas presented in different ways"

3. "Our family has been restaurant investors for 40 years. High end French cuisine using offal or organ meats."

These dishes are pushed because the costs of these types of meats are very low and produce a huge profit margin. Also, the lack of experience with guests cooking these types of dishes for themselves mean very few patrons complain about authenticity. Usually a chef will throw his/her twist in the menu.

Most customers can tell the difference between a great pizza and a mediocre one. They'll remember a great steak - but a restaurant may be paying huge premiums to fly that Waygu in from Japan or for your Flintstone tomahawk. Whereas, a local butcher shop will gladly unload offal and such with glee due to low demand. You'd be surprised as to how little we paid for cow brains for example.

4. "British food"

5. "The damn banana-flavoured food and cherry-flavoured food."

Banana is delicious but banana-flavoured stuff tastes so fake and weird.

Cherry-flavoured food just tastes like chemicals and cough drops.

6. "Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant was s**t. It genuinely made me question everything I’ve seen him criticize and wonder “does this guy just have horrible taste?”"

7. "Deconstructed anything."

glennok added:

I once ordered deconstructed salmon cream cheese bagel from a diner, it was 5 dollars more. Was literally just all the ingredients for the regular bagel spread out on a plate. Never again.

8. "Insanely unhealthy Southern food."

As a life long resident of the South, a ton of popular Southern food is mediocre meat that is breaded and deep fried. The primary flavor is fried breading. Given astronomical rate lifestyle-related disease in the South, elevating food that is both super unhealthy and also uninspiringly flavored is just mindbogglingly.

There is some truly delicious and inspired Southern food, and some of that is healthy or at least ok in small quantities. However, most of what I hear people talking about as "great" Southern food is boring and super bad for you if eaten on a regular basis.

9. "Korean BBQ- If I wanted to cook my meal...I would just stay home & save my money"

10. "Gold-flaked cuisine"

11. "Greek cuisine. It’s just a bland version of Turkish food, but anything to do with Middle Eastern people is scary to some white people, so Greek food is highly overrated while Turkish and other Middle Eastern food is very underrated."

12. "Salt bae…."

13. "Fusion food. Overpriced and overrated and only occasionally done well"

14. "Chilean sea bass. Just awful."

15. "Steak. I call it the steak cult. For the life of me, I cannot understand it."

Don't get me wrong - I like a good steak. I eat it relatively often. It is sometimes exactly what I'm craving. And there's absolutely a difference between a good steak and a bad steak.

But the steak cult is way beyond that - people fetishize it as the 'best' meal you could ever have. On a menu, they'll be willing to pay double or triple the price for any other main dish, just because it's steak. They fall for every silly, cheap marketing trick in the book (Oh this one isn't just Angus, it's BLACK Angus beef - that'll be 30% more expensive; this one here is 5 million hour aged Wagyu beef and the cow was slightly cross-eyed - I'm afraid you'll have to remortgage your house to afford this prime slice of meat).

It's dumb. On an objective level, the complexity that goes into cooking a steak is far less than a really good risotto. The flavours are less complex, and you can simply do less; it's less innovative, and less overall impressive.

It's also completely decoupled from supply and demand - a saffron risotto should cost significantly more than just about any steak - saffron is actually rare, whereas cows are everywhere, and there's no shortage of even the 'prime' beef cows.

Plus then all of the fetishization around how you 'insult the chef and the meat' if you order it any other way than medium-rare....

Agh the whole thing is just infuriating. It's so wrapped up in last-century ideas of meat being rare and precious, and the more meat you ate the richer you were.

But I just want to shake people and say - do you really think that the $130 steak you just bought is four times better than any pasta dish or coq-au-vin or sushi or paella or pizza you've ever had? Seriously?

16. "Any of the artsy-fartsy stuff where they care more about appearance than taste"

17. "The most expensive dishes. “Yeah, man these diamonds sautéed in truffle oil and emerald dust are good, but do you have a cheeseburger?”"

18. "Lobster. It’s fine, it’s just not really worth it’s cost imo. I also like eating it in things rather than by itself. The lobster rolls I had in Maine were much better than lobster straight up."

19. "Not really a cuisine per se, but ‘shock food’"

You know those giant milkshakes with whole slices of cake and candy on top, or quadruple cheeseburgers with so much cheese it’s running everywhere. It’s just not practical/tasty and really only exists to get a cool picture

20. "Fancy cupcakes. Every ‘designer’ cupcake I’ve had has been incredibly dry. I just don’t get why they charge $5-$10 per serving, but the quality of the cake is below a Walmart sheet cake."

21. "American Italian. It’s heavy and repetitive."

22. "The Dutch are so crazy about their meat croquettes and frikandellel, but it's just frozen meat that has been mashed together."

23. "Sushi. It’s very pretty and I like the conveyor belt they sometimes use(more foods should have this), but those are by far the best parts."

24. "'Something for everyone' restaurants. Anywhere where the menu has a ridiculously extensive offering. If I’m flipping multiple pages and not even halfway, I just know everything is about to taste questionable."

25. "French. It's considered super fancy, but every time I've ever seen it, it looks disgusting and sounds like it only tastes good because of everything drowning in butter."

26. "'Free from' everything. B***h, I only have celiac. Before I got my diagnosis, I ate steak medicinally (I was severely anemic). Give me all the dairies and meatstuffs."

Absolutely overrated cuisine-type thing that I still love anyway? Mixology. Give me the intricate cocktail that requires table side presentation, and I'm a happy girl. I don't drink much (see above re: celiac, I was a beer drinker), so I'm down with one stupidly expensive cocktail at a nice dinner.

27. "Expensive Italian, a 30 dollar pasta is straight robbery"

28. "Cake"

ignoring coffee and booze, it'd have to be cake. people care more about how it looks and photographs than how it taste. it has it's own reality show.

29. "kid cuisine. The brownie usually comes out hard as a rock and the mac and cheese is watery"

30. "isn’t a cuisine, but ranch. everybody rants and raves about it, i even had a friend who put ranch on grapes. some ppl put it on EVERYTHING, which is fine because it’s not bad i guess? but idk i just never got the hype, i’m not the biggest fan of it lol"

Are you tired of the same old culinary hype that never seems to live up to the promise? People seem to be prepared to try anything once, from strange charcoal concoctions to the pumpkin spice obsession.

What happens if those much praised foods fall short of expectations? Well, it gets shamed online just like the ones in this collection.

Maryjane