This Is What Bobby Flay Orders When Dining Out

Celebrity chefs are an obvious source of inspiration when cooking at home, but it can also help to follow their lead when dining out. Ina Garten's favorite restaurants in New York, Paris, and beyond might just help you plan your next vacation, for example. Gordon Ramsay's fiery hatred of a food trend can help you avoid dastardly ingredients like truffle oil. And Bobby Flay is a wealth of similarly actionable preferences, opinions, and tips, too.

The repeat hospitality operator and perennial food show host has an easily replicable habit when ordering from a menu: Flay typically gravitates toward anything served on crushed ice. "If I can get oysters or anything else served on ice, that's what I go for," he told Pop Sugar in an erstwhile interview. Yes, this is highly specific, but the principle is broadly applicable, even to oyster haters. Because Flay doesn't handle much crushed ice at home, it is particularly attractive in a restaurant setting, making it a better value proposition. And you can take a look at your own home cooking for absent elements to follow Flay's lead.

If every Sunday is spaghetti night and Taco Tuesday ticks in like clockwork with each passing week, you're better off avoiding close riffs on your own preparations when going to all the trouble of making reservations and paying inevitable restaurant markups. It just makes more sense to order things that you can't more easily replicate at home. The exception, of course, is when otherwise everyday dishes bring something different to the mix. If a restaurant's spaghetti is made with something like squid ink absent from your own pantry, for example, or you can't achieve the tacos' al pastor in your own kitchen, order away. As long as you're injecting some element of novelty into your order, you're getting your time and money's worth.

The one major, totally contradictory caveat to all of this is that you should also always follow your hungry heart. If you've slid into a buoyant banquette, drink poured, and you still just really have a taste for some old reliable item that you could recreate without so much as a Google search, go ahead and ask for it. When those intrinsic cravings hit, you're unlikely to end up as satisfied with anything else. And at least you won't have to do the dishes.