I’ve complained about the quality of the food being served at the studio cafeteria for a while now but a meal this week has forced me to vent again.
One of the options earlier this week was a traditional “Christmas” dinner for lunch. It was roast turkey with gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and steamed veggies. For food professionals, this shouldn’t be a difficult meal to make. All those items are classics and shouldn’t be a challenge to make in large quantities. How many decades has such a meal been prepared in countless kitchens?
I selected that for my lunch because I thought it would be difficult to mess up. I was wrong. At first, everything seemed ok. It looked great on the plate, generous amounts of gravy on moist-looking turkey, generous helping of mashed potatoes and made in-house stuffing. Then I started eating it. To be fair, the turkey, even the white meat, was pretty moist. In it itself should be applauded since the cafeteria loves drying the shit out of every single piece of meat they prepare. Unfortunately, the turkey was bland as a white piece of paper. It had no taste to it at all. It was as if they didn’t season or marinate the turkey with anything. Not a single salt crystal nor a flake of pepper. The meat was also covered in gravy but the gravy didn’t seem to have any flavour to it at all either. When was the last time you encountered a gravy that didn’t have salt in it?
The whole pile of turkey was just a hot gloop of tasteless and bland meat. It had nutritional value but it had no joy to it. The mashed potatoes were alright, at least they didn’t manage to screw that up. The stuffing, however, didn’t have any flavour to it either. It was like they just took pieces of bread and just baked it.
I didn’t finish my plate of food and when I went to dump the rest in the organics bin, a co-worker saw what I had and said, “Pretty damn bland, eh?” I replied it was shockingly bland and I was hoping it was just my portion of turkey but it turns out it was not. The whole mess of turkey they made that day was terrible.
The cafeteria finds new ways to disappoint me.