Eating Out: Cafés, Trips, Guests

Grilled meat or fish, vegetables, salad. These are available on almost any menu, and you usually don’t need to ask for anything special.

There are two requests waiters hear every day: replace the side dish with vegetables and serve the dressing separately. Neither causes surprise or an extra charge in most places.

Have the bread basket removed from the table right away, rather than saying “I won’t have any for now.”

Choose the closest option in terms of ingredients and remove what you don’t need. A burger without the bun is a patty with vegetables. Pizza without dough doesn’t exist, but the same establishment will usually have salad and meat.

If there is no choice at all, it is not a disaster. One meal does not undo a week. There is no need to compensate afterward: have your next meal as usual and keep your usual overnight break.

What is worse is arriving at such a place hungry and eating everything in sight.

Eat before you leave. This solves nine cases out of ten.

A well-fed person at someone else’s table calmly chooses meat and salad and doesn’t think about the pie. A hungry person will eat the pie and then berate themselves all evening — and this is not a matter of character.

There is no need to explain your eating plan to the hosts. A plate of meat and vegetables does not look strange and usually raises no questions.

Things that do not require refrigeration or reheating: boiled eggs, hard cheese, canned fatty fish, cured meat without sugar in the ingredients, avocado, cucumbers.

On the road, the main danger is not the lack of suitable food but the lack of any food at all. After six hours without food, you will make your choice at a gas station, and it will be a poor one.

The guideline for fluid intake on the road is the same: about two liters a day, more in hot weather.

With insulin-treated diabetes or medications that carry a risk of hypoglycemia, delaying or skipping meals while traveling is dangerous: discuss the schedule and doses with your doctor in advance.

With current or past eating disorders, strict rules for behavior at someone else’s table may increase anxiety around food — discuss the approach with a specialist rather than following a list.

Almost every cuisine offers meat or fish with vegetables — the only question is what to ask them to leave out.

In Georgian cuisine: shashlik, meat on a ketsi, cucumber and tomato salad, herbs. Have the lavash removed from the table. In Japanese cuisine: sashimi instead of rolls, seaweed salads without sweet dressing. In Italian cuisine: steak or fish, grilled vegetables, salad — instead of pasta and pizza. In Asian cuisine: meat and vegetables stir-fried in a wok, but without teriyaki sauce and without rice or noodles.

The general rule is simple: look in the hot meat and fish section, not in the side-dish and appetizer sections.

Keep it short and do not explain your eating plan.

Useful phrases: “replace the side dish with vegetables,” “dressing on the side,” “without breading,” “without sauce,” “no bread, please.” These are heard every day, and no one is surprised.

What you should not do is talk about low-carbohydrate eating and ask them to recalculate the dish. It takes a long time, raises questions, and usually changes nothing.

Keep this conversation brief: beer and sweet cocktails use up a full day’s carbohydrate allowance, while dry wine and spirits without sweet mixers contain little.

But there is a second part that people forget: alcohol reduces control over eating. It is most often after a couple of glasses that people eat what they had not planned to, and the evening ends in a lapse.

So the practical guideline is not so much “what to drink” as “how much.” And it is better not to start drinking on an empty stomach just to keep company.