>>24418754Not those. Even in cities like New York or San Francisco, it's...elusive to procure top quality tropical fruits basically outside of avocado, banana and occasionally rambutan for some odd reason. You're kind of shit out of luck if you're not in Hawaii or in Hispanic-HEAVY rural areas where they sell this shit at the side of the road.
I grew up in an affluent part of NYC where these things were accessible within walking distance. And yeah, you could get tropical fruits. Quite easily too. But not GOOD ones. Seriously. You were better off sticking to burger-typical stuff or trying to find a fruit juice.
Lord only knows how Europeans, with many many fewer flips, pacific islanders, and wetbacks cope with this.
>>24418367Not as accurate an assessment as you might think. It's a legitimate tourist attraction now to get driven up to a tropical fruit farm in the mountains, strap on a harness, and pick your shit yourself. Even if you're in a resort-marked SUV. People will still walk into a semi-jungle, pay 75 bucks for 5 mangos they spent 2 hours picking themselves, and leave.
>>24418414Erm, maybe hotel food is a bit of a rip off, but french toast has a HUGE fucking ceiling in terms of bang for your buck. Americans by and large, we only see anemic eggs or like instant omelette mixture. If you use the bigger European eggs with fresh yolks an aggressive neon orange, fresh brioche, good powdered sugar, homemade whipped cream, and bananas at the end of their green period, it's a fantastic dish. Bonus points for legitimate Vermont maple syrup and good mac nuts. Asian tourists are fucking anal about staying at places with these kinds of imported ingredients.
Bonus points for the strong likelihood of it being prepared by an actual Frenchman and his pastry staff. I'm not kidding. You're probably paying some of that money for breakfast prepared to exacting classical specifications. Oftentimes, many of these tropical island resorts will sport a rotating cast of classically trained French dessert and pastry chefs. These are young, ambitious guys who are worth the large salaries they are paid since they are not only real frogs, but take on the duty of training staff. They also benefit from an ongoing process in French cuisine whereby guys like Jean-Georges have acclimatized cooks of all stripes to the ingredients the chefs operating in Asia will often use. leave school, and go cook somewhere in Cap d'Antibes, St. Barths, or the Italian Riviera. Then progress to Bora-Bora, and from there, the rest of the Indo-Pacific or the far-flung outposts of groups like the Four Seasons or JW Marriott.
>>24418756the margins of rip-off are NOWHERE near as bad as they are at these resorts as if you walked into an NBA stadium or Disney World.
>>24419923It's the strat--you take what looks appealing to you in small portions and go back for more, targeting the most expensive or uncommon dishes of the things you liked from your first 2/3 plates and going in for more. Larry Ellison stocks the Manele Bay breakfast buffet with local sashimi, so I took like a dozen pieces of tuna and a few of amberjack. The Shilla in Seoul does fresh pho and dim sum, not to mention juices made of things like kiwi or ginseng, so you emphasize that. Before it closed down like a decade ago, the Westin in Vouliagmeni always had fresh-baked Greek breads (koulouri FUCK YEAH), so obviously go for that. And so on. Kiara took the fruits she sees least often at home. Perfectly understandable.
>>24420298I feel like if they had balls, they'd incorporate the gooseberries not onto the cheese plate but in a pasta sauce, jus, or even a fucking curry base. Hell, even using them as part of a sweet sauce to do whole fried fish in would work!
