Il Treno, with the dietitian's recommendation...

 

A few years ago, Il Treno, while not one of my favorite online restaurants, offered a viable alternative in the Buda-Pest-Óbuda triangle. As I alluded to in my budapestaurant.com post, if I were to write about Il Treno, it would most likely be about how the band I hate most in the city, after Jókai utca 6 and the editorial office of Népszava, has set up shop here. I didn't plan on more than 150-200 characters of swearing about Il Treno, but then my friend Ákos - who gets just as excited when he sees a salmon fillet on a bed of lettuce as I do - messaged me on Facebook and sent me a link that prompted this post. A link, with the text, to check it out immediately because I'd never seen anything like it. And indeed, I hadn't…

LOL. Feel free to review this list again, because this menu was compiled by a dietitian. This is exactly what I talked about in this post. Sheer nonsense pours over us from everywhere. Self-proclaimed messiahs, doctors bought for a penny, and "experts" sign studies that go against all common sense and scientific claims, but they sign them, give their names and faces to them, because they have to make a living, and if they don't, another will. This topic would be worth several pages of study, but I'd rather tell a story that reveals how the so-called profession stands behind products and companies within its own field, promoting them and selling themselves to the maximum.

There's a guy who was studying to be a dentist back in 2007. One time we were talking about how cool it would be to appear in a toothpaste commercial once he got his diploma. You know, those commercials where they explain how great Blend A Med, Aquafresh, and Colgate are, and that 9 out of 10 dentists recommend them. I asked him which one he thought was the best and whose commercial he'd most like to be in. He said he didn't care, as long as he was in one. He'd say any of them were the best because appearing in such a commercial could jumpstart his career, not to mention there's almost no difference between them, the only difference being who has a better marketing team.

 Something like this dietitian-recommended menu is similar, only this one is completely professionally unfounded and utterly unacceptable. For the girl, it's good because her face is prominently displayed on the Il Treno website, gaining her recognition, and for Il Treno, it's good because a dietitian stands behind their food, creating the impression that professionals are behind their meals and care about their guests. It's a perfect example of a typical mutually beneficial marketing situation. How professionally acceptable this menu is for the young lady, and what her reputation will be within the dietitian profession, is another question. In life, we all weigh everything. In this case, professional credibility on one side and a printed picture of a face on the other. Everyone can decide for themselves which way the scales tipped in this instance.

Recommending pizzas with 1592 and 1426 calories, pasta with 1327 calories, risotto with 890 calories, and of course the indispensable vanilla pancakes with their 419 calories, so what should I say about this...

Just for comparison, a double Whopper menu at Burger King (which is their largest available hamburger) with medium fries and a medium regular coke is 1356 kcal. McDonald's flagship Big Mac menu, with similar-sized fries and a drink, is 1023 kcal. So, the calorie value of Burger King's heaviest menu is still more than 300 calories less than the dishes recommended by the Il Treno dietitian. Madness…

I'm not exactly sure, but it seems to me that a dietitian implies some kind of nutrition expert whose job it is to educate people about healthy and proper eating, which doesn't really include pizzas and a calorie intake during a single meal that equals a grown woman's daily calorie needs. But maybe I'm wrong, so I checked what Wikipedia says about the term dietitian.

"A dietitian is a professional whose task is to cure in patient nutrition, furthermore to provide advice in various areas, as well as prevention, meaning to popularize modern balanced nutrition."

I'm writing this article in a café, and the Japanese tourists next to me don't understand why I'm crying... (I hope they're not broadcasting). I can't write any more about this because the visual experience caused by the picture above really says it all. It looks pretty silly to have "recommended by a dietitian" and "Asparagus pizza 1592 kcal" written 3 centimeters apart.

Now that Il Treno won't be mentioned in budapestaurant.com 2, I'd like to take this opportunity to explain what else my problem is with the restaurant itself. I like this blog because if I just wrote a simple complaint letter, best case scenario, they'd read it, laugh at it, and then send it to the deleted messages, worst case scenario, they'd print it out and wipe their ass with it. I'm starting to understand the exceptionally important role of the Tékozló Homár blog in the online community and its controlling power over service providers.

If I wanted to summarize the essence briefly, I would just write about poppy seed noodles brought out with sour milk, a 2 to 2.5-hour wait for food, and the most rotten delivery people who tried to shortchange me with the change on more than one occasion. What happened was that during one order, I had been waiting for my food for an hour and a half when I called customer service to ask where my order was after an hour and a half. They reassured me that the delivery person was already on their way and would arrive in minutes. Just so you know, so no one else is caught off guard, "in minutes" in Il Treno language means 40 minutes. The food arrived a little over 2 hours and 10 minutes later, and the delivery person tried to apologize by wanting to give me change from 2,000 forints when I had paid with a ten-thousand-forint note. And then, the main course was cold, the poppy seed noodles were sour due to rotten milk, and I'd bet large sums of money that those noodles weren't freshly made, 2-hour delivery or not.

I'm not really a snitch, but this was too much even for me, especially since it wasn't the first time this had happened. I subtly indicated through Netpincer.hu that I was grateful for the cooperation, which, from my side, was now over. I didn't report the delivery person, even though they tried to pull a fast one with the change on more than one occasion. The next day, I received a call apologizing and saying they would call me the next day to discuss how we could resolve this regrettable inconvenience. I said yes, they could call, thanks. Well, they haven't managed to contact me since, which I'd like to thank them for with this post.

I lingered a bit longer on the Il Treno website, and it was damn well worth it, because I found treasures like the "Dietitian Answers" section, where you too can confidently ask your questions, just as others have already done....

This is it... Just the last sentence...

And you get this because I had to watch this goddamn crap too.