When Chanita Chayaluk decided to open her restaurant and wine bar Taan in Chicago, she harbored a clear and deliberate vision: she wanted to showcase Thai cuisine in a different, more authentic light. Reflecting on the local culinary landscape, she noted that the first major wave of Thai immigration to Chicago occurred in the 1970s, leaving behind a legacy where a significant portion of the Thai food available in the city still feels anchored to that specific era. Opening its doors in September, Taan’s menu boldly stepped away from tired stereotypes, offering dishes like miang—a traditional Northern Thai dish prepared with fermented tea leaves—and a whole, deep-fried fish smothered in a rich fish-sauce caramel.
Yet, operating a dining establishment in the Midwest comes with its own unique set of cultural hurdles. Chayaluk points out that the ethos of "Midwest nice" runs deep, often encouraging restaurants to overaccommodate and bend over backward to appease the masses. During the early days of service at Taan, guests frequently made requests for alterations, ingredient substitutions, and custom accommodations driven by personal preferences and various dietary restrictions. According to Chayaluk, these constant demands would bog down kitchen operations and slow down service speed, creating a cascading effect that ultimately degraded the overall guest experience for everyone in the room.
Operating with a lean kitchen and a small staff, keeping up with the endless modifications proved nearly impossible. The tipping point for Chayaluk came when a customer ordered the green curry mussels but requested them "without the mussels." It felt to the chef and owner less like a fine-dining experience and more like managing a fast-casual assembly line. "It just felt like we were Chipotle," she recalls.
Recognizing that the custom-order culture was threatening both the kitchen’s efficiency and the integrity of the food, Chayaluk took decisive action. She implemented a strict substitution policy at Taan, taking to Instagram to explain to patrons that foundational ingredients such as fish sauce and shrimp paste form the absolute fabric that defines their cuisine. Consequently, these core components could not be removed from any dishes that naturally included them.
This culinary friction points to a broader, growing tension across the modern restaurant industry. A decade or so ago, asking for menu substitutions was generally frowned upon and widely derided as bad dining etiquette. Recently, however, restaurant operators across the country report that substitution culture is bubbling back up—and returning in full force.
A complex swirl of cultural and economic factors has driven the industry to this tipping point. The proliferation of fast-casual lunch slop bowl spots has thoroughly primed modern consumers to expect a granular, highly detailed level of customization with every order they place. Meanwhile, the massive popularity of books like Unreasonable Hospitality has further intensified the old-school "customer is always right" mentality within the service sector. At the same time, the rapid rise of social media influencers entering the food-review space has made any public criticism from a restaurant—such as a business choosing not to honor a specific dietary preference—ripe for an immediate, viral online takedown. Couple all of those pressures with the brutal economic reality that it is extraordinarily hard to keep an independent restaurant afloat in the current financial climate, and the result is predictable: numerous operators are giving in, either by capitulating to endless specific requests or by fundamentally altering their menus altogether, a phenomenon also observed in the ongoing trend of the great de-spicification of restaurant menus nationwide.
Despite these intense industry pressures, a growing number of establishments are standing their ground. Alongside Taan in Chicago, New York City’s Ha’s Snack Bar proudly announces right in its Instagram bio that everything on its menu contains fish sauce, signaling a refusal to compromise its culinary identity for the sake of mass appeasement.
A similar battle lines are being drawn in Phoenix, Arizona, at Lom Wong, where substitution and modification requests have ramped up significantly following a wave of national attention and critical acclaim. Chef Yotaka “Sunny” Martin received prestigious recognition from the James Beard Awards last year, and the restaurant was honored with a Michelin Bib Gourmand designation in August. Following those accolades, the restaurant experienced a shift in its clientele.
Alex Martin, the chef and co-owner of Lom Wong, explains that the influx of new diners brought a higher frequency of guests picking dishes apart. Customers began asking the kitchen to modify traditional preparations or expressing confusion over the restaurant’s service style, particularly questioning why dishes were not being coursed out in a traditional European fashion. There exists a deeply ingrained European distinction of what an award-winning restaurant is supposed to look like, meaning people frequently equated that specific level of recognition with a formal, white-tablecloth dining room. "We were just like, ‘Well, that’s not who we’ve ever been, and it’s never what our restaurant will ever be,’" Alex Martin says.
Much like Taan, Lom Wong turned to social media to clearly set expectations with the public before they even stepped foot through the door. The restaurant explicitly stated that it would not make substitutions simply to make a dish more familiar to Western palates, and warned diners that certain choices might intentionally differ from Western expectations—such as beef featuring natural gristle or fish being served whole.
For the team at Lom Wong, Sunny Martin serves as the guiding light of cultural context. The kitchen carefully considers whether changing a component of a dish would fundamentally compromise its cultural integrity. While compromises are made where appropriate—for instance, allowing a mango salad to be ordered with the shrimp placed on the side—the restaurant flatly refuses to remove core elements like beef or shrimp paste from dishes that necessitate them.
Chayaluk takes a remarkably similar approach at Taan. To accommodate diners with genuine dietary needs without ruining the kitchen’s workflow, the restaurant always keeps a dedicated vegan and gluten-free option on hand—currently a fried rice dish that Chayaluk describes as a catchall for those who cannot consume other items on the menu. She emphasizes that this option is crafted to be substantial and genuinely delicious. It is not merely an appetizer or an afterthought hastily thrown together.
Staff members at both Taan and Lom Wong are actively encouraged by management to uphold these firm boundaries. Both Chayaluk and Martin emphasize that these policies are just as much about protecting their kitchen and front-of-house staff’s peace of mind as they are about ensuring strict quality control for the diners.
While implementing these policies has inevitably generated some minor backlash from inflexible diners, the proactive expectation-setting at the start of the meal—and beforehand through transparent social media outreach—has for the most part been received quite well by the broader public.
The strategy relies on kindness combined with unwavering firmness. When addressing guests who request disallowed modifications, staff frame the policy with a simple message of respect. "The way we explain it to guests is kindly saying we respect your preferences, but they’re your preferences," Martin notes, adding that staff then focus on gently steering those diners toward menu items that naturally align with what they are looking for.