Fresh-squeezed orange juice tastes quite different from juice from a bottle. A discerning diner would catch them at that immediately.

On a related note, few restaurants will disclose that they're using Asian crab meat rather than North American blue crab.

Along with OJ and salad dressing, iced tea can be a hot button issue. Real brewed tea or from the soda gun. And then there's sweet tea.

I think the biggest lies is considering a 300 mile radius source and advertising themselves as a locally grown or raised food serving restaurant. I find it hard to affirm food sources in Hartford, CT as LOCAL to Baltimore, MD (they are about 300 miles from each other).

"Homemade" could mean almost anything now. Same with "fresh". Meaningless. Fresh fish means previously frozen at least once and we hope it won't kill you. Anything decribed as "verbed to perfection" is annoying.

My mother used to swear that most scallops were really shark meat because they were too round.

Restaurants are now saying "house-made". Meaning someone in the restaurant touched it after it came from Sysco.

This is not a new thing -- heck, my family has been doing it for years. Dates back to when my dad and his siblings were kids. Their grandmother convinced them that she had a friend "Mrs. Smith" that helped her make pies. Yes, the very pies that you buy frozen in the grocery store.

The "too round" comment about scallops reminds me of when I lived in FL, where longtime residents said the "too round" scallops might be holes punched from stingrays. Stingrays instead of shark, but it's the same kind of scam, I suppose.

Does anyone know when "fudging" becomes illegal? Isn't there some point at which you're willfully misrepresenting what you sell?

Not that I'm interested in suing anybody, but it doesn't seem fair if advertisers have to be super strict about not mistating product claims, but restaurateurs can write whatever they want on a menu without having to deliver...

I'm not sure there's any basis to the shark/scallop thing, maybe just an urban legend. I had a friend who was a chef and he made up a special once that had a blood orange reduction sauce. Wow. Not really. He said the owner thought the blood oranges were too expensive, so he used OJ and grenadine.

Or the whole Organic movement. When you see something labeled 'organic' most people think "100% organic". When in reality, unless is specifically says 100%, it can be labeled as organic and have oh... as much as 30% by weight made up of conventional ingredients.

Our USDA at work. Always figuring out ways to hide the truth...

Truth or Dare in food labeling has also struck in Florida and elsewhere. Since it is so hard to distinguish grouper from other firm white fish, many suppliers are providing cheaper fish but calling it grouper. As a result, a number of restaurants have stopped serving anything as grouper because they just can't be sure. It's reassuring to know that there are still some folks with scruples.

Ah, azgal, thanks for bringing up a grandmother memory. Mine once put those Nestle (i think?) Softbatch cookies in a tin and tried to pass them off as homemade. Then, when busted, tried to deny the trickery and claim she was just looking for a nicer container for them.

I think some restaurants genuinely think their bread is homemade if they get the frozen dough and bake it themselves.
They can probably get by with calling it "homebaked" instead - technically true.

Another deception is the phony geographic labels, like New England clam chowder, which usually means just that it ain't got tomatoes. Try to get a "New York strip steak" in New York, where they are called shell steaks, at least when I was growing up there. I wonder how many of those "Idaho baking potatoes" come from Maine. My favorite, though, is the "Maryland fried chicken" found in many parts of the old British empire, indistinguishable from good old Southern fried..

I was drinking Cuba Libres with a Swiss chef in Panama once and I told him I was from Baltimore. No response. I threw in Maryland and his eyes lit up. Oh, like Chicken Maryland! Okay. Apparently it's a recipe in Escoffier and required learning for classically trained chefs.

What's with restaurants calling things "homemade" anyway? Does someone live at the restaurant? Did the chef make it at home before coming to work?

Federal Hill Jim, point well taken about geographic labels. When we were guests in Denmark I felt I had to try the "Danish" pastries, only to discover that there was no such thing in Denmark. You had to ask for "Wienerbrot," if I'm remembering correctly. In Vienna they are no doubt called something else again.

My friend who lives in FL was approached one day by a man who wanted to buy the barracuda he had just caught. The guy then informed my friend that he sells it to local restaurants as snapper..