Michael Pollen has a fun set of 20 food rules today on nytimes.com. My 3 contributions to the cause:

1. If a restaurant doesn’t specialize in mussels, don’t order them. I’ve had mussels at far too many restaurants where they’ve clearly been around for a while or were cooked to death. Instead go to BXL (Times Square) or Monk’s (Philly) where they do them right.

2. “Truffle oil” on a menu usually indicates that cheap, artificial-tasting stuff that a chef added to make a dish look impressive, but which often overwhelms the dish, and not in a good way. (See also Frank Bruni’s lament on the same subject.)

3. Ever since I discovered that Costco sells prime rib-eye steaks for about $10 per pound, I’ve virtually stopped buying steak from the grocery store — there’s just no comparison in taste. If I’m going to consume that much fat in one meal, it’s not worth it to have a sub-par steak. (And the healthy upside, if you can call it that, to the Costco steaks: since it’s more of an ordeal to go to Costco than the grocery store, and the steaks only come in 4-packs, I end up eating steak far less frequently than before.)