The great soy sauce ordeal

Is a really good product worth putting up with really lousy customer service?

For lunch today, I ordered Mongolian beef from one of our local Chinese restaurants. The meal was fine, but my pet peeve about most Chinese restaurants are those little soy sauce packets. The packets given out with to-go orders taste little better than salt water. Often, the same restaurants that give you the nasty, sub-par soy sauce with to-go orders have the good stuff on the table for dine-in orders. I assume there’s some sort of cost issue with the single-serving packets of good quality soy sauce.

I admit it — I can be a soy sauce snob. I usually buy Kikkoman, because it’s naturally brewed. You want a soy sauce that lists someting like “water, soybeans, wheat, salt” as the ingredients. If you see “hydrolyzed soy protein” or “vegetable protein,” it’s chemically processed instead of naturally brewed. Sometimes, the store brand of soy sauce will have both regular and naturally-brewed options, and if that’s the case I don’t mind buying a store brand as long as it’s naturally brewed.

Back in 2020, I learned about CinSoy, a small-batch soy sauce made in Cincinnati. I ordered a couple of bottles of CinSoy sauce and really liked it — it had a discernibly-better flavor than the Kikkoman. I used it sparingly, however; I…