The first time you make one of your favorite home recipes and it is pointed out that it tastes more like something from a restaurant than home is always a bit disheartening. The seasoning isn’t as complex, the temperature isn’t as uniform, or the presentation is incomplete. That is almost never due to a special ingredient. That is due to using technique every step of the way. Restaurant chefs season more than once, adjust temperature often, and taste frequently throughout preparation, not just at the end. Start by making something you make frequently, and stop at each stage to taste and think about what has happened. It will help you understand how the salt, the acid, and the fat develop, rather than being added at the end.
A second consideration is temperature control. Novices will often heat a pan too low or too high, but not somewhere in the middle that balances browning with charring. I recommend turning your stove to medium, then letting the pan sit for a bit longer than seems reasonable before adding ingredients. You want to hear a moderate sizzle, not a crackling pop. If the sizzle dies out immediately, then the pan wasn’t hot enough; if smoke begins immediately, it was too hot. Understanding this helps to make cooking a science, even on terrible hardware.
Here’s a quick practice opportunity that fits in while making dinner: sauté a tiny bit of onions or mushrooms and just try to get a nice color and smell. Stir every so often, and let it get brown in some places. Then toss it with a bit of seasoning, and taste it. Do the same with another tiny bit, but maybe adjust the temperature or amount of salt after tasting the first. Doing this several times with cheap ingredients teaches you more than trying to follow some fancy recipe that doesn’t give you any information because it has 20 ingredients.
A very frequent error in this context is overcorrection. You add too many ingredients, sauces or garnishes to mask an underlying lack of flavor. Usually, the underlying problem is that something is underseasoned or underbrowned. So, when trying to correct this, go the other way. Brown the core ingredient again with nothing but salt and oil, and try to get as much flavor as possible out of that. Then, once that ingredient tastes amazing on its own, you can add other ingredients to augment the dish. They won’t be burying the lead anymore.
Over time, the food starts to taste more delicious before you take a bite, and the texture is more deliberate. You aren’t trying to recreate that restaurant exactly, but you are learning to adjust on the fly. Instead of salt, temperature, and time as a series of steps to follow, they become instruments to wield. And when you learn to wield them, the food tastes more like restaurant food. This is a skill that you can develop while still cooking at home.