When Eating Out

We don't go out to eat very much when we are home but when we do we stick to the tried and true. When travelling we like to try new places and stay away from the chains we have at home.
 

I'm like Ruth, I rarely eat out and when I do I prefer to go to one of the few old favorite restaurants in my area.

When in Rome I try to do what the Romans do, what choice do I have? :playful::eek:nthego:
 
We have our favorites, but we also enjoy trying some new places. One advantage to living in a major metropolitan area (Phoenix is the 5th largest in the US) is that we will never run out of new places.
 
I like "funky" restaurants....you know, the out-of-the-way places with lots of interesting things to look at. One place we went in Arizona had saddles for bar stools and the entire inside of the bar/restaurant was covered with $1 bills that people had signed. If a place is interesting enough, I'll excuse mediocre food (not BAD food, just mediocre food....)

I love restaurants on the water, be it a river, a lake or the ocean. Give me a beer, a plate of oysters and/or shrimp and a view of water and I'm in heaven. If there's a deck from which you can see a waterfall, all the better. I've eaten in a cave, on the Eiffel Tower, in an old sewer in Madrid turned bistro.

Frankly, there's very little I won't eat. I'm not a gourmet, I'm just a great lover of f-o-o-o-o-d.
 
We try as many new restaurants as possible. The San Francisco Bay Area is restaurant heaven for gastronomes, LOL. When eating locally, about half the time we will go back to a restaurant for something specific we have a yearning for, but the rest of the time we'll go somewhere new to us.

Friends think it's amusing we travel regularly in a big circuit around the Bay Area, just to visit restaurants elsewhere. We go for 3-5 days, and eat out twice each day.

The Napa Valley is actually not one of our favorite destinations, since we don't drink. We normally only go once a year. But there's been so many new openings, we'll probably go at least twice this year, because we couldn't fit in all the restaurants we wanted to try. On our spring 2018 trip, out of 12 restaurants, 5 were return visits and the rest were new to us.

We just returned from a swing through Sonoma County, one of our favorite destinations. Sonoma is much bigger than Napa geographically, so we generally divide it up into three different sections. Even so, driving distances can be long. This time we stayed at the south end and also hit the coast/Russian River area, which is always gorgeous this time of year. We did 6 new restaurants and 5 returns.
 
I also like unique places that are interesting with lots of things to look at but I also like a clean establishment.
We don’t eat out a lot but when we do we sometimes go to our favourite places and sometimes we try something new.

Mother’s Day we tried something new and it was disappointing. $25 dollar meals that were pathetic but that’s the gamble you take.
 
Before considering a new restaurant, I look up reviews on Trip Advisor or Yelp. If no one gives it more than 3 stars, I skip it. Of course, some get almost all 4 stars, but there always seems to be one or two that pan a place. They strike me as people that would not be satisfied of Jesus was the waiter.
 
debodun said:
Before considering a new restaurant, I look up reviews on Trip Advisor or Yelp. If no one gives it more than 3 stars, I skip it. Of course, some get almost all 4 stars, but there always seems to be one or two that pan a place. They strike me as people that would not be satisfied of Jesus was the waiter.
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I tend not to rely on reviews so much anymore for a number of reasons.

1. Person has different taste than I do.
2. Person has a grudge against owner/place
3. Person is a friend or relative
 

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