I can’t stand going to dinner with a large number of people. I hate waiting for everyone to arrive, hate rounding up everyone outside smoking or yakking on their phone, and hate being crammed into a table in the middle of the restaurant. Plus, I detest splitting up the bill and I know the server just loves 15 seperate checks.
However, I reserve my special hate for Sunday brunch. The restaurant is short staffed because of the large number of call ins on Sunday. The restaurant is crowded with after church groups and visiting family members. The server is usually hung over after Saturday night.
Anyone else with me? Anyone really like these things?
I dislike them a little them only because you don’t get a chance to mingle when you’re at a restaurant. You’re stuck with the people seated near you or you become “My Husband’s Family” which can get pretty loud at these gatherings.
I also hate when one couple out of six is 1/2 hour late. Then you fill up on bread and drinks and it kind of destroys the main meal.
Oh my goodness, yes. I hate what you describe and I will avoid it whenever possible. There is an exception if the know the group is dependable – my book club steering committee is actually quite adept at going out to dinner as a group so they get a pass.
And brunch – brunch at restaurants should be outlawed. It’s like amateur hour for eating in public. I live in fear that I might need to eat lunch on a day that happens to be Sunday, and end up getting stuck with brunch. I’ve come around to the view that brunch is the dumbest dining concept ever.
From the thread title, I thought you might be talking about large dinner parties hosted in someone’s home, which I do enjoy.
Brunch sucks. In addition to being overpriced and way too much food, I gotta say…dining with a bunch of jacked up kids who just go out of “being have” in church is not my idea of a good time.
I love it. I love when a big group of friends gets together for a dinner party whether in a home or a restaurant. And if it takes a while to get our food because of the large crowd then so what? We’re all there to talk anyway.
We’ve started a Monday Night Dinner Gang (one week in, so far) and only 4 of us showed up, but we are inviting 8 or 9 at least with an open invitation on MySpace. We had such a short notice last time that we hope next time we’ll get a big group. It was fun!
As for brunch, well I don’t know what all you haters are talking about. I can’t think of anything more wonderful than socially accepted alcohol for breakfast! In fact, I think I’ll do that this weekend. Babies are with their daddies - I am heading out for Belgian waffles and mimosas with my man. I love it! And my favorite is when I go to a place where I can eat outside, but that will probably have to wait until it drops below 900 degrees and 300% humidity this year.
So to sum up: big dinner - love it! brunch - love it!
But I’m super social and really outgoing anyway. I’d drive some of you nuts.
Yeah, it is overpriced, and I have noticed that at a lot of places (not ALL, but a lot), the quality of the brunch food seems to drop down from the level of the rest of the week, I assume because the kitchen is cranking out the brunch food like an assembly line.
OK - I’ll give you the overpricing on brunch. It gets ridiculous at some places. I haven’t noticed a drop in quality compared to the regular menu at the (admittedly few) places I’ve been though.
I made a thread recently about my second thoughts for inviting 13 of my friends out to dinner for my birthday. I didn’t think it through until I invited everyone…I was worried about people not showing up, bad service, etc.
It ended up being amazing. Everyone showed up on time, our waitress was phenomenal, the food was great, and everyone had a blast. Most of the people tipped over the 18% added because she was great - no one’s beer was ever empty, and she knew the gigantic beer menu from memory and gave us some great recommendations. And she got me a free birthday shot. Food was piping hot for everyone and delicious. There was a slight “only talking to who you are sitting by” but people did sit by the people they knew more/had more to say to each other, so it worked out, and most of us went on to a bar afterwards anyway.
I probably won’t attempt that again but it did work out wonderfully this time.
Not to resturants, not to bars, not to anything at all will I enjoy attending if there are more than 6 people total in the group. After that it’s more hassle than it’s worth. I could never understand those people who invited 15 people to meet at a resturant or whatever. It’s like “Hey, we’re having a clusterfuck, would you like to be a part of it?”
I am generally a huge fan of going out to eat. I think it’s the pressure to eat enough to break even on the per-person charge. The last brunch I went to was $24.99 a head and I eat small quantities. I’d have to go back every Sunday for a month to get my money’s worth.
Alcohol for breakfast is always socially acceptable at my house too, but only on the weekends. As a matter of fact, hungover houseguests are often treated to being woken up by a rather cheerful Cluricaun casually making up some scrambled eggs and hashbrowns whilst sipping on a top notch bloody mary (the secret is an inch or so of Guinness in the bottom first) or if I’m feeling fey perhaps a mimosa.
Unless we’re at fishing camp, then it’s lukewarm cans of cheap beer with breakfast.
What counts as big? We have a group that regularly ends up with 8-12 people. Now we tend to eat at smaller restaurants, and rather unfancy. It’s almost never a problem if we straggle in over 20 minutes or so, take up 1/3 of the restaurant and eat and talk for 2+ hrs. It also helps that we’ve known each other forever, and the check usually just gets divided by the number of people there. My expensive meal this time will get balanced out by your glass of wine next time.
All my family gatherings are like this. I think it’s a Russian thing.
Everyone knows everyone and there is no problem of where you sit. The person hosting the party always picks up the bill. There is always alcohol. If someone is late, they tells us ahead of time and no one waits for them. When they do arrive, everyone tries to help him catch up on the food he missed.
It really depends on the people. I can see how it would suck if aren’t comfortable with the people you’re dinning with.
I don’t enjoy eating in any kind of group — I prefer to dine alone with a book — but I reserve a special hatred for eating in a large group. I just don’t get the point. From what I’ve seen in my 25 years in foodservice, if the group has more than 8 or so people, you really can’t “converse” with everybody. You effectively have two or more small groups that happen to all be sitting at the same table. Or in smaller groups, you get one guy who does all the talking, which I don’t enjoy either. I’ve never mastered the “art” of bullshitting, which seems to be the point of eating together. I’m somebody who, if I’m going to talk, I need something interesting to talk about. In all my years in restaurants, I’ve never been able to grasp how the same group of retired men can get together at the same table in the same restaurant, seven days a week, and yak yak yak for hours over breakfast and coffee. What are they talking about? What exciting events happened to them in the 16 hours since they last saw each other, that they can spend hours talking about them? The answer, AFAICT, is nothing. They’re simply “bullshitting”.
Of course, this is one reason I don’t think I’d last in a job that required going to meetings. I need to be doing something, not talking about doing something.
I also tend to eat more quickly than most people (probably due to working in restaurant kitchens, where most of my meals have been taken standing up, trying to eat them while they’re still mostly hot in between cooking customer orders), so any time I eat with a group I’m always finished eating long before anybody else, so then I get to sit there bored, watching everybody else slooooooowly working through their meals.
For me it depends on the group. If it’s a bunch of people I know and like (like my mother’s side of the family, or friends from school) I love big dinners. But I used to organize events for the student organization I was a part of and dinners were a pain in the ass. Trying to feed 50 people - herding cats doesn’t even begin to describe it.
