You skip the salad, that’s just filler.
Taste.
Can I assume you’re just joshing here.
Like someone else posted, if I wanted to eat and run I’d go through a choke n puke drive thru.
My absolutely favorite restaurant meal of all time was at Providence restaurant (West Hollywood), and the service was impeccable. We were never bothered, but we also never had to call for anyone. They were simply there as if they had ESP. I think it’s like Helen Mirren’s line in Gosford Park – “I know what they want before they know it. I’m the perfect servant.” It was like that. And so cossetting.
When I go out to eat it’s like @puzzlegal said, a combination of taste and something I can’t make at home. So sometimes that’s just a great pizza.
i have a problem that my dad directly caused … now when I was a kid we didn’t go to too many sit-down restaurants because my dad is /was a semi-pro cook but when we did you couldn’t get anything you made at home (wanna drive my dad nuts go to a restaurant and order cereal … it was to the point where he couldn’t watch Seinfeld because of the scenes where he eats cherrio-s at the diner) …
so something like 70 percent of Dennys etc was off the menu so what we mainly ended up ordering was stuff that only we liked or was extravagant and too time-consuming/expensive to make at home …
the problem is I tend to eat these huge expensive complicated meals … even at burger places …drives the fam nuts "can’t you just have a simple #6 without it taking 20 minutes to make and costing 30 dollars ? and I’m like “nope” if I wanted just a plain cheeseburger I could have stayed at home
Excellent.
I hate being bugged while I am dining. Especially in a high end establishment.
My bitching about it his entire life may be why he went with his set up. There is a specialty company that provides the equipment. It is aesthetically pleasing and doesn’t come across a hokey or chintzy.
He has specific tables in the corners in the dining room that also have privacy curtains for very intimate dining.
For me it was Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. Case in point, I dropped a fork and by the time I’d bent down to retrieve it and straightened back up the replacement was in its place, left of the plate and there was nobody around… Cue eerie music.
Another, most original I order for taste. Although that often coincides with health, because I like fish, grilled or baked, but don’t like cooking it at home much, and sometimes I just want the clean taste of a few tomato slices or some cottage cheese as a side instead of something greasy/fatty/sugary/vinegary
I’m the same. I can eat healthy at home for the other meals in the week.
Nutrition comes in second place if I’m choosing between 2 equally tasty options, price only a consideration if an option is ridiculously over priced relative to other options.
I brought this up with my sister, and she came up with a different answer: ingredients.
She’s a ‘soapy’ cilantro taster, intensely dislikes a couple other relatively common ingredients, and is allergic to tomatoes. So she starts at the top of the entree list and reads each description until it mentions one of her no-nos, then jumps to the next choice and so on. She’s said if she’s lucky there might be two or three dishes she can actually chose from – and then it becomes a matter of which she hasn’t had for the longest time.
The older I get, the cheaper I become. I don’t eat out much anymore because my home cooked meals are often as good as the restaurant equivalent, for a fraction of the cost. And, I can dine at home wearing nothing but underpants, which restaurants generally frown upon. (I’d definitely frequent a restaurant that was Roman-style recline & dine, underwear attire).
But, on rare occasion I do enjoy the ambiance of a nice restaurant with a relaxed atmosphere and non-rushed service.
I’ve also gone back to basics with what dishes I prepare at home. Realizing I enjoy the taste of liver (for example) nearly as much as T-bone steak (for example), I typically make liver & onions instead of taking out a second mortgage for steak.
I’d think a restaurant call-button app could be developed inexpensively that was cost-effective for the average restaurant and designed simply—just flashing the table # on the app of diners wanting assistance.
I’m sure such systems exist. And they will be ubiquitous in the future, but it’s still not a simple system to introduce to a currently operating restaurant.
Where is this app that’s flashing a table #, is the restaurant going to throw out their current app to get this capability, or are the servers going to watch this on their own phones that they’re texting on instead of paying attention to customers? Who pays to replace these buttons when they get food spilled on them unintentionally or otherwise? Or are they just portable devices that keep disappearing like salt shakers and silverware?
It’s one thing for a large restaurant with a steady source of money available for such upgrades, but most restaurants are marginally profitable if profitable at all and someone has to dig into their pockets to pay for this, then have the patience to train what may be some very low skilled employees to use the system. Any change made in the average restaurant can prove to be expensive in time, money, and the loss of customers if it doesn’t work perfectly.
I select the restaurant based on how much I want to spend, and generally don’t order the least or most expensive items.
After that it’s mostly Taste, although I do normally avoid the triple bacon heart attack burger, with a side of bloomin’ onion. I’m not 22 anymore, I can’t eat that way and not feel awful after.
I’m not familiar with the restaurant business, but when I was in private medical practice we used a practice management and billing app that had a free add-on that showed when a patient checked in, when they were in a treatment room and when they checked out. It showed on the desktop computers and any mobile devises logged into the app. Software updates were done automatically. The patient whereabouts was input by the receptionist. In the case of a restaurant, the input would be done by the diners, and only to request assistance. I envision the button integrated into the table, not portable.
Even better than a simple call button, I’ve liked the couple of restaurants I’ve dined at that had mobile tablets at the tables with which to place orders from the online menu (and also call for assistance). This allows you to order at your leisure and frees up waitstaff time. I believe tablet ordering at your leisure probably encourages more orders, so it would be a win-win for the restaurant.
Coincidentally I am even more familiar with the healthcare industry than the world of restaurants. The advances in this kind of technology are fantastic to see. But the industry has a similar problem with the private doctors offices. This is a major reason those small operations are disappearing. An individual doctor is a small business with only one source of income and increasing costs imposed by regulation and their largest payment source, i,e. insurance companies. Getting these small offices to pay for new computer equipment and software is like pulling teeth (and most dentists are still in small private practices with all the same problems). It is becoming much easier now for the doctors to use virtual services that remove most of the hardware costs for them and make the software available as a service as well. But getting private practices to simply pay the price for access to patient information repositories faces a lot of resistance. I don’t blame them, they shouldn’t have to pay for that.
So the same problem exists in both types of business based on the scale of the operators. It’s clearly favorable to take advantage of new technology, but at the edge of the profitability line it isn’t always easy to upgrade. I think you have identified something about customer service expectations, restaurants on average are much closer to the profitability line or below it than doctors are, so it would seem restaurants would be slower to change, but I get the feeling at some point soon restaurants will make the change in favor of customer service expectations faster than the small doctor’s offices. Doctors just don’t think about their patients as customers to be served.
Price and taste - it doesn’t matter how tasty a place is supposed to be if I can’t afford to eat there, or my friends can’t afford to go there with me. An expensive meal can be worth saving up for for a special occasion but price is always going to be a factor.
Nutrition counts in the sense of needing good veggie meals for me, and for some others could count in some low-fat options, maybe. But I don’t need them to be healthy, exactly. I’m not eating out at restaurants for my entire dietary needs.
The venue makes the biggest difference to me TBH. I guess that’s part and parcel of what pkibites said about service. There are a couple of restaurants I adore mainly because they are in beautiful art deco buildings that make you feel like you’ve stepped into an episode of Poirot, and sitting there to eat your dinner is just not something you can get at home. It’s lucky that the food is also very good, and happens to be not very expensive for London.
There’s another restaurant I’ve taken several people to where every single person has agreed that the food was OK in the most part (and nobody’s ever actively disliked anything, so that’s good), but the ambience is amazing. That’s what you want from a meal out, really.
I have family in New Orleans I used to visit annually up until 2009 or so, unfortunately, I don’t make it down there as frequently anymore, but Commander’s Palace was a place I made sure to eat at on every trip.
To clarify, I wasn’t referring to how you choose a restaurant. I’m more interested in how you decide what to order when you’re there, when you might need to choose between the item you really want and the healthier, but pricier, second option.
So then, no reason at all to choose the second option.
Oh good, this make my answer easier. On a given menu, usually I decide based on what feel like eating. Sometimes price/value comes into it - but that’s something more like “should I get the chicken breast for $43.95 or the American Wagyu skirt steak for $59.95” , in which case I’m getting the steak - I may have ordered the chicken if it was $33.95, but for about a $16 difference, I’m getting the steak.