Not a Lunch Person

It's been a while since I went out for lunch.  On occasion I will treat myself to a slice of pizza, usually eating it in the car.  But a restaurant where somebody serves me, or I eat at a counter or go to a buffet, not in a very long time.  I think I got a hoagie at one of my favorite places near OLLI once during the semester.  I never ate at the cafeteria there.  When WaWa has its hoagiefests, a large one for $6, they can count on me for a couple of tuna or cheese creations during the promotion.  Those I order at a kiosk, pay at the auto cashier, and take the sandwich back to my car.

While on my two vacations this year, we ate generously at the hotel breakfast buffets and searched the online menus for dinner.  I don't recall having lunch.  I did the year before when visiting the Smithsonian.  Food trucks line up outside the museums.  Better falafels than I can get at home, and the rock-bottom motel at the end of the Metro did not offer breakfast.  Even there, I walked from the food truck to a place where I could sit down, perhaps a bench or the ledge of a stone wall.  Not a table or a counter.  No server to tip.  The only exception to my eating pattern might be a cruise, last taken six years ago.  Cruises have round-the-clock food for the taking.  Breakfast has a uniqueness.  Lunch and supper at the buffet do not, but unless returning late from a port outing, I reserve supper for the main dining room with service and assigned table companions.  When out in port for the day, I do not purchase food, preferring to exploit the pre-paid excess when I return to the ship.

My car being in the shop, I have a rental.  I don't want to bring food there and risk a cleanup fee.  My morning treadmill schedule discourages going out for breakfast on treadmill days.  I considered breakfast on yesterday's off-day but really did not want to venture out on a cold morning.  I would try lunch the next day.  It did not go well.  I considered a few common mid-day escapes from the years when I had my office nearby.  Too expensive.  My credit card would not bounce, but $13 for the ordinary exceeded my willingness to pay.  On Friday, the Farmer's Market has lots of food vendors, including one that I always found appealing, along with other places that have end of week specials.  Or I could go to WaWa or Sprouts, get a sandwich, and drive it over to a regional park to eat.

I kept my pledge to myself, opting for a Fish Fry special at a diner I sometimes choose for breakfast.  Lots of food, though salty.  Good price for entree, which also included a generous salad.  Soda a bit costly.  Service good.  Tab with about 40% tip, $22.  

Still not a lunch person.

The Hideaway

This nook of a place had been there a very long time, decades, maybe even longer than I've lived in the neighborhood.  I knew it existed though had never seen it, let alone sought a meal or a beer there.  It occupies land almost immediately behind the parking lot of my daughter's high school, with a small housing development thrown in.  At one time my vicinity had a horse racing industry, the sulkies.  It had been demolished to create a shopping destination, one of medium size with two clusters of stores occupying where the raceway once stood.  A dominant enterprise like the horses needs support.  The employees and others purchased housing on streets named with raceway themes.  And within this mostly housing development community, emerged a place for people to unwind.  Thus, The Hideaway.  It had a street address of a main road, though not visible from the road.  I needed my GPS to find it.

While waiting in line to vote a week early, two couples similar in age to me occupied adjacent positions in the queue.  Since it took just under an hour from arrival to casting a ballot, we had ample time to chat.  Not about candidates but about jobs, families, health insurance, and the neighborhood.  As a forty year resident I had by far the longest tenure.  The other two couples had lived elsewhere, one building a business in the DC area, the other living not that far north into Pennsylvania for most of his career.  They had relocated to housing developments just across the main road from where I lived.  One couple liked to eat at The Hideaway.  Walking distance from his house.  Live music.  Economical.  I made a note of the recommendation.

After casting my ballot, I returned home.  Like most modern restaurants, it has a website.  Definitely nearby.  The menu was not posted on the site but as a separate tab.  Definitely lower in price than the places I sought out for supper.  Next step, drive by.  I stayed on the main road, continuing behind the high school but saw nothing commercial.  Try another time.  When I needed to get away from my house, still daylight, I searched Waze for driving directions.  It was indeed in the development behind the high school though not on the street that contained its postal address.  I drove as the GPS directed me, passing an alcove with a large white clapboard building containing a discrete sign.  Its parking lot seemed more than ample, though empty at mid-day, and in need of repaving.  I drove on into the development but found no through road to return me home.  One cul-de-sac had a circle at its end, allowing me to reverse my direction.  The GPS directed me home along the same route it had guided me there.

Between personal recommendation, proximity, and cheap, a dinner went onto my low-priority to-dos.  Before long an evening to avoid cooking in my kitchen arrived.  We only needed a few turns, one right, one left, another right, another left, spaced over about a mile to bring us to the parking lot I had checked out a few weeks earlier.  This time, after returning clocks to Standard Time, the roads were dark and the parking lot only lit by illumination from the restaurant nearby.  While the lot seemed abandoned in the daytime, at 6PM only spaces a significant walk from the building remained.  As the fellow voter advised me, they engage musicians even on weeknights.  Loud music.  Two guitars and a baritone churning out country style sounds from another geographic center.  While the parking lot appeared dim, the restaurant's interior had ample lighting.  The only vacant table we noticed, despite the early dining time, was one in a corner near the door and the music's amplifiers.  We waited for a hostess.  None came so we sat at the vacant table.  On the wall next to us hung the menu in big print.  From our table we could see a chalkboard with entree and dessert specials, as well as drink specials.  Explorer that I am, I walked past the oversized wooden bar along the right wall, where they posted their transient beer offerings in chalk.  I found the music too loud.  By the time a waitress acknowledged us, we had read the posted menu and made our selection.  She left us with a standard menu while requesting our drink preferences.  I asked a list of drafts which she provided from memory.  Not wanting to risk another substantial delay, my wife and I each selected craft brews, hers an Allagash, mine from a more obscure provider in Cape May.  We had already decided dinner, but looked the written menu over again.  Our beers arrived and we ordered dinner.  

Despite the music and table arrangement that offered clear floor space, nobody left their plates or the bar to dance.  In addition, as we had come early, I had expected more diners to trickle in as the clock reached a more customary dining-out hour.  Few new people came in.  A hostess never needed to seat people, nor did a line form.  Our dinners arrived.  Disposable plates and utensils.  Only the pint mugs of glass with painted beer brand logos would need washing.  The entrees seemed large and cheap.  My fish and chips likely had been frozen, thawed and placed in a frying basket.  Undistinguished crust, fish filet of supermarket texture, fries standard.  My wife's fish sandwich overfilled its bun.  And my niche brand beer tasted quite refreshing.

While they had a dessert menu, the waitress never asked us if we wanted to try any of the offerings on their blackboard.  My wife didn't.  I might have.  Instead, she returned to our table with the check, a very reasonable amount considering what we had eaten.  Credit card offered, taken, and returned.  Back to the car for home.

Would I go again?  Probably.  The music could have sounded more subdued but it was live entertainment.  The other people dining seemed mostly my generation, probably late career like the two couples on the voters line who recommended this place.  Food undistinguished, service maybe slow.  Beer selection imaginative.  I could see going myself late one afternoon, taking a seat at the bar and nursing a specialty brew while I make notes in a pad or dictate into my recorder.  A place run by owners, maybe the type of personalized establishment that could appear on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.  Definitely not a yuppie national franchise with programmed menus for mass consumption.  I understand why my new acquaintances gravitate there.

Expensive Dining

My in-laws dined out once a year, on their anniversary.  They always went to the same restaurant, the most famous in their city at the time.  When I first met them, they had moved to the suburbs just past the city limits, while the restaurant established itself in the oldest district of the city near the waterfront.  My father-in-law disliked driving, which was a considerable imposition in that part of the city most of the time.  They took a taxi round trip.  We never knew what they ate.

As prosperous suburban people, we dine out more often, though far less than we once did.  As newlyweds, we lived in student housing, walking distance to oodles of places to eat owned by people who understood student budgets.  We sampled a coffee emporium before Starbucks existed, along witha place to get Soup & Make Your Own Sandwich, slightly more upscale nosh destinations for people like us with starter incomes.  And the city had the truly upscale, where we began our in-law's tradition of isolating our anniversary for a splurge.  

The restaurant industry did not ignore people like us.  Indeed, on my last trip to where our marriage started, those dining boutiques worthy of a small plate had become the fast food and casual dining found everywhere.  

As moderately high-wage earners with children to raise, eating out became more of an escape.  Our permanent home had pizza places, regional chains and national franchises, a few local places of modest cost when neither my wife nor I wanted to cook after a strenuous day at work.  None very expensive.  At about the same time, our regional hub city, about forty minutes drive with parking garages not too outrageous on weekends, became a nationally renowned restaurant destination.  Anniversaries, mostly there.  Weekend outings for downtown shopping included a dessert and coffee at a posh cafeteria with creative selections.  Birthdays sometimes there, sometimes mid-scale local.

Habits evolve.  Kids depart.  My interest in mastering my kitchen took hold.  Birthdays now extravagantly created by myself in a remodeled kitchen, served with elegance in the adjacent dining room.  Meal preparation shifted from chore to pleasure.  Dining out plummeted in frequency.  An occasional breakfast at one of several places, nearly all locally owned, became the escape.  Bill for one, rarely over $15 including tip.  During weekends on call, I would carve out part of a Sunday morning for a gluttonous but cheap breakfast buffet across from the medical center.  

Eventually, even anniversaries were prepared at home to the top of my skill, leaving travel as the main incentive for seeking restaurants.

Covid created a demarcation point.  Isolation rules changed restaurants from places where people gather to places where people acquire prepared meals to take home.  Pre-dating this, however, was the emergence of our mega supermarkets whose niches also included sections where shoppers can take home ready to eat meals, usually at a lower cost than restaurant take-out.  Covid also exposed the fragility of income.  People in the hospitality industry often earned minimum wages, supplemented by tips from diners.  These were now gone.  People confined to their homes ate their meals at their homes.  A lot of workers found themselves jobless.  Eventually the virus would run its course, allowing life as we knew it before to return, though not in the same way.

My restaurant experience had become very different.  Menu prices rose considerably.  Dinner for two at the places we would previously stop by on a whim, those family places, brought us a final tab about half again what we were used to.  As a financially secure person, I upped my tipping considerably, understanding the servers' circumstances.  Wages increased for a lot of reasons.  Legislatively, minimum wages rose.  Worker shortages, people who had been hurt by Covid effects on their employment shifted industries, led to further pay hikes that eventually become menu prices.  The content of the menus changed, as some supplies became less secure.  Chicken, abundant and economical, began to dominate menus.  Fish, my staple, appeared much less.  Even the price of a pizza rose, despite the national chains' focus on restraining operational costs through investment in efficiency.  I largely stopped going out for any meal other than breakfast, preferring what I could create at home each night.  That ultimately included anniversaries.

This year I had toyed with a few anniversary menus.  The date was an inconvenient one, midweek, following another event.  My wife suggested we return to an annual elaborate meal at an upscale place.  She chose one, and we went.  I had looked at the menu, which had suitable content.

This was not always an upscale dining place.  It had begun more than thirty years earlier as a nook on a side street of a major university where I attended a graduate program.  It sat a block from the law school, bookstore, library, and engineering complex. Its location put it comfortably separate from the many lunch trucks that lined a different part of the campus closer to its medical complex and dorms, where students often got their lunch.  Commuters taking the regional rail would have to pass it on the way to their labs or offices.  Occasionally, I would divert my usual route from my assigned parking garage to get a cinnamon roll on my way to the medical complex.  When our group hosted a visitor, our department chief would have a group of us take the visitor there for lunch.  Nice.  Reliable.  Not Extravagant.  And with a suitable competitor on the same block, which I preferred for that morning pastry indulgence.

The competitor no longer has its presence at the university.  This restaurant not only does, but has expanded to suburban satellites, including the location near me.  Our tab ran $139.  

Dining's expenditure takes many forms.  There's the food, selection, ambiance.  Who I dined with dominated all of these.  There is also a delegation of effort.  When I create an elegant meal, I like the effort.  And I could have been with the same beloved person.  I have selection as I design the menu.  My wife accepts what I choose. 

We arrived.  Easy drive to a suburban upscale shopping center.  I drive by frequently, as the dealer who services my car sits across the street and Costco where I purchase bifocals on alternate years has its complex around the corner.  This retail complex has stores in a row along its backbone with several free standing restaurant buildings, including ours, placed along the perimeter.  Parking is abundant and without fee.  We walked into the building, where the hostess confirmed our reservation.  A few other diners waited with us, though not a lot.  The restaurant's capacity far exceeded the current number of patrons.  Another person escorted us to our table, one placed in a room with a few other tables, though with ample space between them.  A large round table sat eight other diners, the only people other than us in that room.  A waiter introduced himself, a young man likely earning money to tide him over as he pursues a different career.  We read the menu, and placed our order.  The various items came in sequence.

To be fair, I could not duplicate what we ate from my kitchen.  The wines by glass, marked up above what we usually spend at a restaurant, would be accessible from my usual package store in whole bottles.  Beer was about the expected price and included unique selections from small regional craft breweries.  I had one of those, something I would not find elsewhere.  My wife ordered a cream soup.  That I could probably approximate.  Despite the pricey nature of the place, they did not offer us bread and butter.  In fact, they offered Bread and Butter for Two for $12 on their starter selections.  We each ordered the same entrée.  It came with a seared fillet of fish sitting atop a vegetables and Israeli couscous medley.  I could not duplicate this medley.  I've made this type of fish in the past.  It is very bony, and difficult to filet.   

I stopped ordering dessert a number of years ago as prices accelerated.  This time my wife wanted dessert, and we were splurging to be with each other.  She selected better than me.  Itemized bill:  What we ate $110, 3% surcharge so we pay the credit card issuer's fee while they get their money promptly, state tax, reasonably generous tip though not enough to get the waiter to the different career that he likely seeks.

Fewer diners.  More revenue per diner.  It seems Covid transformed dining out.  It forced us to eat from our own kitchens, which may have been a good consequence.  It raised the income of the worker, though at the price of fewer workers to serve fewer diners.  The national chains, often experiencing declines in patronage, once rescued the younger couples too tired to make dinner after a stressful work day.  Now we draw our second wind to make that dinner.  The respite from the home kitchen has shifted to celebratory, the few times people really want something they cannot duplicate for themselves.  We watch the Grand Chefs on FoodTV.  We mostly eat at home, with maybe a modicum of upgrades from those culinary masters on our screens.  More effort. More satisfaction. Less expense.

Wine with Dinner

Getting tired of making dinner, it had been my intent to use up leftovers last night, then go out tonight.  My wife has an obligation tonight so we shifted days to going out last night.  Most of our options, as we require vegetarian, are a few regional and national chains which this era of restaurant tech makes things efficient, as we can preview menus in advance.  Italian always has pasta, so we went that route.  

As much as I welcome the evening off from KP periodically, cheap evening outs have largely disappeared, mostly because the concept of a treat also includes a serving of wine or beer that I would not have available to myself at home.  About $8 a serving, one serving each.  While our choice offered house bottles for $20, which would have been a better buy, I did not want to drive home with a partially consumed bottle of wine in my car, even in the trunk, though in another era I once did routinely.  Our legislature has been grappling with a bill to make driving home with leftovers illegal.  The merits of that are obvious, the downside also obvious.  Had I purchased a bottle, would I have poured myself the same glass that I purchased individually, or might I have topped it off?  And if I couldn't take leftover wine home, would I get my moneys worth by having only minimal leftovers?  

In my younger years, as newlyweds we lived in a place that had a lot of students some quite wealthy, and a lot of faculty, all prosperous.  Lots of great places for supper, many walking distance from our apartment, but for special occasions I drove to someplace more elaborate.  Wine by the glass had not become available everywhere, so we would get a bottle for those special evenings.  And I would top it off, but keep myself still within safe driving limits, with about half a bottle in the back seat for later.  

My permanent home did not have quite the plethora of whim outing places, we grew our family, and went out less. In addition, I became interested in what I could do in the kitchen.  As a result we went out much less.  I became more interested in craft beers as they came onto the market, something usually served as an ice-cold pint in a tall glass, as I only ordered a selection that they had on tap.  My wife preferred wine, leaving a glass the best option.  Those bottles that we ordered previously essentially stopped, more for economic than liability reasons.

But at home, where saving leftover wine for the following evening had not legal implications, I still purchased a bottle for each elaborate dinner I made myself.  And I almost always drank beyond what would be safe driving.  So trying to duplicate that at an Italian restaurant, even if a better buy, would probably be unwise.  Paid a little extra per ounce, and we each got our glass, but it added about another third to our final tab.  Which is why going out for dinner is relatively infrequent as I reach my senior years.

Aborted Out to Eat

Shavuot meal planning has dominated my week, supplemented by what I thought was a pot luck dinner for my wife's choral group, for which I spent much of the day making a complex Hungarian Monkey Bread.  At the last minute she disinvited me.  Rather than this being a social post concert gathering, as organizational President she declared it a working Annual Meeting exclusive to members of the Chorale.  

So a Me supper.  I sort of like them on occasion.  My last occurred about four months ago when I treated myself to a few days in the Poconos, something of a bust of an outing, but I got to eat at a wonderful casino buffet one night and a brew pub the next.  Maybe try the new Kid Shelleens, a place for beer with food.  Not much I'd be willing to eat, and the prices more than I want to spend.  Brew pub around the corner.  Same reaction.  Then surfing menus online by "...near me."  One diner, but I really wanted beer.  And I would have expected the search engine to find more places.  Maybe just get a beer.  Two microbrews, one nearby, one just at the limit of what I would be willing to drive.  No food though.

A few observations.  First, since covid, restaurant prices have jumped considerably.  These may be the least secure jobs around other than entertainer or artist, often occupied by otherwise aspiring but not currently employed entertainers or artists.  Turnover must be high.  Wages needed to rise.  Supply chain made product acquisition insecure.  More price rise, but also restriction of menu options.  Chicken dominates, as economical, available and versatile.  Fish less so.  And pasta must have gone out of favor.  While low wage workers earning more reflects justice, consumers like me also have to be willing to pay the price increases, which I am not.

I made two sandwiches, one cheese, one hummus, on discounted hamburger rolls.  Then I drove along the main drag.  I passed many potential restaurants that did not appear on my searches.  Popular Italian, IHOP, two sports bars, two seafood places.  Wonder why the Google algorithm doesn't capture these.  Maybe there's a pay to play component.  Had I just driven around instead of searching for a place online, I would have settled for one and had my supper out.