Same goes for nightclubs, museums, movie theaters, "culture". This is really why people want to live somewhere???
> Same goes for nightclubs, museums, movie theaters, "culture". This is really why people want to live somewhere???
What do you do in the afternoons? Almost every home-hobby I can think of is improved by company of people with similar interests. Rather than do DYI in a garage, I'd rather go to a hackerspace. Rather than play the same N boardgames with the same X people, I'd rather to go a boardgames meetup.
And well, while you might not be into 'culture', there's a reason why nightclubs, museums, theaters, cinemas, etc exist. People like entertainment!
> Get dressed up, drive or walk to the place, wait in line, get seated and wait again, place your order and wait again, finally you get to eat, trying not to think about how much of your life you just wasted, then when you're finally done enduring all that, drop $100 that you could have used to buy groceries for a week.
Well, here's the opposite view. I don't cook at all; I'd much rather place a delivery order at one of 20 great restaurants around, depending on whether I feel like italian, thai, vietnameese, british, american, or any other cousine. Why would I spend hours buying ingredients and preparing food, when someone else can do the same for me, but better?
Going out to restaurants is a bit different - when you go as a group, the fact that you have free time as your food is being prepared is a benefit, not a cost. That's the main reason you go, after all - to spend time together, while at the same time enjoying a good meal.
Small cities, under 100,000 people even, can have hackerspaces. Maybe they aren't to your standards. (local one here has CNC, laser cutter, 3D printers for plastic, etc.)
To not cook is odd. Even when I lived alone in Boston, I cooked my meals. If you cook, you can be sure that nobody: picked their nose before handling your food, spat in your food (politics maybe), sneezed on your food, scratched their ass before handling your food, failed to wash the salad, plucked out a mouse and called it good, etc.
There are only a few restaurants where you can dine naked, you'd be seen by others if you went there, and you might have to suffer seeing people that make you want to rip your eyes out. At home there is no problem.
While waiting for your food at home (as it cooks), you can spend time together. It's the same as what you get, but with privacy. You can be as politically incorrect as you like, you can cry or shout, you can hold a burping/farting contest, whatever.
At home there is less trouble with kids. I'm guessing you might be single... if yes, how do you find any meaning in life? I remember being single, and I found it to be horrible. There was such a feeling of my existence being pointless. I very nearly jumped off a bridge. So life without family is unfathomable, and family makes restaurants awkward. It takes consistent discipline to keep a crowd of them under control, meaning that one can not relax.
Restaurants are nearly always too dim. I suspect it is so you can't spot defects in the food. At home I can put a 4000 lumen bulb in every socket, which is 6x or 7x normal.
You can go as a group to the supermarket. You can cook as a group. If you want peer bonding, this does it.
For sure, I get that. I just find it pretty amusing that restaurants, of all things, constantly get brought up in these "Why do engineers move to the city" stories. Anyway, aren't we all working 60-80 hour weeks? Even if I liked restaurants and night clubs, I'd have no opportunity between work and sleep to partake, so it would make no difference whether there were good ones around!
And you don't think that's a problem? But no, we don't all work 60-80 hour weeks. Work shouldn't be your life, and 40-45 hours is already a lot of time.
Without a commute that's plenty of time for restaurants and bars ;)
Imagine that, a person who never goes to restaurants doesn't consider them when making decisions. Shocker.
I go maybe once a week. Sometimes twice. And I almost always end up going to the same few. But once in a while I like to try something new and it's great when that option is available.
And I don't know where you eat, but my fav kind of restaurants are in the $20 to $30 per person range. $100 is for special occasions.
Fun fact: in Ljubljana (my home city) you can barely even find $100/person restaurants. So even if you want to special occasion, you can't. And when you do, the food is often closer to a San Francisco $30/person restaurant.
So yeah
You look at Yelp or similar and you've been to everything it suggests and decided it's meh. Or your friends have been and aay it's kinda meh.
There's also that argument that Oatmeal mentioned once. In a small city you have Asian restaurants. Maybe Chinese, Japanese, and Asian. In a big city you have Cantonese, Sushi, Japanese Grill, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Singaporean, South Thai, North Thai, Dim Sum etc etc
Maybe SF is a special case. The city itself is only 800k people, but it's surrounded by 6mio people which makes it feel a lot bigger than it is while retaining a lot of the smaller city feel. It's basically Bay Area's lower to mid Manhattan.
PS: London is massive. 13mio people in the metro area. That's twice the size of the entire Bay Area so yes, law of diminishing returns definitely kicks in at some point.