Good Restaurants Should Be Appreciated

Retirement has allowed us to slow down and appreciate life a little bit more than we did during our working years.  We love good food and have started to cook more at home, but we still enjoy a nice meal at a good restaurant.  We have learned tha good restaurants should be appreciated.  We have a few favorite places near us, and we have great admiration for how much work goes into placing a delicious meal in front of every customer.  A restaurant represents almost every part of the supply chain and relies on the output of farmers, efficient distribution, careful and creative food presentation and an attentive, knowledgeable and skilled staff.  My first job was in the restaurant business so I am very aware of the hard work required to provide good food and efficient and polite service all at a price that is competitive and will keep your customers coming back again and again.

Restaurants provide many people like me with their first job.  I was going to college at the time and the hours and location worked out perfectly for me.  Working in a restaurant is an education in itself.  You meet all kinds of people, and you learn the difference between a nice person and a person who just cannot be satisfied.  Many of my friends quit because they couldn’t take the clientele.  To this day I am always pleasant to the workers in a restaurant.  They work hard and good restaurants should be appreciated.  One of the nice things about retirement is you can travel a little bit more to get to a place you really like, and you don’t have to go during the busy days and times.  Happy Hours are great for seniors and, when we escape from the winter to our favorite locations, we have a list of places that we go.  Of course, we’re always willing to try a new place but we definitely have our favorites.

Running a restaurant is hard work so good restaurants should be appreciated.

We like all kinds of food although my wife enjoys Asian and Mexican more than I do.  We like pubs and seafood restaurants and, as we have gotten older with smaller appetites, we pay more attention to the appetizers and sometimes will each get an appetizer and perhaps split an entrée.  As I mentioned earlier, Happy Hours are worth hunting down and some of them are really great deals.  There is a lot that goes into making an excellent restaurant and finding qualified help is one of the biggest problems.  Food costs are going up all the time, and the owners face a constant battle of maintaining quality without pricing themselves out of the market.  Good restaurants should be appreciated and, when you travel to different places, doing a little research will quickly reveal the gems that the locals have discovered and flock to.  Retirement allows you to eat dinner a little on the early side before the working people are home from their jobs and quite often, we sit down in a nearly empty restaurant and watch it fill up as we work our way through dinner.  By the time we’re ready to pay the check, there’s a line out the door.  We’ve been known to take a dessert home with us for later.  Taking the time to scout out a good restaurant, enjoy a nice dinner and spending a quiet evening sitting outside is one of the great joys of retirement.  We never get tired of it.  We have been very fortunate to enjoy a few years of winter escapes.

A great dinner at a wonderful restaurant can inspire a new meal to make at home.  Part of the fun of cooking is to try new things and to get as close as you can to recreating a meal that you had at a good restaurant.  That’s when you discover how hard the restaurant business is.  It can be a real challenge to make a decent version of paella, spaghetti carbonara or even a wonderfully seasoned steak and restaurants are feeding dozens of people at a time making it look easy.  If you’ve ever had something prepared tableside, you know it’s a very nice treat to watch a professional assemble a salad or entrée right in front of you.  We especially like a small chain called Columbia and they have perhaps a half dozen restaurants in Florida that feature their 1905 salad which is made at your table.  They sell their dressing by the bottle so, as you might have guessed, we have adopted this salad for special occasions and everyone absolutely loves it.  Everything they make is wonderful, but we just love the salad and the dramatic flair with which it’s prepared.  Good restaurants should be appreciated and one of the ways to do that is to bring a little bit of the restaurant home with you.

Dining out is one of our great pastimes and we have enjoyed doing it in all of our travels.  The little bistros in Paris, the fish and chips places in Britain, the romantic sidewalk cafes in Spain and Italy along with little places you find along the rivers have given us great memories as have the hundreds of places we’ve enjoyed in this country.  Restaurants make up an important part of the American and global economy.  Good restaurants should be appreciated and patronized as often as possible.  Get out to your favorite place tonight.  It’s time to Enjoy Retired Life.

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