With the way the world is in a discombobulated state, I feel more people, who love to eat and drink out, are going to reel it in and entertain more at home…
Loved to know what your take is. .
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I’ve always preferred staying home and cooking for friends. Start in the kitchen, move to the dining table, sit for hours and go home. Frequently the living room never gets used. Love it.
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I never need a reason to go out for a Filet-O-Fish.
Trump could be a running for a third consecutive term, Britain could be voting on joining Pluto, and I’d probably still feel the same way.
Bucking the populist sentiment to dine out, I almost always stay at home during the following holidays: Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, and New Year’s Eve (I leisurely cook the gourmet meal at home instead of getting it spilled on me by a harried server)…
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The beloved Filet O’ Fish…extra tartar with small fry squished together…
Drive thru and take out will become, IMO, the mode of picking up food vs. Dining in.
Just my .02 Aloha cents
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I go all Baller at home during those holidays…
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Certainly not the case around here. Lots of busy restaurants.
Some of them find creative ways to keep costs down, usually at the expense of service.
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True that @J_L. We go out for a date to celebrate Valentine’s Day, but not on the actual holiday. The actual holiday we kick-it with champagne & store bought hors d’oeuvres (mommy does not cook on vday). New Years Eve… fuggedaboudit. We definitely stay home, unless our neighbors have a party and we can walk. This Mother’s Day we went to my sister’s and the little kids got into a fight (blood was shed), and the parents haven’t spoken to each other since. But the food was good 
. We went to Pizzeria Mozza Dad’s Day and had one of those “harried” experiences.
But for me. When I younger I used to love entertaining at home and in our big backyard. But our house was built in 1928 and something is always going wrong, and the drought is causing the backyard to look like Tobacco Road. The older I get the more this stuff bothers me. I feel I have to be Martha Stewart and end up stressing myself and everyone else, and not enjoying my own party. So now, I would even go out for Thanksgiving if I could talk my family into it.
Also, L.A. over the last few years is like living in restaurant Mecca.
Okay, so that was long winded. But to answer your question @Plumeria. I think it depends on people’s lifestyle at the moment.
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[quote=“Plumeria, post:1, topic:3641”]
With the way the world is in a discombobulated state
[/quote] Good one. My husband says we’re not leaving the country until ISIS is destroyed. And he’s only half kidding.
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I love going out to eat, and the only things that hold me back are financial constraints and a desire to not be fat. I love cooking at home, too, but I’m not deluded enough to believe I can make better sushi than someone with years of training and access to excellent raw materials.
Our apartment isn’t tiny, but it also isn’t set up for entertaining - put six people in the living room and it’s pretty full. So when we want to eat with friends, we go out.
We usually go out to eat on Valentine’s Day, sometimes for predictable Valentine’s Day food, and sometimes not. This year, we had dim sum. I don’t think people are inventing their Valentine’s Day restaurant horror stories, but I don’t have any of my own.
I also like to be surprised. No one’s going to present me with a little gift from the chef while I’m sitting on the couch watching Orange is the New Black.
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Interesting article in US News & World Report:
There’s probably no way to know but I wonder if the numbers are the same for non-chains.
Don’t know but I feel so sad for the restaurant owners that put so much time and money to start up a restaurant, to be faced with a 43% or more fail rate, for independent operators, in the first 1-3 years…then you top it off with the multi-faceted pre-recessionary forecast from U.S. politics, terrorism, social unrest, global geopolitics, economic uncertainty. .
Second quarter will be the canary.
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