The Intervention

Newsletter 2023-05-01

I hate going out to eat.

There’s probably something wrong with me. Replace “probably” with “definitely” and “something” with “everything” and you’d be closer to the truth. Everyone else seems to enjoy the restaurant experience. What’s not to like about having a third party prepare great food for you while you sit back and relax somewhere that’s not your house? I can think of about a thousand things. I suspect people who truly enjoy eating out are either rich or don’t have kids—or both since one condition leads to the other. Nobody reproduces their way to wealth, unless you have so many children that you get your own show on TLC. People think those three letters stand for “The Learning Channel,” but they’re actually an acronym for "Terrible Life Choices." I’m surprised they haven’t tried to throw money at me.

I’d be a much better husband, father, and member of society if I could get past my own hang-ups and enjoy a good meal out. Everybody else in this house wants to go out to eat, as was recently brought to my attention in my family’s version of an intervention. Being an addict and being super lame are both hard habits to break. I was the only thing standing between my family and fun, which is most of my job as a parent. Under pressure, I relented, but reluctantly and with much complaining, as is my style. I promised to take us all out to eat more often. Most people make resolutions to eat more meals at home, and now I’m doing the opposite. But life is short, and, more importantly, I’m a pushover. I’ve committed to taking us all out to eat roughly once a week, even though I still think it’s the worst idea ever. Here’s why.

It starts with the size of my crew. The world isn’t built to accommodate groups of six. It’s designed for four, which is either two couples or one family with two kids. When I tell a hostess how many people are in my party, they hit a big, red button and the whole restaurant immediately transitions into crisis mode. It’s the same reaction I used to see from fast food workers after a high school track meet when our bus would pull into the parking lot of a McDonald’s. Now, I can induce that fear response with just my own family. True, six people isn’t that many, but it’s just enough to be inconvenient for the existing infrastructure. Booths would seem to be perfect for us, but they’re really meant for four people. We make them work because my wife and kids are small. Even if we fit, they’re less than ideal since they box in two kids on each side. That’s when all of them suddenly need to go to the bathroom. It’s a law of nature that the harder it is to get to a toilet, the more urgently you need to go. Restaurant booths should come with emergency escape hatches.

Then there’s the cost. Restaurant food is expensive because running a restaurant is expensive. I have no illusion that anyone is getting rich off of me. Opening an eatery is the ultimate way to turn millions of dollars into a bankruptcy filing overnight. Still, it costs me a lot to help some entrepreneur ruin their financial future. With six people, I can’t get out of any sit-down restaurant for less than a hundred dollars. We’re not ordering high-end options, either. No matter where we go, three out of my four kids will order chicken tenders or grilled cheese with fries. The supposed ethnicity of the cuisine is irrelevant. Some form of those menu options exists in every restaurant in America. At home, I could microwave breaded bird chunks or throw a slice of yellow cheese-like material between two pieces of bread virtually for free. At a restaurant, both will cost me exponentially more because I’m paying for the building, the staff, and the ambiance. Dinner at home doesn’t come with three crayons and a paper place mat. The ultimate level of fancy is being able to stalemate at tic-tac-toe while you wait for your food.

Most people like going out to eat because it saves them from cooking and cleaning up. I handle both of those duties. Technically, the dishes should fall to my children, but half the time they don’t do them at all, and the other half, I have to redo their work. They wash the dishes, then I wash the dishes, and finally the dishwasher washes the dishes. It’s triple the inefficiency for triple the fun. I don’t mind, though. When I cook and when I clean up, I turn on a podcast and zone out. It’s the most relaxing part of my day. Some random narrator’s monotone voice is orders of magnitude quieter than the screams I normally hear in this house. Going out to eat doesn’t give me a break; it just takes away my alone time. Plus, when I cook, I know exactly when the food will be ready. When I go out to eat, it’s a total mystery. It could be five minutes or half an hour. Not knowing is torture. My stomach craves certainty. At home, if the food isn’t cooking as quickly as I expected, I can snack. I’m never more than arm’s reach away from an infinite supply of food. That’s frowned upon at restaurants. If I tried to walk in holding a box of Lucky Charms, they’d tackle me at the door. For the record, breakfast cereal is an all-day food. That’s one hill I’ll die on.

When restaurant food does finally arrive at my table, I’m never sure what I’m eating. I mean, I have a general idea. If it looks like a burger and tastes like a burger, it’s probably a burger. There’s nothing more disappointing than discovering it’s actually a head of lettuce in disguise. What I don’t know is if it’s a light snack or a day ending calorie-bomb. The menu almost never lists the nutritional facts, and even if it does, they’re a guess at best. One chef could use a smidge of butter while another might use eight pounds. You’re not really eating out until the added fat weighs as much as a baby. Any given pile of French fries could have somewhere between 500 and 5000 calories. Good luck tasting the difference. I try to watch what I eat because my hunger response simply doesn’t work. If it tastes good, I eat it, end of story. Unfortunately, restaurant food tastes very good. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t come back. They have every incentive to slather my entrée with all the things that will make my heart explode. In the long term, they’ll lose a customer, but in the short term, they’ll cover payroll. I’ll eat my way to an early grave and reward this gradual murder with an unbroken chain of five star reviews. Bon appétit.

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

You think I’d be happy with that arrangement. Not quite. In between surgeries, I’ve actually been trying to gain weight. But I want it to be the good kind that makes me strong and not the bad kind that makes me look like I’m a snake who just swallowed a moose. My goal is to stay in a slight energy surplus every day, which means I track my calories pretty closely. That goes completely off the rails when I go out to eat. When I get home from a restaurant, I never know if I should eat an entire box of cereal or skip all my meals for the rest of the week. Ironically, the only time I have any certainty is with fast food places, which are supposedly the worst ones for me. Their frozen burger patties are pumped out of a distant factory with perfect uniformity, and all the nutrition facts are online. Also, they’re cheap and delicious. Fast food seems like the perfect solution to my dilemma. Too bad Lola says getting McDonald’s every Saturday night doesn’t count as “going out.” I found the downside of marrying up.

Fast food has other advantages over the sit-down restaurants my family prefers. The biggest one is the refills. I want to get my own. No other human being should be taxed with that burden, which technically qualifies as one of the twelve labors of Hercules. Drinking diet soda is the one time I get to indulge my inherent desire to consume unlimited quantities of something that tastes good, but without consequences. Well, the consequences are that I have to go to the bathroom every four minutes. I’m okay with that. At sit-down restaurants, though, some poor waitress has to get me my refills. I already feel guilty that someone brings me my food, even if I pay them for that service. Having them get me multiple refills of diet soda is too much. Yet, I can’t stop myself from drinking it. A cup with soda and ice lasts me about ten seconds. And when I finish it, they swoop in and put another full one in front of me. Of course I lack the self-control not to drink that one, too. It’s an endless cycle. I know they’re judging me, as they should. But if we stuck to the fast food places, that wouldn’t be a problem. The only ones who would know how many refills I drank would be me and God—and whoever got in my way as I sprinted to the urinal.

The worst part of the sit-down restaurant experience is the tip. How do I put a price on the emotional damage I caused by needing sixty-five refills? That’s where the costs really start to add up. At least the kids don’t inflict much damage anymore. They’re old enough that they no longer cause a scene or leave enough crumbs on the floor to reconstruct an entire meal. They still spill the occasional glass, although the last time my youngest pulled that trick, the cup was already empty. Even their accidents are becoming less destructive. Still, as an English major, my greatest fear is being forced to do math in public. Thank goodness my phone has a calculator. It’s even better if the waitress has one of those tablets where I can just choose a preselected tip option to take all the thinking out of the process. The biggest downside is that I have to wait for the bill in the first play. I like to be able to bail from a meal as soon as possible. Waiting to be dismissed feels like I’m under citizen’s arrest. Rushing the process is even worse. Restaurants are the only business where I feel like a jerk for trying to give them their money early. Eventually, I’ll successfully hand over my credit card, and the restaurant will give me a receipt. That’s when I regret every life choice I’ve ever made. The first time the bill hit triple digits, I realized dining out wasn’t for me, but few things I do are. That’s part of having a family. Everything costs more and is done for somebody else’s benefit. At least it comes with a doggy bag so we can share stale fries the next day.

My kids are still confused by my sudden willingness to take them to restaurants. They never expected the intervention to actually work. The first time I told them we were going out, they asked if I had a coupon. Then they asked if somebody else was taking us. Finally, they asked if this was a trap. It was the only possible explanation. I worked for years to set their expectations low, and I threw them all out in one night. Now, my kids assume we’ll go out. In fact, they’re making requests. Tonight, we’re going out for ramen and boba tea. Whatever that is, it sounds expensive.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James