Thanks for the invitation, but....

I don't see the joy of eating out. So many of my friends are always eager to try the newest restaurant and seem to enjoy the experience. Not I. To me dining in a restaurant is a series of difficulties to cope with. One, will it be wildly overpriced. Two, will they play loud contemporary music, which I detest. Three, will it be so loud that one can't engage in pleasant conversation without shouting and constantly saying, "What?"  All three of these problems are generally the rule. Add to that the the food is almost never as wonderful as you were told it would be and servers in fancy restaurants are generally not much better than those at Denny's or the International House of Pancakes, and often a good deal worse because they think they are. Naturally I have dined at times where everything was perfect, the food, the music or lack thereof, the entire experience. But these events were few and far between. Maybe the fact that I don't drink has something to do with my lack of enthusiasm for dining out. I would guess that after several glasses of wine, or a couple of cocktails, the food tastes much better, any tidbit of conversation seems trenchant, money is no object, and one hardly hears the endlessly repetitive beat of the screaming background music.