It's Harder To Just Impulsively Eat Out Now

Thoughts on the shrinking number of "incidental activities"

I wrote recently about “incidental activities,” inspired by a bit in Jane Jacobs’s “Death and Life of Great American Cities.” She notes, talking about children but applicable to everyone, that there are certain activities that are by their nature incidental—stuff you do impulsively, without planning or overthinking. These activities can’t be planned. Once they become so frictional that you have to plan them, they just don’t happen anymore.

And I realized this was a perfect framework/terminology for understanding what I’ve been trying to get at with a series of occasional pieces over the years about shopping/eating out/inflation/distance/density: basically, that the combination of rising prices (inflation) and physical distances (suburban, car-oriented land use) shrinks the set of incidental activities which are possible.

You have to either plan a transit trip or drive a long way to visit lots of places when you’re out in suburbia. You have to argue with yourself whether a dinner out or some little indulgence (pastry, coffee, etc.) is worth it once prices passes a certain point. Yes, obviously sometimes you do it anyway, but the incidental, spontaneous nature of it is gone, in any case.

With that way of thinking about this all in mind, I’m going to do another little dining-out rant. I’ve been looking at some of the area’s more upscale all-you-can-eat restaurants (but this applies to many restaurant types)—not the buffets I love to write about, but places that serve food made to order and which offer somewhat more premium ingredients/experiences. For example, there are a bunch of Chinese hotpot all-you-can-eat restaurants, Korean barbecue, and even a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant with an all-you-can-eat option. (Rockville, Maryland, a D.C. suburban community in Montgomery County, Maryland has a bunch, and it’s actually a great example of suburbia having a lot of culture and diversity.) Washington, D.C. also just got its first all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant in several years, an upscale endeavor from a local celebrity chef.

I really want to like this kind of thing. And yes, sometimes I do. But what gets me with these places is most of them have multiple rules and/or confusing menus. The conveyor-belt sushi place is the worst offender. There are four tiers of a-la-carte pricing for the plates, then three tiers of all-you-can-eat which include escalating levels of a-la-carte prices. But the top all-you-can-eat tier, which is $65, doesn’t cover the top tier of a-la-carte pricing! So a $65 option in a suburban restaurant still leaves the restaurant’s best items off the table. It feels cheap, annoying, and overcomplicated.

The place in D.C., which is new and which I’m nonetheless curious to try, has a bunch of rules. Not just a 90-minute time limit, which is a bit tight. But a limit on how many items apparently a whole table can order, every 15 minutes, until the time limit is over plus a 10-minute grace period after which management might charge a-la-carte prices (instead of kicking you out? Or instead of letting the time limit slide?).

This is from a review they received, warning against large groups going to the restaurant: “we paid Premium price and for the first half hour only received literally two bites of food per person.” And they charge for leftovers—a reasonable way to prevent food waste—but leftovers can’t be taken to go! (As in they call the cops if you remove the food you paid for from the premises? Or as in they don’t offer takeout containers but don’t mind if you bring your own?) And their premium sushi all-you-can-eat tier is $75. Frankly, I feel like you have to slightly disrespect yourself to go to one of these places. I feel like a schoolkid in trouble just reading the damn menu. It’s kind of cheerily threatening, like HR.

And not to be outdone, there’s an all-you-can-eat dim sum joint in D.C. with a 75-minute time limit. Dim sum is supposed to be a kind of social brunch meal. That is barely more than an hour. It seems insufficient for a proper meal out of the caliber it’s supposed to be. (It’s $38 before tax and tip, but maybe that isn’t that high a caliber—my wife and I ended up spending $50 per person on a normal amount of decent dim sum three years ago, at a suburban Chinese restaurant in an old strip mall. So maybe it’s actually a great deal.)

And try finding out the price points, the tiers, the menu(s), the restrictions/rules/etc.—do reviewers divulge any of it?