In Praise of Limited Choices

Now that I live in a huge metropolis, I praise the fact that we had limited choices of good restaurants in our former rural community.

True, I wished for years that Mt. Airy, NC would get a Starbucks. After I moved it did. 

And I moaned when our favorite chefs moved on, and further restricted our possibilities for a dependably delicious dinner. 

At least in a small community, you know what you're going to get when you go to a particular restaurant.  At every new opening the locals endlessly review it on Facebook. 

My current zipcode 80247 has 26,000 people in 3 square miles. The Denver metropolitan area has 5,000  restaurants. There is no way to know the quality of every restaurant within even a one mile radius. And since our dining out time and budget are limited, we don't want to waste them on a dud. 

 I stood on one corner this week and took photos of four restaurants. 




The Italian restaurant was in the nicest building. 






The Turkish restaurant was humble, and hadn't caught my eye previously. But I liked the food we ate in Turkey and might try this one.





The Mexican restaurant always has funny signs, which is what prompted me to stop and look around. 

And the Thai restaurant in a three-business strip mall tried to create some ambience outside. Good for them! 





Just one intersection could shape our dining out until February. 

However, the sheer number of choices immobilizes us, so we tend to stick with the few restaurants we know and like. 

It's the same don't-take-a-chance principle vanilla ice cream eaters use. Who knows if you'll like glow in the dark ice cream (Britain),  raspberry-orchid (Turkey) or curry and carrot (Japan)?

Vanilla doesn't appeal to me, but that raspberry-orchid ice cream sounds interesting. Maybe my next dinner out will be at the Bosphorus, pictured above.

I'll let you know how it turns out.