Quote:
Originally Posted by Calcountry
After watching Restaurant Impossible on the Food channel, I am convinced, there are WAY too many restaurants in America. Time to learn how to cook for yourself.
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My wife and I were going to dinner the other night and were talking about the rise of restaurants. I don't know much about this, but my theory is that at one point in time restaurants didn't exist, and then they were probably invented primarily for travelers while all the locals prepared their own meals.
Then at some point, perhaps in the 30s to 50s or so with the rise of cars, I think local people probably started going to restaurants occasionally for special occasions. No reason to go out when the wife was at home all day to prepare meals.
And then maybe in the 60s you had two changes that made an impact. Fast food started making meals cheap, and women started working. Now all of a sudden families had some practical reasons to start eating out. This probably outweighed advances in home foods like frozen dinners, better shipping to give us diversity of foods, and maybe even things like more mixes.
Now fast forward to today, and my wife and I are going out to dinner just because we're busy and working late and it's more convenient and easy to just walk to a restaurant than it would be to go home and cook. That's a long ways from the original mission of restaurants.
All of this is just a theory, so anyone can feel free to refute it or expand on it.