The difficulties of choosing a restaurant

"If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?" Martin Scorsese

I think my husband feels a bit like Martin Scorsese although in his case it's his wife not his mother and really it's more that he doesn't like going out much. He's probably steeling himself for a week of dining in Port Douglas that is coming up. No that's probably not fair - he has already spoken with relish of one place we went to there before. I think in normal circumstances the Martin Scorsese quote applies though, just take out the word 'Italian'.

My son wants to take us out to dinner as a belated thank you for my babysitting in the summer. Which puts us in a quandary. They live on the edge of the city, we live out in the outer suburbs and although it is relatively quick for us to get to the city outskirts, the centre is rather more difficult. And my husband hates going into the city. Then there's what kind of food, what price range - tricky when someone else is paying, what kind of ambience ...

It's always difficult though isn't it? Particularly when you are confronted with a vast array of options to choose from. When we were young there weren't that many options, and not that many options of places to look for reviews either. Nowadays we have Trip Advisor, The Age Good Food Guide, Zomato and several others besides. Do you take the advice of the 'professionals' in the official type of guide book, or do you go for the user reviews? The 'professionals' might focus on things you're not interested in and ditto for the user reviews, which may well be mostly written by people totally unlike yourselves. I guess once again you need to check them all out and then go for some sort of middle way. With respect to the user reviews, somebody is always going to have something bad to say and somebody might be totally undiscriminating. So you have to read a few to get a consensus. All of which takes time.

And you also have to take time to decide where - somewhere easy for both parties to get to, where there is easy parking. In big cities this is a consideration. But that said, this still gives you lots of options. In this particular instance the price factor (and the final choice) is up to my son. Type of food is easier - there are only a couple of cuisines that don't really delight us - Japanese and Chinese. Yes I know we are not with it, but that's OK. And I'm sure we shall find something. Because, as I said, there are so many to choose from.

I also remember that it used to be a lot easier when we were overseas on holiday. We would just amble around town - or village, check out the menus (and the price - we were poor back then) and most likely go for the cheapest, unless it was all offal. Sometimes we were lucky, sometimes not. These days again we get bogged down in guide books and online sites like Trip Advisor. Now I am not knocking them - you probably do better in the end because you have possibly made a more reasoned decision. You have also had options to choose from that you might not have known about otherwise because it might be a little place all on its own out in the country which you would otherwise not have known about.

Sometimes though it all gets so fraught that it's best not to bother at all.

It's another first world problem and therefore not right to complain about.