Are Restaurants Hard for You?

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Mine:

Noise/Crowded

I have been known to stand up and walk out of restaurants if the ambient noise level is too loud. This is especially difficult because many of the best restaurants in Utah are built to be noisy (restaurant-industry experts say that tables can be "turned over" more times a day if guests realize they can't hear each other talking). Watch out for restaurants which have tiled floors, cramped table arrangements and loud music.

Sticky tables and sticky menus

Even at more reliable and expensive restaurants, I am shocked at the condition of menus. Chunks of food, syrup, and grease smears festoon most menus these days. It lets me know the management (in)abilities right away.

Overall, I check the food-establishment inspection ratings from my county health department (most counties offer this information online). The ratings are the best indicator of the care, abilities and knowledge of the management staff. Restaurants which have few reported violations of health codes are more likely to care about the other aspects of the businesses, too. I have actually developed an ongoing list of restaurants near me which succeed in avoiding health violations and accommodate their guests in all other ways.

When I was young , my family had the nerve to drag me along to cheap, dirty Chinese restaurants, to eat with relatives. And I hated it

Pressured to make awkward conversation. Having to answer questions that took much energy

Hated drinking tea. Sometimes they had water but just hot water

Everything was greasy and oily

And too much pressure to eat too much



In college, once in a while I went to a restaurant with someone

Usually just dining hall or food court

After that, almost never

I only ever use restaurants with drive thrus, that way I still get food but in the comfort and security of my car.

Even when I'm getting something to go, I generally go inside to order it and wait.

At times when i go out and dine with someone. Too much noise, people talking forcing my brain to listen to 3-4 conversations at the same time. I try to block it out and focus on the person i went out with, but it's hard.

Also crying/screaming kids and waiting in line makes me go out when it is not lunch/dinnertime, and i do takeaway more often than i eat at the restaurant.

I don't do drive-thrus. I'll go inside & order to-go first. Too many things go wrong with my order when using a drive-thru.

Televisions in restaurants are my big annoyance. I'm going out to eat to talk & spend time with people, not watch/listen to the boob-tube. It's a huge issue when they have multiple tvs on & they leave the audio on & turned up. I frequently ask for tvs to be turned off, muted, or for us to be moved to a different table. Hell, I often ask if there's a "tv off" night. I'd pay extra! I expect tvs at BW3s. I do not expect tvs in every fast-food & sit down restaurant. (To be fair, I was raised that keeping a tv on during a meal was the height of bad manners. I still get hot-headed when my in-laws serve dinner in front of the tv. They're gonna be unhappy when we start hosting holidays, & they find I've removed the power cable.)

I actually prefer to eat out rather than at home; it's much less stressful than trying to make sure everything's around & ready to be cooked. The food tends to be consistent from visit to visit, there aren't any dishes/pans to wash up, & my social skills & manners get practice. We also tend to eat late, so there are fewer people around.

I'm somewhat different about that-- if the televisions are on sports channels or anything nonoffensive to me, I don't really mind it. It's when they're on FOX News Channel and I feel like I'm being bombarded with Republican talking points masquerading as news (the kind of stuff that Donald Trump insists is real news, it seems) that would drive me crazy.

Restaurants aren’t always really bad for me, so I voted sometimes. Here are my main problems I have from your list:

1. Noise isn’t always that bad, or at least not as bad as school assemblies and things. If somebody makes a loud or sudden noise than that is a different story, but in general a little noise is okay.

2. I really don’t like crowds, but I can deal with them somewhat.

3. The smell depends on what type of restaurant I am at and whether I like the food.

4. I have such a hard time deciding what to get on the menu so I always get the same thing because at least then I know I will like it and I don’t have to choose from so many options. They are really hard to read and I hate it when the waiter comes quickly to take our order!

5. I don’t really like waiting, but I can deal with it most of the time.

6. I always get the same thing so I don’t really have this problem. If it is a new restaurant, I order something that is plain and pretty simple.

7. I have such a hard time ordering my food because it is hard telling the waiter/waitress and I always feel like I am going to forget so I have to practice what I am going to say a bunch of times. The best thing is when somebody else just does it for me.

8. If I am with family or a close friend, I am okay with interaction.

9. I don’t like sharing appetizers either.

10. I usually stay in my seat but I do stim.

11. I can’t use a knife at all, unless I want to cut my hand off. As a result, I eat really messily so I usually get something I can eat with my hands (or I just pick it up anyway ).

12. I hate this. It annoys me so much that I just keep my napkin on the table.

13. I don’t try new foods .

14. Most of the time I go to the same place, but if I have to go somewhere new than I get something I am familiar with and then I end up eating it every other time I go there.

15. I don’t really care for sticky menus/tables, but I can tolerate them.

16. I have pretty bad table manners.

I don't like people looking at me when i'm eating..... so it doesn't help too much feeling like people are staring at me all the time.

There is one local Mexican restaurant that has background images on the menus that are nearly the same intensity as the print. It is so hard to read the menu that I quit going there.



I read. Sometimes I take a laptop if they have wifi and I read online.

I do often wish they had restaurants that did not allow babies (kids under 4). Even the fancy restaurants get noisy with wailing toddlers. This stupid country is too soft with young families.

Right?!? I get nervous every time children are present and if they start wailing or crying then that's a massive trigger for me and I usually have to run out of the place and go through the whole meltdown phase. Ugh...

Yes, restaurants are indeed a problem for me. Sometimes I opt out of going to them if I think it's going to be an issue. If I do go, then it's usually to somewhere that's familiar to me. Simple, plain food is preferable and at a less busy time with the least screaming toddlers.

I can't sit too close to the door due to my asthma (people tend to smoke right outside and smoke tends to waft in, smoke can trigger an asthma attack in me) and I like to sit at the edge of the table (so then it's easier to escape to the toilets if I feel overwhelmed and need to get away from it all).

Usually it comes down to a choice, do I sit at the edge and risk triggering my asthma, or do I sit in the middle and risk feeling uncomfortable about being squished in and potentially have a freak out in public and lose my cool?

Sometimes I will retreat to the toilets if the smells and sounds become too much, but unfortunately sometimes the toilets smells heavily of perfume which isn't great for my asthma either. Die by smoke, or die by perfume...yay...

Music is a good way to block out sounds, and sometimes I listen to my old mp3 player as a source of comfort in a restaurant if it's particularly loud and crowded. As for smells, I tend to rub some liquid soap under my nose (and rub it in well so people can't see it) and a little bit on my knuckle so whenever I start to feel uncomfortable, I can lean on my hand (inhaling the smell of the soap in the process) so it looks like I'm just fidgeting/bored when in actuality I'm doing so as a means of relaxing myself via the smell of soap.

Not a great fan of speaking to waiters/waitresses, but I am capable of it. If I can't get to the toilet, at least I have my music (although without being able to top up on soap it isn't great...but hey, at least I don't have to choke on perfume). But if I am able to get to the toilet, I can hold my breath a bit (if it smells heavily of perfume), get some soap and leave. Potentially take my inhaler if necessary.

Yeah...there's a lot of planning I go through when it comes to going to restaurants. I usually read the menu before going, and I tend to order the same thing, or the same couple of things each time.

Personally I'm more annoyed with the parents... sure the noise hurts my ears, but I can't understand parents that let their children cause trouble for others in public places. If a kid is noisy in a grocery store and there's only one adult with him/her then it can't be helped; every family needs to eat after all and it is very well possible that a parent doesn't get any chance to go grocery shopping without the kid/kids, but if there are two (or more) adults then there's no excuse; if a child starts misbehaving then the other one should take the kid away from other people until he/she calms down. This applies to restaurants as well and if a parent can't get their kid to calm down then they should seriously consider the option of taking the rest of the food with them and just leaving.

Of course a child can have a good reason for misbehaving, like an autistic child overhelmed by everything around him/her, but that is no excuse for the parent to let their kid bother others. If a child, no matter if he/she is autistic or not, tends to cause trouble in public places more often than not then I think that the parents should cut down the times they bring the kid to places like these until they can teach the child manners or teach them to handle the enviroment well enough that they won't have a meltdown that will ruin everyone's night out. Of course, children (and sometimes adults too) have accidents, but when it comes to kids their parents or other care takers should make sure with the best of their ability that the children won't bother others. I don't know about other people, but personally when children run around and are extremely loud in restaurants I'm not really giving the bad looks to the children but their parents who won't put them under control. Children are children, often they don't even know any better since they haven't been taught yet, but a parent who won't even try to get their kids to behave shouldn't be a parent in the first place.

I have a feeling I might get a lot of hate in my neck for saying all this; lot of people seem to have the attitude that if you say anything negative about children then you're a childhater. Which I'm not, I like kids. What I don't like are parents who don't even try to have their children behave.

Might've gone seriously off topic, but then again loud people, children included, is something many people have said to be a problem in restaurants, so maybe not?

I don't find going into a new restaurant and ordering something nice difficult, I just find the socialising around it hard so feel awkward and anxious around it.

Went to a lovely Italian in Hammersmith for lunch yesterday with my work team. Nice food, good feel to the place. Just hardly said a word while everyone else never stopped chatting and didn't feel the right time to chip in or know what to say.

Maybe it is because my family goes out to eat a lot and always has, but restaurants are rarely a problem for me. I like getting out of the house sometimes. However, if they are too loud and crowded or it is somewhere I have never been before and I don't know what is in their food, I start to have issues. I have texture issues with a lot of foods and the foods I can eat are very limited. If they serve something I like and can eat, I typically enjoy going out.