Are Restaurants Hard for You?

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I hate them, god I hate restaurants.

I hate the noise and the smells and just the idea of people eating, the sensory stuff involved in that, I find it repulsive.
Then there are the social difficulties of not knowing how the restaurant operates (do you seat yourself? will someone come to take your order? etc.), and the overwhelming choice of the menu.
Then I get depressed because by the time I've followed all my 'rules', there's only one thing on the menu I'm 'allowed', at best, anyway. But that's my ED creeping in, that's beyond normal autism restrictions.

I used to put up with all these things but more recently I have started to assert my needs more. It is ok that I feel like this, and it is ok that I don't want to go. We went on holiday in the summer and I didn't go to a single restaurant, my family went and I got to stay at the apartment. It pissed my dad off, apparently, but I don't understand why, and I'm very grateful to my mum for saying that it was ok. I wouldn't have had the confidence otherwise, to upset what's normal.

I also worked in a restaurant for three months and, having seen behind the scenes, I think it's only made my squeamishness worse. The horror.

I don’t really have a problem with restaurants. The only issues I might have is if the restaurant is very busy and the noise can make it hard for me to hold a conversation with someone because I can’t hear what they are saying. I tend to prefer restaurants which aren’t too busy but have enough people eating for there to be a good atmosphere. These types of places are usually more relaxed which helps quite a bit.

I can handle restaurants: up to a point. When I go out to eat alone, I NEVER sit and a table and eat and always take my food home.

Sadly, I don't have that luxury when I'm dining with someone else. After a while, all of the noise and activity gets to me. I feel like an overcharged battery because not only am I picking up on the emotions of people around me. but the longer I'm there, the ruder I feel like I'm being to potential customers and to the staff. I mean, I'm sitting there with someone and just talking after we're done eating: we could be talking in the car, at one of our places, but we're taking up a table and probably making the servers and bussers annoyed.

Eating out with my grandmother and my other Southern family members is a nightmare. In their little town, it's customary to sit in a place and chat for sometimes more than 2 hours after you've eaten. It makes me super uncomfortable. I usually have to go outside or to a quiet restroom to take deep breaths to calm myself down.

I'm not a fan of eating communally in any setting really - even family meals at home. There's just something about the sounds that people make when they're eating that I find incredibly distracting (not uncomfortable or painful, thankfully.)

To be quite honest, I find eating a bit of a chore most of the time, I've often joked with people that I'd just like a little
door in my tummy like a pot-bellied stove, so that I could just throw in something to burn when I'm low on energy! I also struggle with food which is supposed to be served hot once it has got a bit tepid, so I tend to eat very quickly. Eating in a restaurant, where folks are trying to hold a conversation while eating, just doesn't suit my 'eating style' - once I've started on my food, I can't engage with anyone else until my plate is empty, and then it seems like I'm sat there like a lemon for the aeons that it takes everyone else to finish up ready for the next course.

I'm also a bit particular about my meal being 'my meal', so I get rather uncomfortable when people start swapping bits of their meals to see what they taste like. The same with settling the bill; I just want to be sure exactly what I ordered and that I paid for what I ordered, otherwise I start to get anxious that maybe there is some unspoken 'debt' that I'm informally expected to return on another occasion.

Nope

Not usually. I tried a new place today. Small, family run business.

I was somewhat anxious. "Should I wait to be seated? If not, where should I sit? Do I wait for someone to tell me? Hey, that's a neat painting".

The restaurant I go to most frequently closed a couple of weeks ago. At this time of the evening (8:30 pm) in my town, there is only the local gas station open and I really don't like their food.

So if I want to go somewhere to eat, it's a a 70 mile round trip drive. That's too far just to get a hamburger. Not only that, my usual hamburger spot in that town closed at the end of September. This time of night, the best hamburgers you will find there are at a drive-in restaurant where they bring the food to you and you eat in the car. The only real point in their favor is that they are open until 11 pm or midnight, depending on the day of the week.

There's also a Subway sandwich place there. The last time I ate there, it was quite good. The previous time, it was very bad. The great uncertainty in the quality of their food is certainly not worth a 70 mile round trip.

I use to go to one Chinese place frequently when I lived in that town. The food was okay and the prices matched. The only problem was that the tables for 1 or 2 people were right by the smoking section which was only separated by a railing. The tables were pushed up to the railing. You could be sitting in the no smoking section and someone might be smoking only a foot away from you.

So when I went in and the water would lead me toward the 1/2 person tables, I'd peel off and select the available table that was the furtherest from the smoking section and sit down. Often, that was a table big enough for eight people. So I'd often have their one eight person table all to myself. The waiters didn't really like it because I would only give them a 1 person tip, not an 8 person tip, but not once did they try to get me to move.

For what it's worth, if someone else wanted to join me at that 8 man table, they would have been welcome to do so. Nobody ever did, though.