Are Restaurants Hard for You?

Post Reply New Topic

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.

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.