Old Favorites vs. New Explorations?

It's inevitable - anyone constrained by time or money eventually has to make a choice as to whether to keep hitting up their old haunts, or to keep exploring new restaurants. That's not to say it's an either/or proposition, but unless you're going out to eat every week, you're going to have to decide.

So how do you all decide? How often do you try out a new place that's gotten some buzz, versus an old favorite you already know you love? Heck, it even applies when it comes to individual dishes, too - when do you stick to something you love, versus trying out the latest addition to the menu?

It's definitely tough, especially when you live out in the burbs. A weeknight "too lazy to cook" dinner is going to be at an old familiar. A trip to destination dining can end up with repeats too: If someone mentions Evanston, there's a good chance I'll make a pitch for Dave's Italian Kitchen's eggplant parm, or now that there's a Lao Sze Chuan there, SueF will ask for the Crispy Lemon (aka Mayonnaise) Shrimp.

When in doubt, I try for GNRs, but the N's (neighborhoods) I end up in have the same three restaurants I've been to before (must get to Pilsen again soon... I'm just not hipster enough for Wicker Park).

Some old favorites on menus are just too good to pass up: If I'm at Aroy, it's hard not to order the Sai Ua sausage and beef ball tom yam. Need to go to restaurants in bigger groups, to select more items (that's one of many things that make LTH so awesome).

I think this is the ultimate conundrum that many of us food enthusiasts face. It's simply impossible to try all the new places about which we're curious and also visit our favorites on a regular basis. But I'd by lying if I said I have a system. Some are really easy: Psistaria, for example, is head and shoulders the best place anywhere near my office and a favorite of mine, so I eat there several times a month. Other favorites, like Calumet Fisheries, are just so out of the way, I don't visit them nearly as often as I'd like.

I keep a list of places I want to try (and places to which I want to return) and from that list, sometimes, the circumstances of geography make the dining choice(s) obvious. A concert at City Winery leads to a natural group of options. Other times, feedback from friends or reading a favorable review from a trusted source may move a place up the list. Going out with friends and letting them decide where to eat often lands me to places on my list. There are times when a group I'm part of mulls ideas on where to eat. I extract a few appropriate suggestions from my list -- both favorites and untried -- and let the others decide where we end up.

And let's not forget the good old-fashioned technique of just going somewhere because you're really in the mood for it. There are times I crave something. When those situations come up, I think it's best to just follow that impulse.

I've never done an analytical review of my dining out pattern but I'm guessing it's about 60%-40% in favor of old favorites. Maybe I'll take a closer look at my dining history and find out how accurate that is.

=R=

I like to try new places as often as possible. Old familiar places are more like comfort food; when I'm in the mood for a specific dish, I go where I know I won't be disappointed. Sometimes it is a matter of convenience; when I'm at an event, what's nearby and tasty with reliably good service? If I don't have time to cook, we'll probably go across the street to the Golden Nugget, which is worth it just for the garlic bread.

I have friends who used to request Leona's for every birthday for years. They didn't like it or dislike it, it was just reliable. Cheap, decent, always the same. I think life's too short to eat at the same place over and over. Perhaps it was the years visiting my grandma and every week it was Family Palace.

This has become an issue for me because I'm currently planning my annual blowout with my brother and one of my cousins, and the ratio of "must-go!" to "let's try..." has gradually increased over the years. Since we're generally limited to one week while both are in town, the decisions get harder and harder every year. I think we've pared it down to Zaragoza, Hot Doug's, and HMPC as the only true essentials (as they have no equivalents in NYC or Orange County), but it's so tempting to just go back to Avec (for example) instead of branching out.

Independent George-

As others have said better than I could -- this is the challenge for food enthusiasts. My mental list of places I want to try is ever evolving. When given the opportunity, I'll suggest a new place for us and hope that Mr. X will agree. Last night is a great example: we needed a spot for pre-Bulls dining, easily accessible by public transit. I wanted a menu with lighter, healthier options. He came up with Little Goat and Union Park Lounge, both new to us. Little Goat just didn't speak to me and I didn't want sports bar food. I countered with Vera, a tried and true favorite, and Nellcote, new to us. New to us won. On Sunday, Mr. X wanted Korean food and suggested a return trip to Yeowoosai. I suggested Da Rae Jung to try it and he agreed.

There are times though that the familiar will win out. When we find ourselves with no food in the house and no will to cook, we'll frequently hit a place we've been to because we know the food and/or it's close. I think a balance of new with familiar is what works for me.

Have fun planning your blow-out.

I keep a mental note of places I want to try. Some of these are local or in the suburbs. I find that there is kind of the same Chicago centric stuff posted on here, which is good...but there might be some gems in the suburbs too. Also sometimes I am driving along a strip and see a bunch of maybe divey kind of places and wonder "maybe they are really good". But since they are off the beaten path or just small hole in the walls, I have not heard of them. And sometimes I eat at a place that is good but nothing really noteworthy. Not something to post about. In the end I choose a balance of old favorites and trying new that either I've passed on my way somewhere or heard about via some publicity. To be honest when frequenting a new place I do webs searches before hand to see what people think of it just so its not a bad experience. Also sometimes you find dishes mentioned...like I wanted to try Fire and Wine in Glen Ellyn and I'm glad I did and I researched it. Its crowded to the max on weekends. And the delicious Grilled Ceasar salad and Salted Butterscotch Budino was mentioned....those I loved.

Restaurant Roulette/My Dinner with Alien: Stacy’s, Bellwood

I wrote this true-life story some years ago; but I came across it recently, thought it was still kind of funny, and it seemed to fit with the topic of "new explorations," so here it is. It’s about random encounters, our shadow government and aliens.

The Wife was out of town at a seminar, and after an afternoon helping my northside Auntie queue up for Netflix, I found myself at Lake Shore Drive and Belmont at 7:30PM on a Saturday night. I decided to play Restaurant Roulette.

Chowhounds always prowl for new places, strange, out-of-the-way joints, off the mainstream radar. Despite good intentions, many of us are still bound by the manacles of the conscious mind, stymied by personal routines of restaurant selection that lock us into the usual. We sometimes dismiss places if they look too familiar/unfamiliar, uninteresting, threatening, what-I’m-not-in-the-mood-for, whatever. I had been thinking that the only way to overcome the constraints of routine vision would be to design a random restaurant selection technique (kind of like my friend and Oak Parker, Rob Gardner, who at Lao Sze Chuan in Chinatown would order items based on misspellings and malapropisms).

So how do you go to a place at random? By playing Restaurant Roulette, of course! My rules are simple.

1. Search out a restaurant based on a random set of coordinates. For instance, Saturday night, as I turned onto Belmont from LSD, I decided that starting from the first intersection of streets the first letters of which spelled a word (this turned out to be the intersection of Lincoln/Ashland/Belmont, which spells “lab”), I vowed to go to the 25th restaurant (because it was January 25th) on my left-hand side (because I was feeling sinister). This may sound complicated, and you can probably design a simpler formula for defeating your mind’s tendency to be regular and routine.

2. As I counted down, I decided not to count franchises or places like bars or convenience stores that just happen to serve food along with their main offering. (Is this sounding crazy enough yet?)

3. The final and most important rule: I vowed to DEFINITELY eat at the destined restaurant, no questions asked, no backing out: if you say you’re going to eat at the 25th restaurant on your left, then damn it, do so (you may not, as when you were a kid, flip a coin to decide an issue, and then go against the flip; un-unh, Restaurant Roulette doesn’t work that way).

Incidentally, several weeks before, I had suggested to Carolyn that we try this dadaistic Restaurant Roulette approach. She rolled her eyes with the now familiar expression that clearly said, “I married a moron.” Restaurant Roulette is a mind-game ideally suited for play when The Wife’s away.

So here’s how my Restaurant Roulette saga played out that Saturday night. I started the countdown, as mentioned, at Lincoln/Ashland/Belmont. When I hit Belmont/Pulaski, I had counted only 6 restaurants on my left. At Belmont/Austin, I had counted 11 restaurants, and I realized at that point that I had committed to a long evening, but I WAS committed (see rule 3, above). The road twisted, and around Stone Park, Belmont turned into Pacific. By hanging a left when I hit a dead end, I was eventually going south on Mannheim and still looking for the 25th restaurant on my left.

Finally, an hour after starting this quest, I came to the 25th restaurant on my left: Stacy’s, a stone cottage cum roadhouse-type place on Mannheim road. I was inspired. Snow was sizzling off the hot pink neon of signs that buzzed Steak and Seafood.” The place was full when I walked in, a lively crowd of young folks on dates and whole families sitting around long tables clinking glasses and gnawing beef, gregarious goodfellows on a cold night. It was warm inside, well-kept, and old school. Me likey. I sat down at the bar and ordered a Jack (decent pour).

Now, as I get older, I find myself more prone to strike up conversations with random strangers, so I started chatting with the guy to my left: Wayne. We got along, so I suggested we share a table -- which we did, after repeatedly confirming to each other that neither of us was gay (which I think is something two totally straight guys, completely secure in their sexuality, would normally effusively and emphatically assure one another of, right?).

Wayne, I’m certain, is the weirdest, strangest, most verbalicious high-velocity gentleman I’d met that year. He indulged me as I spoke of my daughter in China, my this, my that, and then he launched into a 3-hour transgalactic exposition of his life as an abused child prodigy, widower of a murdered super model wife, former CIA agent, UFOlogist, friend of those who really know what went down at Roswell, and currently the owner of a company (site link below) that is offering several technologies Wayne invented, including a UFA (universal frequency array) that, according to Wayne, far outstrips the traditional parabolic dish and could be used, not incidentally, to help prove that the US did NOT actually land on the moon (the Company staged the fabricated moon landing only to scare the ass off the Russkies; to back up this mother conspiracy theory, here’s the clincher clue according to Wayne: there’s NO debris left on the surface of the moon from the alleged US landing, no launch pod, no lunar rover, no flag, no nothing).

The Hubble telescope accident, as Wayne explained, was no accident. Our shadow government (those who pull the strings behind our then-marionette president) did not want the Hubble Telescope to work because it would reveal the lack of aforementioned equipment left on the moon. So, when they fixed the Hubble, they recalibrated it so it would work for only deep space exploration, and not for nearby heavenly bodies, like the moon, where close investigation would reveal what THEY don’t want us to know. Wayne told me all this would be exposed over the next two years…but this was more than two years ago.

One may comfortably assume that Wayne’s product line was back-engineered from extraterrestrial technology.

Any who, for dinner, I had the peppercorn butt steak, and it was fabulous. The server suggested I have the hash browns, and I did, and they were fabulous. I would go to this place again.

After dinner, Wayne invited me to his lab (remember that word?) to check the equipment they’re designing and which, he believes, he will soon be selling at the rate of 6,000 units a month. On Wayne’s site, his tagline is: “We are coming through the portal by the thousands.””

Overall, a completely unexpected, serendipitous, and memorable dining experience, made possible because I decided to play…Restaurant Roulette!

Stacy’s
845 Mannheim Road
Bellwood, Illinois 60104-2017
708.544.6636
Link: http://alienworksltd.com/index.html

LOVE Stacy's!

My eldest daughter used to play a lot of basketball away games at Saint John Vianney, a hop skip and a jump from Stacy's.

The first time I dragger here there she complained the whole time about eating dinner in her uniform.
The next game at St John when I told her it was time to go she said "OK, let me just pack a change of clothes"
"For what?" says I...
Enthusiastic reply - "We're going to Stacy's, right?"

zoid wrote:LOVE Stacy's!

My eldest daughter used to play a lot of basketball away games at Saint John Vianney, a hop skip and a jump from Stacy's.

The first time I dragger here there she complained the whole time about eating dinner in her uniform.
The next game at St John when I told her it was time to go she said "OK, let me just pack a change of clothes"
"For what?" says I...
Enthusiastic reply - "We're going to Stacy's, right?"

Love that.

What a way to end a long week! Thanks.