Trying New Restaurants

A number of times in the past few years I've said, "We should make a point of trying new restaurants, say once a month." Umpteen years ago that would've gone without saying. It used to be that we tried new restaurants at least once a week! That was when we first moved here. Back then, of course, everything was new.

Over time we developed a set of favorite restaurants which we visited again and again. Pizza? 5 great places. Mexican? At least 8 great restaurants. Indian, Chinese? Several superior examples of each. Afghani? That, too, and it was one of the best local restaurants overall. The SF Bay Area is home to an amazingly rich food scene. Most of these great places were within a couple miles of our home or workplaces.

Soon we reached such a critical mass of great restaurants as our usual haunts that we weren't inspired to try new things locally very often. Sometimes we even wondered why explore, as almost no place we hadn't tried yet would be better than what we'd already found. Then, too, something about getting older has made trying new restaurants less of a thing.

Good things don't last forever. As the years have rolled past many of those great restaurants we made our usual places years ago have disappeared. The restaurant biz is tough at the best of times, so there's always a certain amount of churn. At many, the owner retired and sold to a new owner who wasn't as good. Some restaurants closed up due to financing problems, especially after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. And the situation with Covid-19 for the past 3 years has been rough on restaurants, driving a number of them to close.

All that has left us with a dwindling number of "the usuals" for dining out. And many of what's left are no longer great but merely good. Oh, and fuck the idea about getting older making trying new restaurants less of a thing. We are not ready to put our taste buds into nursing homes and starting eating at Cracker Barrel. I don't even know where there's a Cracker Barrel locally. The only one I've ever eaten at was 2,500 miles away, joining my parents there at their insistence. Thus it's time to get more aggressive about trying new restaurants.

The Mandalorian Season 3 Eps. 1-2

A few weeks ago we started watching season 3 of The Mandalorian. It's TV we've been looking forward to ever since the second half of that other Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett, turned into Boba Fett Writes a Book About a Someone More Interesting. Here are my thoughts after watching the first 2 episodes.

The Mandalorian definitely has strengths going for it. Din Djarin, the title character, is a genuinely interesting character... even if the face mask thing does have actor Pedro Pascal seeming to phone in 99% of his performance. A number of the recurring characters are interesting, too. Then there's CGI costar Grogu, aka "Baby Yoda". I have hopes we might see him develop this season into something more than a MacGuffin dressed in a potato sack.

Production values remain strong. It's obvious even when the writing gets cheap (see below) that the show still have a lot of budget. The crew, artists, and animators continue doing a fantastic job.

The setting continues to be a great canvas for storytelling. The "Space Western" genre provides an outer rim of the galaxy where every planet is different and danger lurks around every corner. BTW, space-western isn't just my term for it. It's a known category within writing, and showrunner Jon Favreau has said in interviews that his idea was to create a Star Wars story that was like the Old West.

So, with all these positives, what's not to like? You knew there was a "but" coming.

Mandalorian Science Theater 3000

The "but" is the writing. The first two episodes of Mandalorian are just cheesy. I sat there on the sofa offering a sarcastic running commentary like I was Joel and the 'bots.



What's so cheesy about eps. 1 and 2? Here's a partial list of things I spontaneously ragged on the show for, spoiler protected as it reveals plot points:

( Episode 1 spoilers, MST3K-style )

Episode 2: coming later, as this is getting too long.