recommended restaurants for many of the places we visited. We trusted it
with an almost religious faith, and nine times out of ten it was spot on. When it
did let us down it was normally because the restaurant in question had closed,
changed hands, and so forth. Either this, or the food was just not to our taste,
and the guidance provided by Lonely Planet had just not been descriptive
enough. Without this, our second 'bible', we would have definitely spent more
time in McDonald’s ...not a pleasant prospect.
Of course not every small-town makes an appearance in the
countrywide guide book that we were using, and if it does get a mention it
could just be: 'Drive through Smallston, and carry on to Somewhere-bigsville',
nothing about where to eat in Smallston. On occasions such as this we either
relied on personal recommendations - a risk if you ask locals as they may
have vested interests - or we wandered from place to place checking menus,
popularity, and environments. In Mariposa, near Yosemite, we literally walked
through the whole town and back in order to see all the restaurants before
choosing where to stop. Actually, this was less of a hardship than it sounds,
seeing as the whole town was only about ¼ mile long!
Quality of service was one thing that we could not easily predict before
choosing where to eat. Inevitably, given the number of restaurants that we
visited during our 13 weeks stateside, we were subjected to a real mixture of
customer care. Some waiters and waitresses were extremely good, some
were shockingly bad, but most were passable - and therefore instantly
forgettable.
Our most attentive waiter was in Las Vegas, in Caesar's Palace ‘all you