@antiaall3s This! But we have to "eat out to help out" those struggling capitalists right?! Ha, no, and in fact, I'm not sure I'd ever go back to eating in restaurants. Cost me so much money I never really had, and ate out of obligation for the "socialising" in usually noisy, crowded places with shitty music and even shittier options on the menu where the default is often meat and dairy, as you rightly suggest here. Much better to cook for one another as friends in homes if possible, talk, laugh, debate, and play music we like. And of course, come the revolution, a lot of neighbourhood communal cooking and eating, anyway!
At any rate, the food is only an excuse to push booze, which is how they make money. Alcohol pushers. Legal drug dealers.
Restaurants are loud and smelly places, that charge at shit ton of money for, at best, mediocre food.
Do not miss. Not one bit.
There are very few vegetarian cooks out there, and even fewer have genuinely exited me. Pietro Leemann in Milan. Denis Cotter in Cork. Eric Tucker in SF. Ottolenghi may invent some nice dishes, but his restaurants in London are overpriced yuck.
Is anyone missing to eat out in restaurants? Not me. Not at all. I cook better than all the restaurants in this shitty little city, that's for sure. Better and healthier. Most restaurants here are a one trick pony. They always add a shit ton of butter and, increasingly so, garlic to every dish. Often they add so much garlic that it nukes out all the other flavours and gives me a headache afterwards. And so much butter that it bloats me. Plus the "vegetarian" options are lame.