@RaisedByPangolins
I'm aghast at the number of adults who think that enjoying a glass of wine with your dinner is tantamount to an addiction.
I think the point isn’t that a glass of wine with dinner is an addiction, but that even if the food in a restaurant was amazing, you wouldn’t go there because you can’t drink that points to an addiction. Once you associate alcohol with eating and don’t enjoy eating without wine then the focus has become more about the wine than the meal.
I’ll happily say that I’m addicted to food! Every trip I take, every holiday, meeting friends or family etc, it becomes focussed on the food. To me a holiday where I didn’t get to eat amazing things would be no holiday at all and I wouldn’t want to go. But I know that’s probably disordered eating.
I think the bigger point is that very very few restaurants that refuse to serve alcohol will be ‘amazing’
Even the very best Indian restaurants in Tooting and Brick Lane are BYOB
A restaurant which for whatever reason has banned alcohol from the premises is not thinking about the wider dining experience so for me, it would be shorthand for the food being substandard as well
I’m happy to be proved wrong but in decades of eating out, I’ve never come across a restaurant that didn’t see good food and good wine as synonymous
And of course I’ve eaten out countless times without actually drinking, either during pregnancy or illness or out of respect for other guests I’m with
But that’s not the same as a restaurant that takes an active anti-alcohol stance
And also, restaurants make a lot of their profits on drinks sales
So without alcohol to boost margins, they will have to make the food a lot more expensive
A dry restaurant opened in London recently to great fanfare, but a few months in, all the reviews are the same - the food is too expensive, the mocktails don’t go with food and the whole thing is style over substance