Maybe this is just a matter of getting old, but lately I find myself just as bored with the trendy independent spots. There is an oppressively generic quality to, say, the typical microbrewery as of 2021.
The distinction seems to fall between between local or immigrant businesses, where character shines through, and the kind of place that some rich individual or couple retiring out of finance or software built because they had money to spare. Many of these places look like they have been designed off of a template.
Granted, I have never lived anywhere with a shortage of reliably decent restaurants. This is a problem that I notice more often when traveling, especially to places in the West or South.
There's this place in Northampton whose name I can't remember right now that has this "shabby chic" repurposed-industrial-furniture-and-mason-jars aesthetic that I've always found absolutely infuriating but that a decade ago was at least distinctive. Nowadays there are at least four or five such places in Northampton, plus at least one or two in pretty much every other city or town of any size that I spend time in.
Back when my father and stepmother, in full midlife crisis mode, moved to Mount Vernon (about five blocks north of where I currently live) in their attempt to be hip and enable Amtrak commuting to DC, they made a habit of going to whatever restaurants seemed most hip to them through their "lived in the suburbs since the late 80s" filter, which were naturally whatever locals tended to shy away from. I remember quite clearly a very unremarkable pub-cum-microbrewery that they kept going to even after moving out of the city, all the while discussing how horribly managed it was and how they'd inevitably go underwater. I still regularly eat somewhere right across the street from there and reflect on what that stands for in a gayborhood where all the gay and lesbian bars have been closing for a decade and my <500 square foot apartment is still a thousand a month.
I can't remember the last time I patronized a chain restaurant, nor do I care to.
