By Gary Orlando

One of the guilty pleasures we still have as Americans is the ability to have a nice meal out. Whether you are very well to do, middle class, or just bordering on making ends meet, we as a people love dining out. We go alone if we have to, or with our spouses and our family, our friends, and even fellow co-workers, and we all enjoy an evening out.

With the current explosion of new shopping centers and malls of all types including those quaint "village" types being constructed across America, big business is vying for your hard-earned restaurant dollars. You see the ads on TV, in the movie theaters, magazines, and on billboards promising you a fantastic dining experience. With specials that sound almost too good to be true. But are they? Is the food going to be that good? What about the service?

My wife and I are firmly entrenched in the middle class and love dining out. But in the last ten years or so we have taken a different tack in picking the restaurants we choose to visit, both in our home town and when we’re traveling. How about trying out a place that may do little or no conventional advertising? Their only advertising may be by word of mouth.

We have two different situations that we deal with. One involves dining out in our local area, and the second is when we are traveling. We prefer the small and sometimes not so small mom-and-pop restaurants. These types of restaurants are locally owned and since we do not live in a tourist area, these owners have to work very hard to just stay open. We probably have about two dozen favorite restaurants and most all of them have been around for more than ten years. Why do we patronize them? Well quite honestly, the food is always very good, the service is good, and they have a good score on their health rating. Cost is comparable and sometimes even better than the chains. We get to know the owners and the staff, and more importantly, they get to know us. These types of restaurants offer a nice, usually quiet dining experience, and we hardly ever have to wait to get in and get seated.

The second situation involves our travels; we do a fair amount of traveling inside the US from coast to coast. So because we prefer the locally owned restaurants at home, we look for the same type of establishment while we travel. What we do is ask the locals—hotel desk clerks, store personnel, welcome center workers, even gas station attendants—where they eat and what they like. We have had some really good meals away from home like this. If it is around meal time, we can look at the parking lot to see how many cars are there and whether they are licensed locally. This cannot be over emphasized—if it’s meal time and there aren’t many local people dining there, there must be something wrong!

For example, when heading home from our annual New York City trip last month, we were in the mood for buffalo wings. When we got into this small town around lunch time we started looking around. While entering town, immediately on the right we saw a small restaurant that specialized in wings, which I will call restaurant A. It even had the word "wings" in the name of the restaurant. Across the road and down a little we came upon restaurant B, a pizza place that happened to have "wings" plastered on the window along with ads for other menu items. We finished our drive around town and decided to pass restaurant B and head back to restaurant A to check it out. With the word "wings" in the name of the place, it had to be good, right?

Well, it was about 12:30 and there was only one person in the place. It didn’t take us long to decide that they were not getting our lunch money. We then headed back to restaurant B and their parking lot was almost full, with almost every license plate local. That’s where we ate and had a very good meal of not only delicious wings but also fantastic pizza. I not only enjoyed the meal but had a nice conservation with the owner. Restaurant A was a fancy place with a cool logo in a fairly new mall. Restaurant B was a small stand-alone building, not so new or fancy, but they sure had good food, and the owner was there and served us himself.

This is our basic strategy and it seems to work well for us. We actually have a very good track record, although we’ve had a couple of meals that were memorable for being memorably bad. But for the most part, locally owned restaurants tend to care more about their customers and the quality of their dining experience. If you go to Applebee’s down the street from where you live and then take a vacation to Disney World and visit Applebee’s again, they’ll have the same menu at both places, and th