Lots of folks celebrate by going out to eat. We don't; it's practically our favorite thing in life to hang out here at home. My family did one Thanksgiving at a restaurant (actually a country club) for reasons I now can't recall, and I am here to say that it was a dismal experience. I have marked exactly one New Year's Eve in a restaurant, and you can count me out on repeating that experience, too. It has been my great good fortune not ever to have celebrated Christmas dinner in a restaurant, and I plan to keep it that way.

Home is always better. For one, you already know where the bathroom is, should you need it, and for two, you don't have to dress up as much. Well, I'm entitled to my opinion.

Everyone has interesting restaurant stories, and I am not immune to the charm of these. I have a few myself. One of the most elegant restaurants I ever ate in was in Pittsburgh (it's true!). It was a balmy late September evening, and I happened to be dating the guy who'd just been crowned our university's Homecoming King. He and I and the Homecoming Queen and her beau all went out to dinner -- part of the package of things the King and Queen won for representing the school.

While I remember nothing of the actual meal, I distinctly recall feeling ever so cosmopolitan when, between courses, the waiter brought out tiny sorbets and placed them in front of us. There were three or four different flavors. Each time he put these ping pong ball-sized scoops in front of us, he intoned in a voice suited to church, "To cleanse and brighten the palate." Then he whisked his dapper self back into the kitchen and left us to our own devices.

After the first notice of cleansing and brightening, the four of us just sat there for a minute. We'd never had the experience of being told exactly what a food was for (why did he not tell us that the main course was "to fill the stomach and satisfy the appetite"?). It brought us up short, frankly. But what the heck, the stuff looked good, and was good, and we ate it right up. I couldn't tell you if it did actually cleanse and brighten anything, but you'll never catch me complaining about a little mini dessert break in the middle of a meal.

A restaurant in Sedona, Arizona, still gleams brightly in my mind as having served up one of the more memorable afternoons I've passed. Although I can't remember individual dishes, I do dimly recall something amazingly savory with lamb and potatoes. Before the meal, there were hard-cooked quail eggs (beautiful little things, and delicious!), and for dessert, a chocolate pastry thing that was like angel's wings on a plate. It didn't hurt that the restaurant was set hard by a creek in the middle of the woods and that the interior made you feel as though you'd miraculously woken up in a country home in France.

Of course, there's always the other end of the spectrum. Take my New Year's Eve experience, for example. I was in college, and my then-boyfriend insisted that we needed to spend lots of money and dress up in untold finery in order to actually have a good time. I must have been in a coma when I said OK to this, but say it I did.

My main memory of the evening is that among the sea of polyester-draped tables, ours turned out to be closest to the band's 11-story speakers. I sat there in my red satin gown with puffy sleeves (well, it was the 1980s) and felt like weeping over my not-even-good-enough-to-be-called-mediocre dinner. The couple we went with got obscenely drunk to the point that we actually stopped speaking to them for the remainder of the evening. And, hey! No need to brush your teeth after the meal, as the band was busy murdering swing and jazz standards at decibel levels that shook that pesky plaque right off.

Another cautionary tale involved a situation wherein a friend and I had agreed to meet for lunch halfway between my house and hers. The shopping area where we met had half a dozen restaurants, but most of them were of the carnivore-in-heaven variety: Steaks R Us, Western Cowboy Lariat Lasso Roadhouse, Burgers 'n' More, that sort of thing.

We settled on the lone restaurant that seemed to offer a little variety. It was a national non-fast-food chain, and within five minutes, I was sorry for ever having darkened its door. When the waitress brought our drinks, a breeze happened to push my napkin to the floor in front of her. Whereupon Suzy Q. Waitress picked it the napkin, plopped it back on the table in front of me, and said brightly, "Sorry about that! Now! What can I get you ladies for lunch?"

"Wait a minute," I said in disbelief. "Could I get a new napkin first?" The expression she turned to me was as blank as a sheet of paper, and I had to explain that I needed a napkin which maybe -- call me wacky! call me a stickler for cleanliness! -- had not been in contact with the floor.

My last restaurant-from-hell event took place recently. My husband Michael and our son Henry and I had gone to visit Michael's brother Dan, his wife Nancy, and their daughter Sarah. The six of us went to the Flats in Cleveland, an attractive riverside area with lots of restaurants to choose from. It was suppertime, and we wandered into Dick's. The waiters and waitresses all wore silly hats and wigs, and we thought, oh, good, here's a place that welcomes kids. They even had a kids' menu.

This innocent supposition was shattered almost immediately. Our waiter complained about having to serve us, cursed loudly in front of the children, gave us a snarky look for being asked to wipe off the table (which was sticky with ketchup), and finally flung a wiping rag at us to do the job ourselves. Upon so doing, he snarled, "Look, folks, I clean the table after I get the order, not before. I'll get to it when I get to it." Seeing our looks of dismay, he rolled his eyes and moaned sarcastically, "Oh, crrryyyyy!"

We are not a group to be left speechless, but we had absolutely no idea how to respond to this treatment other than to leave. On our way out, I told the manager in no uncertain terms why we were leaving -- and he rolled his eyes, too!

Well! When we decided upon Fagan's restaurant a few minutes later, we heard from the hostess there that Dick's is supposed to be like that. They encourage the wait staff to be lippy and rude, and apparently (amazingly!) some people like it. Not so amazingly, some people don't; the hostess told us about a 400-lb. man who'd gone to Dick's, only to be insulted about his weight -- and how he'd promptly beaten up the waiter who'd ventured the rude comments.

We don't have many restaurants here in town, and we wish there were more of a choice in that area. Still, after some of the restaurant experiences I've had, I'm really not complaining. I'd rather eat at home, anyway.

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