Peak dining experience
A few years ago I was in Baltimore for a wedding. Beforehand a bunch of the attendees met up to tour the guinness brewery. When we got there the brewery wasn't taking walk-ins for the tour (because covid). They said we could sit in the garden outside and order beer and stuff though.
It was cloudy and misting on-and-off, so we weren't sure about the outside bit. But the gardens were nicely maintained and there were picnic tables with big umbrellas, so we decided to give it a shot. Folks kinda sorted themselves so that people who were more prepared for the cold ended up at the ends of the table, and everyone else took the middle.
Each table had a QR code, which opened up to an ordering page. You'd put in your payment info ahead of time and then order things which would get brought out to the table as they were ready.
It was kinda a late lunch time and they had a kitchen with pub food, so I figured a lot of the people would be eating. I got a beer which came pretty quickly and waited for everyone else to figure out their order. People were at different points in their days so some folks had already eaten, some were coming as others were going, people were deep in conversation, etc. So I figured ordering/splitting the bill was going to be complicated. Then I realized that we didn't need to wait for each other to order - we all had our own tabs so we didn't need to coordinate around the waiter coming for drinks and food and whatnot.
What followed was several hours of just hanging out and chatting with my friends. People came and went. We'd grabbed a few tables and folks would just float between them, making sure to return to their original table to meet their orders but otherwise free to roam. We didn't need to know our party size to avoid inconveniencing the waiters. When your beer was empty you could just "push the beer button" and another one would be out quickly. If you liked someone else's appetizer you could just order one for yourself and it'd be out in a few minutes. The space was big and the tables spaced out for covid, and the whole thing was in a decently nice garden. And at the end there weren't uncomfortable moment around settling the bill like arguing about who Shared The Nachos or hunting down who ordered stray items.
That was a memorably fantastic dining experience. When I started writing this I assumed the food was great, but looking through my photos it looks like I got a stringy brisket sandwich and some barbecue chips. I think the experience was colored by the excitement of seeing many of my friends for the first time since covid started a year and a half earlier, being in a low-pressure, calming (and car-free) open space, and not having any anxieties about people coming and going or needing to tortuously split the bill afterwards.
My dad enjoys high-quality service at a restaurant more than the food itself - he loves going out out to fancy dinners where the waiter falls all over themselves to be helpful and laughs at all your jokes and wants to hear your opinions on the wine list. I fell far from that tree. The best dining experience that comes to mind is one in drizzling rain, with impersonal (but quick!) service, and so-so food. But all of those traded off to make the event about the other people, not the food or service.
This seems to be a brewery-specific thing. People tell me that Gravity Heights does (did?) something similar, but it's a long trek by public transit. Last year I modified a work trip to fly me back to LAX so I could see Aunty Donna with some friends. They picked me up from the airport and brought me to a Firestone Walker that worked the same way - We just scanned a QR code for food and beer and had a great few hours catching up on life until we headed to the show.
Restaurants in Europe also felt the same way - you can sit in a nice outdoor space and are welcome to hang out for several hours, though the ordering is still through a human waiter.
I'm not sure I have a big point at the end of this. Maybe it's that living in a younger/more touristy town has made it so our local restaurants are pressured to be subtly hostile to encourage table turnover (loud, crowded, hard seats, pushy waiters). Maybe the USA doesn't generally have big nice garden-y open areas like the Guinness brewery - or maybe I just haven't gone to the right parts of the USA. Or maybe it was just a magic mix of traveling/seeing my friends for the first time after covid that made it so special.
Whatever the cause, I'd go out of my way and pay extra to get that fluid, social, outdoor, QR-code-ordering kind of dining experience again.