Well... if you define "sucked" to mean most restaurants served short order diner food, a la Denny's then, yeah. That's mostly what you would find prior to WWII with some local variation prompted by patterns of immigration. Many small towns had one "regular" restaurant and an "exotic" option like Chinese or Italian. After WWII was when you started to see a large increase in diversity of food choices.You nailed it. Not sure how long you have lived in PNW - and not focused on one type of food - but in general restaurants have sucked, especially in smaller towns until the restaurant renaissance - probably started when late baby boomers (b 1955-1964) became affluent middle agers ca 2005 or so. There are many laggards to this day. And they made it through C-19
I don't know if I could live in a world without Mexican or Thai food.
