I think time is the most limiting factor in my life, so what you described is near impossible for me.
I live in NYC, and so when my wife and I want to go out to eat or enjoy some activity, factoring in the time it takes to travel (usually 40+ minutes each way to any place interesting in the city), we truly can't afford to tenuously choose the places we dine because we want to hedge our bets that the place we'll be at will be great. If it's not, we just spent several hours going to/at a subpar place when we know there are actually hundreds of really incredible places in the city that we could have gone to instead given we had the knowledge.
It doesn't help that we're both programmers who love to program in our spare time together so even during non-work periods we're also "working" to some extent, so usually on a daily basis the only free time we have is when we're eating or right before bed.
But I digress, TL;DR - Not everyone has the luxury of time and the social prowess to curate locations themselves.
Stack up an ordered list of fall-back options in close travel distance to each other. Try #1, if it looks dodgy fall back to #2, etc. Have a tolerable, reliable thing like McDonalds as a worst case fall-back.
I live in NYC, and so when my wife and I want to go out to eat or enjoy some activity, factoring in the time it takes to travel (usually 40+ minutes each way to any place interesting in the city), we truly can't afford to tenuously choose the places we dine because we want to hedge our bets that the place we'll be at will be great. If it's not, we just spent several hours going to/at a subpar place when we know there are actually hundreds of really incredible places in the city that we could have gone to instead given we had the knowledge.
It doesn't help that we're both programmers who love to program in our spare time together so even during non-work periods we're also "working" to some extent, so usually on a daily basis the only free time we have is when we're eating or right before bed.
But I digress, TL;DR - Not everyone has the luxury of time and the social prowess to curate locations themselves.