Given The Villages' exceptional Amenities, finishing #7 in the nation for Retirement Communities with good local Cuisine is outstanding! ALL of the other places that are listed don't offer Amenities that even come close to those offered by The Villages and most of these places are in areas with much higher Costs of Living.

LOL. . . as we age, we slowly lose sensory abilities. . could be one of the reasons why normal food all tastes the same, and why what we liked when we were younger now takes more seasoning to taste the same.

Personally i do know my taste sensory ability is declining, because the amount of my favorite spices i love i need more and more of to enjoy the taste. I have a hard time tasting most spices in the very small amounts recommended in recipes. .

but we are all built differently

CT actually has the better pizza joints. Says my taste buds and National rankings. But you can’t go wrong in NYC for the HUGE slices!

Retirement communities and low quality food go hand in hand. As most retirees go for their bottom dollar.
It doesn’t help that our American food quality/standards basically suck. What the FDA allows in our food is criminal! Have you noticed the food coloring names have been changed? Gone are Red 40, Blue 5 - in name only. Now they are allowed to use benign names tho the dye didn’t change one bit.
Much of our food can’t be sold in Europe , due to their realistic food quality standards. Even our fast food chains there had to leave out/change the recipe to sell there. GMO is a clear example.
Don’t get me started on our restaurant suppliers. Ever notice the Sysco truck stopping at both high end and low end restaurants?

Judging by the size of stomachs I see here, I'd guess the Villages restaurants are serving decent meals.

What about?
 

The Golden Corral???????

Seriously? OMG!

We like Blue Fin, Chop House, and Prima but after a couple cocktails most of the others are fine. I'm more into the service end of restaurants. Good service and mediocre food is not good and good food with poor service is not good therefore the pre-dinner cocktails.

If I'm not mistaken, 3 of the 7 places listed are assisted or independent living facilities where the facility prepares the food for you. I don't think you can fairly compare the food at restaurants in TV to a facility where you're paying close to $10k/month to live.

BRAVO PIZZA is authentic Italian Pie! Yum!

So glad I grew up in a farm where we learned to eat any kind of food put on the table by my Mom. To this day, I still don’t have to eat “fine dining food” to enjoy a good meal.

I'm with you on that. Up north we belonged to a country club and the food was terrible. I often told the club manager to get rid of the chef and hire a cook so you can offer good old fashioned homemade meals. They didn't fire the chef but he was having homemade old fashioned meals offered once a week and it was a hit.

The problem with restaurants in The Villages is that MOST of them get the same stuff from the same distributors, and have the same menus with minor variations. There are a few "good" restaurants, but they're also expensive and not some place the average retiree would be able to afford on their monthly dine-out rotation. I really love Coastal del Mar. I'd really love to be able to afford to eat there more often than once every 4 months.

Pizza - nope. I'm going crap, because there is nothing good on the east side of the Villages. There's Gio's on 301 but it's not a take-out option when it's cold by the time I can get it home and why would I want to drive 30 minutes to get pizza anyway? Where I come from there was one in walking distance, no matter which town or part of town I lived in. And most of them were excellent.

There's very limited diversity. Zero Indian food. Zero Syrian or Middle-eastern food. Even the middle-eastern food truck that shows up at town square events serves their falafel sandwiches on GREEK pita, which isn't anything like syrian pita. And no one serves anything with tahini. There exists no decent meatball sub in The Villages. Sure, maybe you can get them outside the bubble but there are none within it. There is no GOOD lasagna in The Villages. Carrabbas overcooks their noodles, and Takis "lasagna" is actually pastitsio, not lasagna. Thankfully my sister in law taught me her recipe so we can have GOOD lasagna when I make a pan every 6-8 weeks. But it'd be really nice to have someone else do the dishes for a change when we're in the mood for lasagna.

The Chinese take-outs are abysmal, Koyame is the only chinese restaurant I would buy from and even they're only "decent." Their egg rolls are blech and they don't add strips of pork to their wonton soup like they should.

But hey you can get a $15 cheese burger or $28 strip steak or $25 chicken alfredo at any of 4000 restaurants that get their products from Sysco. And the same undercooked broccoli with no seasoning.

Stavros has excellent pizza, it just happens to be outside the bubble but well worth getting in the car and taking the 15 min drive.

We’re going to give Roberto’s a try.