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Notes -
There's something I wanted to talk about for a while. Desserts.
No, not the arid terrains with sand dunes and camels. The sweet things people sometimes eat at the end of the meal. Those ones.
So, when I came to live in the US (a while ago), I found the dessert game in the most restaurants - even upscale ones (not the Michelin level - I am not rich enough to go to those) - is pitifully bad. In general, in the States, you can have a good meal in many places, serving wide variety of cuisines. I have had hundreds of excellent meals. Finding an excellent dessert was much harder.
Most places have chocolate cake, maybe a cheesecake, maybe ice cream. Crème brûlée if they are fancy (over half of them won't make it right though). Maybe couple more options, but that's it. Nothing to write home about.
Cafés are even worse. Unless it's one of those rare specialized shops, you get muffins, croissants, maybe lemon loafs, and those enormous cookies whose point I still can't get. If they feel fancy, maybe some French macarons. But usually that's it. For any real variety - and the world of pastry and patisserie is no less varied than the world of main dishes - you need to go to a specialized shop. Which are quite rare. I have probably a dozen of cake shops around - but I don't need a whole frickin wedding cake! I just want something small and nice to have with my coffee. But within at least 20 minute drive of my place, I see maybe one place with decent variety (which is also closed half of the week - probably because lack of patrons?). Despite over half a million people living around. Back when I lived in Silicon Valley (~3 mln people?), I knew some decent places, but also not too many, especially outside of SF.
So why is this happening? Do Americans hate desserts? Do they just not care? Or am I just not looking at the right places and it is my ignorance that is causing me to suffer (as usual)?
I remember when I first visited the US (even longer while ago, over 20 years now) it was nearly the same situation with beer. It's not that you couldn't get a decent beer at all. It's that you can't expect a random or even upscale place to have even a half decent beer game, and you needed to go to special places for weird people to get a good beer. Now the situation has been, thankfully, greatly changed. Even in a random pub you can have one-two decent beers on draft, more in cans/bottles, any self-respecting restaurant would have some local crafts and some nationally popular choices, a good pub would have dozens, and it's not unheard of to encounter a multi-page beer menu in a non-specialized place. And even the most mundane supermarkets would bother to present a respectable selection.
Could this happen to the sweets too? I understand the complexities (beer is much easier to pack and preserve than sweets), but maybe there's still hope?
Not it hasn't. You get to choose between an overhopped hipster ale and an overly sweet lager. It's supposed to be the other way around, you heathens!
I certainly see where you're going there - overhopping is a thing, and even I, who actually loves bitter beers, need to watch out. But many places helpfully publish IBUs, and for those that don't there are the wonders of Internet (like Untappd) and even when I do regular shopping between Costco, Whole Foods and couple of smaller local stores, I can pick up something decent that doesn't go over the deep end. And it become common for restaurants to have actual beer menu where the choice isn't just "Guinness or lager?" - so while the phenomena you mention are real, it's possible to avoid them and still have a good choice in beer.
The trouble is when you go a hip place and look at the (helpful) IBU ratings on the 20 beer menu -- only to find that there are 19 overhopped lager/IPA choices, plus one boring lager.
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