If you know the restaurants offering the best value food around your region takes only cash, and you need credit card spending in order to get sign up bonus, what would you do? Choose a restaurant accepting credit card but offering crap food, or forgo the bonus?

Typically cash-only restaurants are inexpensive. They're street vendors, quick lunch lines, etc. I try not to commit to spending targets so aggressive that I need to find ways to charge even small purchases or make purchases I normally would not make.

I think Peter Lugar's only accepts cash or their own credit card.

I've run into a few places that only take cash and they could be expensive or inexpensive.

Why would you spend money (either cash or by cc) on a crap product? I'd pay cash for the good food and find another way to use my cc to get the bonus.

I go to the restaurants I like. I don't care if they only accepts cash, cards, cheques, silver, gold or goats. I'll bring the right currency/method of payment with me.

IME, most restaurants not accepting a very common type of payment usually have a warning on their website or send one out when you make a reservation.

You will miss fantastic places (both hotels and restaurants) if you stick to credit card usage.

I haven't seen any high end restaurants that only accepted cash. There are a few inexpensive places here that are like that. I've eaten there. The food was good.

If I was hypothetically on the last day of a CC promo and 1 meal short of reaching a spend bonus, I would look for an alternative to spending $10-15 on "crap" food. If I couldn't find one, I'd buy the "crap" food. I probably wouldn't eat it though.

These days with Square virtually everywhere, I come across fewer and fewer cash only businesses.

have the good dinner and pay cash. Spend somewhere else.

I feel that the places that have minimums and/or charge extra are a bigger problem now. Granted, they're still not that common yet but I run into them on occasion. When I do, though, I pay cash and tend not to go back (unless, of course, the food makes it worth the hassle).

I don't and don't plan to churn credit cards, so cash is NBD.

This.

If you're having to spend money you wouldn't otherwise have spent, it's worth a careful cost-benefit analysis to ask yourself if you're actually spending more than the bonus is worth...to take it one step further, as an example: Let's say I get 50k mile airline bonus, which maybe is worth $500. Let's say I make $475 non-normal purchases trying to get the bonus. So it's only worth $25...but I ALSO could have just bought the airline ticket and got points on another card.

Use any numbers that work, I was just using simple numbers vs. actual to illustrate.

As far as cash-only restaurants, fine with me, but it gets annoying at a high end place, just because you never know how much cash you'll need if you're enjoying yourself, and it kind of stalls the evening to have to run to an ATM.

If you are in small cities, most of the restaurants will accept cash.

Almost every restaurant will accept cash. That's not the problem...

This is an area where you can't generalize. There are cities where hot dog carts take CC's because nobody carries cash and they can't sell without the capability. There are also cities where many high-end restaurants don't take CC's, either because they don't want to deal with the cost of interchange fees and CC disputes.

Unless you are on business travel and have no option but to eat at a restauarant, it is usually a discretionary expense and twisting your life into a pretzel to score a few points in some program is likely a poor monetary and even poorer personal choice.

I eat where I want to eat and use the payment form that suits me best if it's available. But, I can't imagine passing on my restaurant of choice even if I had to use an ATM and pay a fee.

Wait, Peter Luger's has their own branded CC?

Yes, they do, unless I'm misinformed.