Sunday, February 27, 2005
Culture: The Food Trough
I love being a Southerner but that does not mean that there are some things about my culture that I would love to see changed. I'd like to skip over the obvious "white v. black," and extreme sexual prudishness blights on the culture of my birth and rather focus on the icon which is highly indicative of our being culinary morons: The Food Trough.
It goes by several names, Ryan's, Golden Corral, others. It's a restaurant which has a menu, but no one uses it. It has servers, but no one really needs them. The main reason people go is to eat from a large trough that runs down the middle of the restaurant. You pay a fat, I mean flat, fee to eat as much slop from the trough as you can pack into your "what a good value!"-screaming gut. Anything you don't eat you can just put in the trash with no consequence or additional fee. And these restaurants draw hicks much like turds draw flies.
I suppose I'm only bitter because we tried opening up a restaurant in a location which was 80% hicks. Guess where they would rather eat -- the "good value" and highly-predictable Food Trough, or the strange, risky, "ethnic" restaurant?
It goes by several names, Ryan's, Golden Corral, others. It's a restaurant which has a menu, but no one uses it. It has servers, but no one really needs them. The main reason people go is to eat from a large trough that runs down the middle of the restaurant. You pay a fat, I mean flat, fee to eat as much slop from the trough as you can pack into your "what a good value!"-screaming gut. Anything you don't eat you can just put in the trash with no consequence or additional fee. And these restaurants draw hicks much like turds draw flies.
I suppose I'm only bitter because we tried opening up a restaurant in a location which was 80% hicks. Guess where they would rather eat -- the "good value" and highly-predictable Food Trough, or the strange, risky, "ethnic" restaurant?
