Why Do Modern Restaurants Suck?
New Restaurant, Celina TX.
I’m from a time and place where a date meant dinner and a movie. Dinner was for talking. The movie was, maybe, for holding hands. Afterward you walked and talked a little more, then you took her home, and if you were lucky you got a kiss, and you thought about that kiss the whole drive back.
I have no idea how that evening could happen today.
The modern restaurant is a polished concrete box with exposed ductwork and no wall between the dining room and the kitchen, which guarantees the constant noise of standing next to a car crusher at a junkyard. The chairs are flat, cold steel. The benches are hard. The air is freezing. You order from a menu your phone pulled up after scanning a QR code, and your “server” is now a courier for a tablet so you can pay, usually before you’ve finished eating. (Also: I don’t think we stopped calling them waiters and waitresses because the words were sexist. We stopped because they don’t wait on you anymore. Get the fuck out.)
Nothing about the modern restaurant says, “Please linger. Have a conversation. Enjoy yourselves.” Nothing even says, “We like you.”
How did this happen?
When I was in high school in Dallas in the early 1980s, Chili’s was cool. No, really. It started here. There were only a few of them, one in the city and a couple in the ’burbs, and they didn’t feel like a chain yet. The menu was a yellow 3x5 index card. You could get any combination of chili, burger, and hot dog you wanted, plus tortilla chips or French fries. Coke and beer. And a dessert in a frozen mug that, I learned later, was soft-serve ice cream with brownie mix stirred in.
It. Was. Awesome.
A lot of my dates started there, and those dates were awesome too. We could talk. The booths were leather, and there were walls between us and the kitchen. After The Thing or The Big Chill, you had something to walk around and talk about. What the fuck does anyone have to say after an Avengers movie? “Hemsworth’s sure been working out”?
Somewhere along the way, restaurant owners decided to maximize table turnover on the theory that it would bring profit. Judging by the bankruptcies, it didn’t. My pet theory on why: a turnover model assumes someone is always waiting for a table. I almost never wait for a table anymore, and I rarely see anyone else waiting either. We waited back then because it was worth it. Today I can’t be bothered to wait ten minutes for something that cold and flat. I’m only there because I don’t want to cook tonight, or because I’m out running errands or on a photowalk.
The restaurant experience I knew at seventeen still exists, at steakhouses with luxury prices. You can speak softly there and be heard. Most of us just can’t afford to go every week.
Chili’s is still around. It’s everywhere now. I don’t go. The menu is a laminated phone book, and you order through a touch screen at your table. I’d rather remember the index card, the leather booths, and the girl across the table.