frame.jpgThis past weekend my wife and I headed out of town to get some lunch.  You know, that sounds odd even as I write it.  Why would we have to go out of town to get something to eat, you may wonder.  Well, it appears our town has the highest bad restaurant to good restaurant ratio in America.

These places think their definition of “down home Southern cookin’” is somehow a good and just thing to threaten innocent people with.  With vegetables boiled yellow and shapeless and an extra heapin’ helpin’ of bland in everything else, going out to dinner around here is sort of like eating a giant plate of Gerber’s baby food.

What makes it worse is that this is such the polar opposite of what you see on TV that your expectations are unreasonably high from the get-go.  You see happy families enjoying mounds of fried chicken, ribs, and other delicious looking (and possibly actually delicious) food.  Therein lies your folly.  You have hoodwinked yourself into thinking that this is how all (or even most) Southern food must be.  Picture an alien landing on Earth on Christmas morning and happily reporting back what he saw.  Yep, your viewpoint is that distorted.  Most of the restaurant food here is like being trapped in England in about the year 1100 - before trade routes brought much needed flavor to the island from the East.

I am not necessarily saying I would prefer to be waterboarded rather than to eat a plate of our local food, but I really can’t think of a way to end this sentence truthfully.  I honestly think that even Oliver Twist would have said “Please, Sir, may I sit quietly in the corner and starve to death instead?” if the orphanage was run by one of these local restaurant owners.

Surely, there must be a few places locally to go to enjoy a nice sandwich or whatever.  Yeah, with about 50 to choose from you’d think so.  Never mind “statistical clustering”, this town has reached some sort of Blandness Event Horizon where all flavor and appetizing presentation is sucked from the menu shot into oblivion and lost forever.  I mean, even the pizza places are terrible and I am super not picky about pizza.

You may wonder If the food is actually so bad then how do the restaurants stay in business?  Well, my theory is that the town is caught in an Insipidness Feedback Loop (IFL). Here’s how it works: At some point in the town’s past someone (we will call him Zeke) opened the first restaurant and it was “okay, I guess”.  Not great, but at least you could get out of the house and have a drink and some hot food once in a while. Since it was the only game in town, it became popular.  One of the patrons may have said to him or herself with a burst of undeserved overconfidence “This food is okay, I guess, but this town needs another restaurant and people tell me I make a fair Thanksgiving turkey.  Heck, If Zeke can start his own place, then so can I”.

And so the downhill slide began.

A few more places popped up and bored self-important civic league members began Johnny Appleseed out entirely too many “Best in Town” awards.  With the bar set so low to begin with, it was easy for any of these food joints to accumulate any number of these prestigious and meaningless frameables.  Getting a prize was a crystallizing event for these places.  After all, an award says “Good Job!  Keep up the good work.  Don’t change a thing.”

So they stay the course and proudly display their “Voted Best Apple Pie or Whatever in Town” certificate.  This causes people to say “Wow, I didn’t know Emma’s won an award… I always thought the food was kinda crummy.  But what do I know? Let’s go to Emma’s”.  After a while of this (say a couple of decades) this sub-par blandness and how it is prepared actually becomes a “local style”.  While no one genuinely enjoys it, it seems to be what everyone else likes (just look at the awards, after all).  After a little while longer people have become so accustomed to “blah” food that they would probably burn you for witchcraft if you added oregano or (God help you) a bay leaf to your spaghetti sauce.  It may even be fatal to some of the older members of the community - too much of a system shock…

Wow, this got ranty quick.  Sorry about that.  I originally intended to write about the awesome Buckingham Palace Guard-like wait staff at this restaurant we went to over the weekend.  Maybe later this week.    Â