Texas' Seemingly Bottomless Appetite for Top-Heavy Restaurants

big-racks-grapevine

Add this to the extensive and growing “Evidence that Western Civilization is Doomed” list.

Occasionally, as Mrs. Blather and I drive through what’s left of the U.S. 114 – U.S. 121 interchange in Grapevine (it’s currently blown up to allow for a long-needed extreme makeover) one of us will shake a head and comment on the proliferation of boob-themed restaurants there.

recent post on the Business Insider blog called  them “Breastaurants.” (Warning: pics accompanying article are a carnival of bare midriffs and pierced navals.)

First there was just a Hooters there–the creepy, pervy grandfather of all boob-themed eateries–nestled amid TGI Friday’s, California Pizza Kitchen, Don Pablo’s and a half dozen other national chains.

But success invariably triggers imitation. And the Hooters chain has been wildly successful. Now the TGI Friday’s has been replaced by something called “The Tilted Kilt” which, according that Business Insider article, is clearly appealing to the quasi-pedophilic “school girl uniform” fetish crowd. And across the road we now have a “Bone Daddy’s House of Smoke” (get it).

Among the other establishments infesting what has become the restaurant industry’s fastest growing category you’ll find “Twin Peaks,” “Brick House Tavern,” “Big Racks BBQ,” and, God help us, “Mugs ‘n Jugs.” And sadly, Texas seems to be the place where a lot of these chains are being birthed.

Surely they’re about to run out of euphemisms for mammary glands. Sadly, I won’t be surprised to see a Jello-themed dessert shop pop up on the corner carrying the name “Jiggle.”

Yes, I know to some I sound like Mr. Prudence McUptight. But let’s face it, these are basically a halfway house, next-best-thing for guys who would actually like to be at a strip bar for lunch. But these are supposedly respectable enough that businessmen can put them on their expense reports.

This whole phenomenon raises a number of troubling questions about our culture. First, what kind of culture produces men who frequent these places? And what kind of culture produces an endless supply of young women eager to work in them?

As I’ve asked in past posts: Where are the feminists? Oh that’s right, they’ve been too busy keeping partial-birth providers legally in business and making sure we all say “chairperson” to muster a peep as an entire generation of American women embrace the idea that the highest thing they can aspire to is to be an object of lust.

On a lighter note . . .

About 15 years ago, when I was the Media Pastor at a large church up in Minneapolis, the men on the pastoral staff had a December tradition. We would take a Friday off and go as a group to the Mall of America to Christmas shop for our wives.

For some reason, I missed this particular outing, but when lunch time came, the guys decided to explore the new restaurants that had just opened up in the huge mall’s restaurant row. There were lot’s of “theme” restaurants at the Mall of America, including a recently opened “Rainforest Cafe” and a “Planet Hollywood.”

Instead, this group of about eight pastors decided to check out a new “owl” themed restaurant. Called Hooters. They had been seated and had ordered before they began to connect the dots and realized, to their deep mortification, that the theme of the restaurant wasn’t owls at all.

They prayed no church members would see them in there and when the food arrived set a world record for eating.