Like regional cuisine? Come to
Club
DMZ
, a North Korean-styled eatery, where you’ll dine on rice. Just rice.
Call ahead to make sure they’re not out of rice.
While waiting in an orderly line
for your rice, take the opportunity to pledge loyalty to The Great Leader Who
Makes Rice Possible.
Make
sure to plan to arrive in time for the daily parade, when the entire wait staff
combines with the kitchen staff for choreographed mass gymnastics displays.
Your dining experience seems to
never end at
Quagmire
, an authentic Afghani bistro.Place your order,
then watch in amazement as competing factions in the kitchen battle for control
over your meal!
And tell Grandpa to bring his
reading glasses, because the menu is in
twenty
different
languages!
Feeling blue? Nurture your
depression at
Wallow
. Miserable, hung over servers begrudgingly will
wait on you and your friends, while the state-of-the-art sound system plays
Nick Drake and My Chemical Romance.
During their nightly Crappy Hour, all
the drink specials are named after celebrity suicides– “Another round of ‘Sylvias’?”
The lighting in the dining room is an exact recreation of a Norwegian winter.
Conservatives will be lined up
around the block to get into the
Grand Old Pub
, the only restaurant
dedicated to traditional American family values.
You may have to be patient waiting
for your meal, as the Republican Party’s anti-gay stance and removal of
undocumented workers has left the restaurant woefully under-staffed.
History buffs will shout “Huzzah!”
at the grand opening of
The K Man
, a restaurant devoted to the legacy of
our eleventh president, James K. Polk.
Gleefully
relive the years 1845-1849, and explore waistline expansionism as you try their
signature omelette, the ‘Manifest Destiny,’ featuring a side of Texas Toast.
At (Law and) Order Up!, you’ll be
greeted by a pair of servers—one a sarcastic, jaded veteran, and the other a
headstrong rookie who won’t play by the rules.
Both of them will come back about twenty
minutes after you order to “verify some details and ask you a few questions.”
A Word From Our Sponsor
Most food advertising
seems pointless to me. I don’t think I’ve ever watched an ad and then felt
compelled to amend the grocery list for that week. Like most of us, in my
foraging, I look for what’s on sale.
That’s why I think the
only food ads on TV should be for places that deliver. Otherwise, we can all
figure out what foods to buy on our own. Why advertise something like
mayonnaise when anybody who wants mayonnaise can probably find mayonnaise
when
they go to the store
.
And I don’t imagine
many people are swayed by an ad to switch
brands
of mayo just because of
an ad— “Hey, darling. Did you notice this other brand when you were at the
market? Why the hell are we eating
Best Foods
? Why didn’t you tell me
there were other options?”
The first food ads were
no doubt cave drawings that probably used the same approach we see today:
Og
kill extra big bear.
Many
pieces available.
Will
Put on fire for you. Act now.
If
glowing orb in sky three times, meat gone.
Later, in the Middle
Ages, you might have seen hand written flyers saying things like “Get thine
mutton here! Our mutton has beene worm-free for a fortnight!”
Even as recently as the
past century, food advertising was at least honest, by virtue of its
simplicity:Ads told you where to get something, how much of it you get, and how
much it costs.
The
main difference in ads
today
is the emphasis on what isn’t in the
package—“No Transfats!” “Zero cholesterol!” “Fifty percent less enzyme-modified
hyperpolyunsaturated thiamine mononitrate than other brands!” I just think
that, in the past, there was a little more emphasis on what
was
inside
the box.
The
worst part of most food ads is the slogan, a particularly insidious species of
earworm that can stick to your brain worse than the hook from a Hall and Oates
song.
So
many of these are stuck in my mind that I can’t walk through the grocery store
without one of them bubbling up from the depths (incidentally, the Bubble-Up
slogan was “A Kiss of Lemon, A Kiss of Lime.” Seriously, I wish I didn’t know
these things).
The understated slogans
work best for me, like Campbell’s “Soup is good food.” That’s perfect! No
made-up words, no miraculous claims, no CGI. What is it? Food. Is it good?
Yeah. It’s safe to say that soup is, in a general sense, good food. And that’s
all I need to know.
Or the classic, yet
informative Velveeta slogan: “Colby, Swiss and Cheddar, blended all together.”
Of course, listing ingredients doesn’t work for a lot of processed foods,
because it’s hard to come up with clever rhymes for ‘pyridoxene hydrochloride.’
If you have a good product,
you should be able to come up with a catchy slogan pretty easily. Instead, I’d
like to be the guy who comes up with slogans for the kinds of foods I’ve had to
buy when I’ve been broke.
“Exactly What
You’d Expect For A Dollar!”
“It Sure Looks
Like Salmon!”
“Better Than Not
Eating At All!”
I hope that someday I
get the chance to be a spokesman for something cooking-related. I could do a
spot for my little mini-blender:
“How many times
have you been baffled by food-processors that have just too many functions?
That’s why I’m proud to endorse the KitchenAid One-Button Mixer.
No manual to
read, no dials or attachments to decipher, just one big button! The patented
‘blade’ cuts vegetables really small, for all the times I need really small
pieces of vegetables!”
I’ve also decided that
for the next thing I write, I want sponsors. Why shouldn’t writers be like
NASCAR drivers? Most writers could use the money! We could wear patches on our
blazers with sponsors’ logos!
I’m gonna sell ad space
right there in my book. If Frito-Lay wants to underwrite my next book with a
few half-page ads for Ruffles, why not?
