November 1994: What Goes Around, Comes Around. Sex Sells.

 

litvinchuk                                                                                                                                       

You’d have thought we’d have learned, with the passing of Victoria Station and other restaurant chains similar in concept, not to recycle themes that—given the fickleness of a consumer dead set on getting what he or she wants, regardless of what you think he or she wants—have no more appeal than a sitcom about infectious disease.

But here we go again with a bunch of restaurant concepts that profit only from sham, not substance; that have caromed off the drawing-boards of movie studios, the think-tanks of TV producers and the computers of Mad. Ave. publicists and account execs and have landed promiscuously on the corners of high-traffic intersections, inside office buildings, shopping malls and the centers of tourist traps, seducing diners: snatching dollars from the hands of the seduced, not, by the way, unaware (and here’s the rub) they are being seduced.

If ever there was a signal that foodservice is in for another heady dose of go-go sales and profits, this new generation of eateries is it. They self-righteously boast of incomparable dining orgasms, but in reality offer little more than tease and titillation, scam and swagger.

They will survive, for a while. Like Victoria Station survived for a while, until everyone grew tired of eating in a boxcar. If the restaurant is a boxcar and the menu is the same (prime rib and baked potato or surf and turf and baked potato) day after day after day, then multiple visits eventually morph into no visits.

(I told Neil Reyer, a dear friend, who happens to be Jewish, that I was writing a column about the rise and fall of themed restaurant chains, conspicuous among them, Victoria Station. He said, “Let me tell you why Victoria Station didn’t make it: I don’t know of too many Jews who want to eat in a boxcar.”)

The difference today (the “rub”—see above) is that the people who patronize these joints now patronize them willingly, knowing that they are hopping aboard a foodservice bandwagon overloaded with flash and hype. And, surprise, surprise, they love every minute of it even to the point of painlessly shelling out bucks just for the privilege of being hoodwinked. As I said, if we were waiting for some sign that the age of austerity and penny-pinching is over, all you have to do is look at Dive, the Harley-Davidson Café, Planet Hollywood, and God only knows what else is lurking out there ready to surface and capture (control?) the imagination and stomachs of consumers aching for a quick fix. The theme-restaurant rumor mill has let slip that something called a Jekyll and Hyde restaurant may open soon in midtown Manhattan. A critic was overheard to say, “Food, most likely, will be an afterthought.”

There is no accounting for taste when there is none.

                                                                                                            Oleksiy Mark

Mark my words: we will witness, before this decade runs out of steam, restaurants appealing to our obsession with sex and violence, however provisional that obsession might be. Convinced there is a market of consumers out there spellbound by the aphrodisia of violence, some entrepreneurial nitwit will roll out a chain of restaurants whose theme playfully replicates acts of violence and sex: killings, rapes, drug deals, you name it. Entrepreneurial nitwit will incorporate all of that stuff thematically.

Fat chance, you say. Fine chance, I say. Consider that the consumers ripe for this sort of restaurant are the same ones spending millions to see movies whose plots record more body counts than the Holocaust.

We have come dangerously close in the past to such a restaurant. Remember the restaurants flush with symbols of military triumphs? Never mind that they were nostalgia banks invested with designer memories of the romance of war. The fact is there is nothing romantic about war. Try talking about war to someone who’s been in one.

So, you heard it here first: on the heels of Oliver Stone’s satirical depiction of violence, “Natural Born Killers,” and a natural-born outgrowth of movies such as “The Terminator” that tastelessly mixed violence with snatches of kinky humor and sex, we bring you (fanfare, please) Restaurant Uzi, a collaboration of the NRAs: the first restaurant ever to feature random acts of tongue-in-cheek mayhem; scantily clad waitresses, their busts crossed with bandoliers holding not cartridges, but—ho-ho: Jell-o shots; service at gunpoint (“Your order or your life!”); paths to restrooms strewn with land mines; salt not in shakers, but laid out as cocaine lines in the middle of the table; TV monitors with scenes of violence from movies featuring Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, and Sharon Stone; menus replete with every four-letter and multisyllabic obscenity known to man and woman; Colt-45 (and only Colt-45 until another brewery crafts a competitive brand theme-appropriate) served at the bar; and, at the stroke of midnight, virtual realities of sex, wife and child abuse, and muggings. It is to snigger, don’t you think?

Snigger this: Years ago, a friend of mine opened a restaurant in Cleveland’s Little Italy. It had three themes, all bad; the worst was a bistro that poked fun at mob violence and featured, at the stroke of midnight, a fake raid. Forget that this garbage took place in Little Italy, an affront to everyone who lived there who did not need to be reminded of the stereotype; consider, instead, that even way back then—nearly 20 years ago—someone had the effrontery to spoof violence as an attraction to charm customers. 

If there is consolation to any of this, it is this. Just as Victoria Station collapsed beneath the weight of its own inertia, so, too, will all other theme restaurants. The consumer, always searching for change, becomes bored easily: when sham upstages substance, the initial attraction of the come-on fades and boredom sets in quickly.

Wild prediction?  I don't think so. Go to www.heartattackgrill.com