Why my evening at Hooters was a total bust

My husband may be the only man in America who had to be dragged to Hooters. Perhaps it’s because he still remembers the icy reception he received a few years ago when we were on vacation in NYC and he suggested we celebrate my birthday at a Hooters on Long Island.

The reason I made him go to our local Hooters recently was to taste some of the recipes in the chain’s new cookbook before attempting to make them at home—my kind of investigative reporting. The restaurant in downtown Minneapolis definitely lived up to the chain’s tagline: “Delightfully tacky. Yet unrefined.” I think the only thing refined was the sugar.

I ordered a glass of wine and it was poured at my table from a single-serving bottle. “You must not sell much wine,” I commented to our server. “Not really,” she replied. Beer was another story.

Hooters is famous for its wings—foodwise—but I wasn’t a fan. I tried both the “naked” and breaded versions, which were greasy with no kick. When I attempted to duplicate the cookbook’s wings at home, I opted to cook them in the oven, rather than fry them. I’m sure that’s the only reason my husband looked disappointed when I served them to him. It probably had nothing to do with the fact that I was wearing sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt. Plus, as I discovered after I interviewed someone from corporate, the store’s recipe wasn’t even in the book.

Actually, none of the recipes I envisioned trying at home was on the menu, so I ordered the hot dog. The week before I had seen the movie, “Fast Food Nation,” and wanted something less disgusting than a hamburger (it takes a lot to make a hot dog look like the healthier choice). The hot dog wasn’t hot, but the baked beans were good, even though they resembled canned pork and beans dressed up with bacon and brown sugar. Once when I added brown sugar and ketchup to a can of beans, my father chastised me, saying the people at Heinz spent years perfecting their bean recipe, who was I to mess with it? Fortunately, my father didn’t raise the Hooters’ chef.

I guess I was expecting more. Instead of finding their outfits sexy, they reminded me of Hot Dog on a Stick, minus the big hats. (OK, so I’m not a guy.) Years ago—pre-spandex—the girls’ T-shirts had to be knotted in the back to get the same tight fit as the ones today.

The only person more disappointed than me was the young man who had come to Hooters on an off-night to celebrate his birthday. He stood on the bar flapping two menus to resemble wings, wearing paper cups fashioned into an owl’s beak while the Hooters girls sang “Happy Birthday.” Hardly anyone looked his way, and he didn’t even get spanked. If that’s as good as it gets, I’m happy I didn’t spend my birthday at Hooters on Long Island.


Food Vegas style

Vegas was not known as a restaurant town the time I visited it back in college. I remember women in hair curlers, cigarettes dangling from their lips, and men in undershirts and plaid shorts playing the slot machines, while grandmothers in skimpy cocktail attire served them free drinks.

My only other memory of Sin City before becoming a regular attendee at our sister publication’s annual finance conference there was the time my family stopped in Vegas on our move from San Diego to Denver. As we entered the parking structure after hours on the road, we got stuck when the luggage carrier on top of our van became lodged in the roof of the on-ramp. We couldn’t move forward or backward. My husband frantically tried rocking the van back and forth to free it from the low ceiling. It wouldn’t budge, presenting a hardship no parent needed after being enclosed in a small space for 10 hours with three teenagers. This was probably the only occasion that when a van was rockin’, the inhabitants would welcome someone to come knockin’, as long as they could free us from our embarrassment. I don’t remember our meal that night, because we had lost our appetites by the time we finally got the carrier off the car and into the van.

That was not the case with my latest visit to Vegas during our 17th annual finance conference. Dining out was an all-star event. It started the first evening we arrived, when Publisher Mary Jo Larson and I sat at the bar to sample the French onion soup, macaroni and cheese, and fries at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon. I will never dine at Keller’s famous French Laundry in Napa Valley, so this was my consolation prize. Mary Jo had just eaten the onion soup at Red Robin and I was making her do a taste test (Bouchon’s won, spoons down. Please don’t take this personally, Red Robin, but you never had a chance). The macaroni and cheese was so much better than the Kraft version I used to feed my kids, I wanted to call all three and apologize. Even the macaroni and cheese with truffles at the upscale StripSteak the following evening didn’t compare to Keller’s. (After tasting the truffled version, I confessed to my dining partner that I really didn’t like the taste of truffles, but because they were expensive, I felt the need to be impressed by them.)

The next evening I went to Bobby Flay’s restaurant, Mesa. I had interviewed Flay at our conference back in November and purchased a copy of his cookbook. Fortunately none of the recipes for our selections that night were in it. I would hate to think I could fill Flay’s shoes in my kitchen.

With all the great restaurants to visit, getting stuck in Vegas may not be as painful as it once was—as long as I remember to stay away from places with low ceilings and out of rocking vans.


Mandatory tipping

The restaurants in Miami—at least the ones that line the tony area of Lincoln Avenue in South Beach—routinely add an 18 percent tip to the bill. I know this because on my recent trip down there to attend a franchise expo, I ate every lunch and dinner on that expensive strip of real estate for four straight days.

We were told the reasoning was that a lot of snowbirds are notoriously bad tippers. I don’t think they were referring to Minnesota transplants, it must have been other states giving seniors a bad name.

Tipping may be generational, however.

My mother-in-law, in an attempt to treat me, once told me she’d pay for my meal if I left the tip. Unfortunately, because I tip more than she, the tip was more expensive than my meal.