Sounds about right. I can’t say I’ve ever been bored in NYC but certainly on longer stays you move beyond the tourist attractions to more “authentic” experiences.
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I’ve experienced the same thing a few times. Travel and novelty gets exhausting after a couple months and you just want to sit still for awhile.
It also shouldn’t be surprising that achieving some apex of wealth, fame, freedom, or whatever doesn’t do anything at all to get rid of the emotional baggage you carry with you. Thinking that it will might actually be what pushes some people over the edge when they get there and realize the truth. But people really should know better. We’ve been telling ourselves many versions of that story for thousands of years.
Czech Republic has a grand total of one fast food chain: Bageterie Boulevard. I guess imagine Subway but with the sandwiches served on baguettes rather than weird-ass bread.
This has been my mindset. Most don’t because traveling is expensive for lots of people and they don’t want to waste it by not seeing stuff. Seems that American tourists either go the Caribbean and do nothing or go to Europe and do as much as they can as quickly as possible.
Another way to put it is extreme risk aversion, aka living in fear. Lots of people are not willing to “risk” city living, which just translates to racism-based fear. They won’t “risk” a trip to a foreign country, but they’ll go to Disney or Myrtle Beach or whatever over and over. They want to know exactly what they’re getting. I’m myself guilty with regards to Myrtle Beach golf trips, but if you’re trying to do a golf trip in the winter from the northeast, it makes sense.
They’re also unwilling to risk a bad meal or a culinary surprise. So they never get a surprise, missing the many many good surprises to avoid the occasional bad ones.
I never thought of it that way but that makes a lot of sense. I guess the opposite way of looking at it is that it means you do have control of that if you work at it and try to re-orient around what will make you content.
I know he did drugs when he was younger, and he drank a ton… Whether he was ever addicted to anything I’m not sure.
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I remember as like a 12 year old going to New York City and being so relieved to find a Sbarro in Times Square - I recognized it from the local mall food court. This is how lots of adults behave.
Thoughtful people just have a harder time with life. It isn’t fair, it sucks, its tragic but its just reality. It fills me with resentment that thoughtless, oblivious, selfish people are objectively much happier than me, on average. I’d like to think I’m capable of experiencing higher highs as a kind of partial reward for having empathy, but I’m not sure that’s even true. As someone who has checked all the boxes for success and still felt extreme depression, Bourdain hit hard.
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Perhaps also more fulfillment? Helping others should be far more rewarding for those with empathy.
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you can take my waffle house from my cold, dead hands
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Welp, looks like I’m rewatching all these episodes now. I spent many a drunken nights at the Waffle House across the road from me when I was going to Mizzou. It will always hold a special place in my life.
Tex roadhouse has their own supply chain not Sysco or usfoods.
We use yelp or trip advisor to find local places. It’s nice have the chains as an option on the road if you want certainty but that’s generally a backup plan. The wife loves cheesecake so that’s 2-3 times a year stop.
Y’all seem to be underestimating the fuckery in the American food service business. Most medium sized and sunbelt cities have a smattering of actual unattached mom and pop restaurants left, and many of them just reheat the same crap from Sysco or US Foods. Even the higher end restaurants in many cities are owned by regional holding companies. The authentic American experience is the sanitized corporatized garbage; you can’t escape that by going to some crappy diner—not in America in 2020.
I only look for legit immigrant-owned businesses when I travel (which is like 1/2 my life, during the olden days). At least that supports a parallel but somewhat smaller and less demonic corporatized supply chain.
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Kansas City has had a foodie renaissance the last 15 years or so. Although they’ve always had a decent number of good local restaurants. But now they also have small artisanal farms raising high-quality meats and vegetables in the limitless farmland surrounding the city.
But I think New T is talking about some smallish craptown like Victorville CA, or Albany, GA - where 90% of the restaurants are corporate shlock and Buffalo Wild Wings is the town hotspot.
I thought we were talking greasy spoons and mom and pop places.
At the middle-higher end, are not most of the restaurants in these cities run by established dining groups? Most of the time I’ve looked under the hood at a restaurant, it’s been the case.
These are some of the big ones from Atlanta (which have of course spewed local-looking lookalike restaurants around the southeast). Of course their menus are covered in a farm-to-table veneer. It’s a microcosm of the entire urban renaissance: all the trappings of craft and local, but these are not just visionary enterprises set up by random enthusiasts. Ditto breweries, workout studios, etc.
Sorry about the derail. We should probably excise.
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At least Waffle House is cooked right in front of you on the hottop and not thrown in a micro in the back somewhere.
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Macaroni Grill was like that of course - as a national chain. But even then I watched the quality of ingredients steadily drop in the 1.5 years I waited tables there. Every time we switched suppliers the food got just a little bit cheaper and crappier.
I think a lot of corporate restaurants do that “frog in a frying pan” model, where they start out with very high quality stuff, then slowly try to degrade it to squeeze profits and hope their customers don’t notice. Could be a reason most Macaroni Grills are gone now. Gotta sell that profit growth story when you’re a hot new chain.
Also one thing I liked about Red Lobster. They were in it for the long haul and seemed to be pretty stable as far as quality.
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To me the problem with chains isn’t necessarily food quality, its that standardization destroys authenticity. Morton’s will generally bring you an excellent steak, but I feel nothing when dining there. Knowing exactly what you’ll get is a huge positive for most customers, but not what I want to experience.
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Morton’s opened a location in KC - but still insisted on calling it a NY Strip, when every Kansas Citian knows the correct name is KC Strip. It’s like you might as well open a John Elway steakhouse in KC and expect people to show up. I think they finally capitulated.
wut
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The Kansas City Strip and the New York Strip refer to the same cut of meat. Apparently restaurants in New York City in the 1930’s decided they couldn’t sell a fancy steak named after Kansas City (where the stockyards and slaughterhouses were located). So, they just started calling it a New York Strip.
If you want a steak renamed by a egotistical chef, order the New York Strip. If you want a steak named for the cut of beef originally selected by butchers working next to the stockyards, order the Kansas City Strip.
TROOF
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