"Famous Dave's:" overpriced camp
Desperate and unable to agree on anything to eat, we went with one of Elf's Rules: When you can't agree on where to eat, eat at the first place you see that you've never eat at before. This wound us up at "Famous Dave's BBQ," an overpriced middle-class camp restaurant chain.
I have been advised by wordsmith Richard Sher about the difference between "kitsch" and "camp": both describe a design aesthetic that is bathetic, over the top, and in bad taste, but the designer of camp knows it is in bad taste, whereas kitsch is created in all sincerity. Famous Dave's knows what it was aiming for when it hired its design team. The inside is garish, with bright yellow, red, and white signs with cartoons of pigs roasting other pigs, chickens slathering to get into roasters, and billboards proclaiming "If it walks or flies, we'll eat it," "We dig pig," and "Only the best pigs put Famous Dave's on their organ donor cards." (When Yamaraashi-chan asked me what that meant, I said, "It means that this place only buys genetically engineered cognitively modified organisms." Omaha said, "It does not!")
The food was okay. I mean, if you want a lot of mass-produced, fairly good meat, it's not a bad place to go, but I've made better at home. Omaha and I looked up the difference between barbecuing and grilling on her iPhone while we waited and determined that the menu didn't try too hard to confuse the issue for the guests. We had the "garbage can lid" of dinner for two: the meat was generally unremarkable, the five sauces on the table went from too sweet to insufficiently spicy-- this is not a place that can afford a bad hotsaurce experience with a customer, so their "Devil's Spit" sauces plays it way on the safer side. The coleslaw was good, I'll give them that.
I stopped eating well before my plate was clean. "It's a sign of my... responsible maturation," I told Omaha. "You mean getting old," she said. Maybe she's right: it was also too loud in there.
I noticed in the bathrooms that the walls are plastered with ads for men's products from pre-WW2 magazines. Which I thought was kinda funny, since I shave with some of the products on the walls: shaving soap and badger brush, double-sided single-edged blades, big steel razor. Nothing works better.
Anyway, take it or leave it. It's not my kind of place. (I'll tell you about Bennet's on Mercer Island, which is my kind of place, next time.)
I have been advised by wordsmith Richard Sher about the difference between "kitsch" and "camp": both describe a design aesthetic that is bathetic, over the top, and in bad taste, but the designer of camp knows it is in bad taste, whereas kitsch is created in all sincerity. Famous Dave's knows what it was aiming for when it hired its design team. The inside is garish, with bright yellow, red, and white signs with cartoons of pigs roasting other pigs, chickens slathering to get into roasters, and billboards proclaiming "If it walks or flies, we'll eat it," "We dig pig," and "Only the best pigs put Famous Dave's on their organ donor cards." (When Yamaraashi-chan asked me what that meant, I said, "It means that this place only buys genetically engineered cognitively modified organisms." Omaha said, "It does not!")
The food was okay. I mean, if you want a lot of mass-produced, fairly good meat, it's not a bad place to go, but I've made better at home. Omaha and I looked up the difference between barbecuing and grilling on her iPhone while we waited and determined that the menu didn't try too hard to confuse the issue for the guests. We had the "garbage can lid" of dinner for two: the meat was generally unremarkable, the five sauces on the table went from too sweet to insufficiently spicy-- this is not a place that can afford a bad hotsaurce experience with a customer, so their "Devil's Spit" sauces plays it way on the safer side. The coleslaw was good, I'll give them that.
I stopped eating well before my plate was clean. "It's a sign of my... responsible maturation," I told Omaha. "You mean getting old," she said. Maybe she's right: it was also too loud in there.
I noticed in the bathrooms that the walls are plastered with ads for men's products from pre-WW2 magazines. Which I thought was kinda funny, since I shave with some of the products on the walls: shaving soap and badger brush, double-sided single-edged blades, big steel razor. Nothing works better.
Anyway, take it or leave it. It's not my kind of place. (I'll tell you about Bennet's on Mercer Island, which is my kind of place, next time.)