Meditations on the Evil of Banality: The McSpensive Restaurant

The McSpensive Restaurant. Austin, being a city that hosts a number of conferences a year, and just being an American City in the 21st century, contains within its limits a fair number of these institutions: McCormick and Schmicks, Ruth's Chris, Eddie Vee's, Trulucks, Finn and Porter...do I need to go on? You know what and who I am talking about. High-end chain joints that try to make you feel like Frank Sinatra. The food is rich and pricey, the waitstaff obsequious and the atmosphere overdone and contrived. My wife Caroline and I will occasionally find ourselves at one or another of these places - as guests of some out of town friend or other, or when, in moments of amnesiac craving (maybe the Seventies did take their toll on me) we might think, "Where can I get a good lobster/steak/plate of crab legs?" and the answer will come, "Why at one of the temples of Satan," and off we go to a deplorable and financially depleting disappointment.

So, what is so bad about these places? Let's take the experience apart. You enter and are met at the maitre 'd's station by a guy named Jonny (wait a minute, that's my name - note to self, never slick back your hair) with slicked back hair, Armani suit and tassel loafers who smilingly looks you up and down to make sure you're up to the 'standards' of the place. The truth of the matter is that the standards of the place have nothing to do with your character, style, background or accomplishments and everything to do with that lowest of common denominators - what's in your wallet. But Johnny is struggling with a pathological inferiority complex brought on by working in a McSpensive restaurant, and so has an overwhelming need to make everyone but the real Frank Sinatra feel the horrible vacuum of not being Frank Sinatra. His pain must be your pain. It's a vicious cycle.

You're ushered with overcompensatingly cloying politeness to your Corinthian leather banquette by a beautiful and automatonic hostess (Jonny has other customers to sneer at), who looks you vacuously in the nose and tells you to enjoy your meal. She leaves you with wine lists and menus in folders that look like they could survive a nuclear blast, and a smile that makes you feel like Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. You've just entered the The Village, you're now Number Six, and you'll never have to worry about anything again - except, of course, getting out of here. "Be seeing you."

Your waitperson is next with a bottle of filtered water (filtered by what? a screen fashioned cleverly out of lithium?) and an explanation of how the food at this particular restaurant is specially cultivated, caught, raised and/or prepared, how the steaks are aged angus, the fish netted wild by their own fleet of boats, the recipes unique. It all sounds right, it sounds like it's supposed to. And yet, it all sounds so hauntingly familiar - you've heard it before. But where? And who was saying it? Oh, but it doesn't matter, not really. It's so cushy and comfy in here, and the music is so soothing (Frankie, Frankie, Frankie), and the lights so cave dim, and the waitperson so attractive and unremarkable. Everything is so vague and fuzzy. It's fine. I'll just have another sip of that yummy filtered water, and relax, melt into the padding. Who would want to be anywhere else anyway?

Don't get me wrong - I love Frank Sinatra. But the thing about Frank Sinatra was that no one else was Frank Sinatra, and herein lies my rub with the McSpensives - that none of them are Frank Sinatra, but they're all trying to make you think they are. Like Old Blue Eyes's stand-ins, these places are restaurant studies, but not actually restaurants; they are financial establishments that serve food, rather than eating establishments that make money - and syntax is everything. McSpensives are the creations not of chefs, gourmands, cooks or even just good entertainers, but of number crunchers, investors and bankers, of risk-averse, imagination-dead yes men who consider it good night when the figures add up, regardless of whether a decent dish was served.

Okay, you're thinking, why is he writing this column? Fine - last night my wife Caroline and I ended up in one these places. Actually, we decided to go there. I won't name the place - why do we have to use names when they're all so much alike? Okay it was Truluck's - are you happy? We went there out of choice, we paid through the nose, we left feeling overstuffed and ashamed of ourselves. She had lobster, I had crab. We split chocolate cake for dessert. She had a caesar salad (see The Long Lunch for my estimation on that one), I had little neck clams. We may as well have broken into song and broken a few of our closest enemies fingers to really authenticate the experience. Oh, my readers - this is my confession.

The same filet, the same wild-caught salmon, the same Alaskan king crab, the same grand cru, the same Sapphire martini. If you feel like you've entered a place outside of time, outside of reality, it's because you have. You've entered a dead zone. Repetition, you see, is unnatural; variety is the tendency of the observable universe. Sure, we can speculate mathematically on the Unified Field, but if you look around, things just don't repeat. Try to break a wine glass in the exact same way twice; close, maybe, but no cigar. Find two snowflakes that match; or two oak leaves; or two preppy sophomores. Sure, they may both wear the exact same faux-hawks, pegged jeans and polo shirts, but they will each be idiots in their own, unique fashion.

"What makes this so special," my waitress said last night, describing my crab legs (ever wonder why the waitstaff start every sentence with, "What makes us special..."? Maybe it's cuz, well, actually nothing makes the place special - nothing! - including the subordinate clause, "What makes us special..." - and this highly noticeable state of affairs has to be addressed at every possible opportunity), "What makes this so special is that we broil these Norwegian king crab legs in butter."

Crab legs in butter? I have to call Jonesy about this! Jonesy! You won't believe what we've stumbled upon!

Repetition is the attempt to remove struggle from the picture, to be the no problem guy without trying, to be perfect without knowing imperfection. It reminds us of death, of the garden where fruit hangs always ripe from the bough, of the cruise ship in Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life,' where you can order Philosophy off of the menu as a topic of conversation, of endless, endlessly dull harp playing among cloud hosts of catatonic do-gooders. McSpensives are a celebration of antiseptic death, of the vanquishing of variable, uncertainty, failure, dirt, darkness, soul, wisdom, knowledge; they are Rilke's nightmare of the industrial age. Try to talk about the war in McCormick and Schmick's (because we are, in fact, still at war), or urban poverty in Ruth's Chris, or the percentage of young black men in prison, or the cents on the dollar that women still earn by comparison to men in this country. Just try. I dare you.

The McSpensive is what we don't want - I exhort you all to join me in this resolution. Culture is endlessly improvisational and variable, it is a function of curiosity, imagination and exploration. It is constantly open to risk and failure. To be governed by impulses toward repetition, imitation and the bottom line is to forget that Frankie was probably a gangster who busted some heads, that he had risky surgery on his vocal cords and might never have sung again, that he got called a wop, an eye-tie, a gumbah and worse, that he probably wasn't a great father and maybe not even, depending on when you knew him, a great friend. Hell, he smoked and drank and womanized. He did bad things.

He also sang like an angel, and you can't have one without the other. A restaurant must have all things - just as a culture, a civilization, an individual must. The McSpensive would try to convince us otherwise, but they are wrong - and not just wrong, but Wrong.

Yes, my dear reader, I did - I worshipped at one of these unholy altars last night. I drained away a chalice full of the blood of our collective soul, and not to make black pudding. Forgive me, please - and learn from my sin.

McSpensive - at a conference center, tourist mall or airline magazine near you.