Burgerbrow
Chain Restaurants
All across America, sad middle-class hangouts know as chain
restaurants pretend to serve customers
quality fare. These food service clones
are boring in every way: likely locations, monotonous menus, casual servers, stereotypical
music, and of course, the featureless food. Applebee's, Chili's, Red Robin, Ruby
Tuesday, and T.G.I. Friday's, are among the most popular nationwide. A.K.A.
sports bars, these thrown-together establishments mock the bourgeois family man
who attempts to recreate the same goofy look for his man-cave.
A good joke on these chain restaurants and the middle-class
people who eat there was performed
in the movie Hall Pass. A couple
of married guys are granted a week off from marriage by their wives. This 'hall
pass' gives the husbands a supposed opportunity to get lucky with some other
ladies. These clueless dudes hook-up with their friends and head-out to
Applebee's, where they think the action is. The group ends up overeating and
calling it a night without ever making an attempt to talk to women. The joke plays
on an idea that these middle-class, uncultured, hopeless men, have no idea what
to do when their wives aren’t around.
I confess. I regularly hangout at sports bars and chain
restaurants similar to the ones mentioned here. Some things that I'm proud to
say I like the most are what Roland Barthes and Virginia Woolf would probably consider
predictable bourgeois garbage. Nevertheless, I recognize chain restaurants like
Applebee's as the middle ground between the take-outs found in poor
neighborhoods and the four-star fine dining found downtown. Try asking-out an
artsy Baltimorian girl on a date to Applebee's. I doubt she'll go, but if she does,
it will only be to make you the butt of the jokes she tells her friends later
on.
Synchronic Analysis
on Burgers
I will momentarily buy-in to Barthes's and Woolf's opinions
of middle class fare by zeroing in on one particular food item that's served in
food establishments in all three social classes. I believe burgers (A.K.A.
hamburgers or cheeseburgers) revel an essence that highbrow, middlebrow, and
lowbrow, social class features still exist (at least in one particular food
item).
The Matrix
Let's start with the highbrow burger. While The Hamilton Tavern
may not be considered fine dining, it's certainly fashionable among Baltimore
hipsters. The pub is not a sports bar - it has no TVs! And the staff certainly
takes their food seriously. They'll gladly share information about all the
local ingredients, including the beef. The Crosstown Burger made second place
in City
Paper's Burger Bracket challenge (City Paper's Burger Bracket 2013). The same way Mozart
obsessed over his music, the Ham-Tav (as locals call it) shoots for perfection
with their burger. It's the elite!
Second, let's discuss the lowbrow 7 Eleven Cheeseburger.
While it may, in fact, be the lowest quality burger for presentation,
ingredients, and taste, it has something that the middlebrow burgers don't have
- it has significance. 7 Eleven burgers are for emergencies. You eat it when
you're hungry. You eat it when you have to eat something now! Poor children scrounge
for change to go and get one. Exhausted construction workers eat them.
Commuters in a hurry eat them on the go! I remember eating 7 Eleven
Cheeseburgers after a long crazy night at the club and just before the late
night after party. It's the first-aid kit of food!
Finally, the middlebrow Applebee's Cowboy Burger is the
official sandwich of the lost. I remember eating one of their burgers years
ago. It was not round; rather, it was shaped long, like a football or the end
of a baseball bat. It was smashed together quite like the way the sports decorations
were thrown up and nailed to the wall. It was a mushy-salty metaphoric-mess. One
blogger mentions that he wished he had skipped Applebee's and gone to
McDonald's instead. I remember thinking the same. You will not experience the taste
of perfection found in the Crosstown Burger, nor will you be charged the
bargain price of the 7 Eleven Cheeseburger - in the Applebee's Cowboy Burger -
you will just feel sick and sorry.
Codes
Daniel Chandler explains how important codes are for the
construction of society. People need codes to make sense of things (Chandler 2007, Ch. 5). In the defense of
Applebee's and other chain restaurants, they do in fact provide a positive set
of codes for people of all three social classes. For the middle-class, it's
appropriate to take the kids to an Applebee's. This way mom or dad can enjoy an
evening out; have maybe a drink or two, and dinner with the little ones,
without critical stares from others. It's simply not socially acceptable to
take kids to a bar, or club, but to a chain restaurant - that's ok. For the lower-class,
it's likely more reasonable to celebrate by going out to a chain restaurant,
where something fancier may be too expensive. And the upper-class certainly knows
of the consistency that chain restaurants offer. Applebee's may certainly be
something that an upper-class couple would gladly settle for when traveling through
remote areas. For instance, if a wealthy couple was driving across states like Alabama
and Mississippi, an Applebee's might look like an oasis.
Word count = 888
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Hill and Wang,
2012.
Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. 2nd.
Routledge, 2007.
City Paper's Burger Bracket. 2013.
http://citypaper.com/eat/city-paper-burger-bracket-winner-1.1503718.
Dario. n.d. http://godblessburgers.blogspot.com/2010/12/cowboy-burger.html.
Glenn, Joshua. Woolf contra Middlebrow. 2009.
http://hilobrow.com/2009/03/04/woolf-contra-middlebrow/.
