Everything is weird now
this restaurant is wrong
New Normal has degraded our manners, our expectations, our work ethic, the availability of basic products, and much more. It has also made lots of things weird.
Like this restaurant up the road from me. I live in the country about two miles outside Montpelier, Vermont. My route to get to the major highway takes me through classic New England hamlets of Colonial through Victorian houses set on winding roads that follow the railroad tracks, which follow the river that came before them.
Classic American roadside general stores and diners are disappearing. In their place are “general stores” that carry upscale organic small label foods that cost four times what any other store would sell normal food for. Gas stations are moonlighting as (I’m serious) Indian or Tibetan restaurants. I like the world’s cuisine as much as any cosmopolitan, but I’m getting unnerved by the takeover of Asian Mt. Everest food in places you used to be able to get a hot dog or a hamburger.
Three miles up one of these roads is a new restaurant. They’ve done up the outside of the building to look like a cross between a mid-20th-century roadside service station and a hand-me-down apartment lived in by college seniors who think stringing Christmas lights across the whole place is “decor.”
I stopped there the day that electricity was out at my house (oh curse you, electric stove). It was weird. You have to walk into a tight, enclosed glass foyer with a hostess stand. It’s about the size of two old-style telephone booths, and feels like being trapped in one with the glass doors closed. On your right is the fully visible kitchen and a pass-through window. On your left is the dining room where people sit at drab tables picking at weird combination plates. This building used to be a secondhand shop, so I know the restaurant constructed this foyer deliberately, though I can’t think why.
A waitress squeezed into the glass box with me. She was very nice, in that half-shaved-head, 16 pieces of face metal, and apparently full-body tattoos kind of way. “Cool man,” she said, giving me a thumbs-up when I said I was looking over the menu for a take-out order.
The menu was weird. You can get two things at this restaurant: Japanese food and hamburgers. One side of the menu lists about eight kinds of sushi and a half-dozen tempura options. The other side listed a dozen different kinds of hamburger.
Starting at around $15 for a basic burger, I was interested in whether fries or even a scoop of coleslaw came with it. The menu didn’t say. I didn’t want to ask because a) I felt as weird as the menu because everything about this place is weird b) It seemed likely such a question would be answered with a pitying look, since obviously this is the sushi-or-hamburger restaurant, not the sushi-or-hamburger-with-fries restaurant and normal people would have known that without asking.
You know how most menus have a section devoted to sides or small bits? A basket of onion rings, a dish of pickled Japanese vegetables, a soup, that sort of thing? Not this restaurant. I don’t think sides exist there, and I don’t think you’re supposed to ask.
There weren’t enough Japanese selections to make it worth shelling out the inflated prices for at least a complete Japanese meal with some of this, some of that. And it looked like hamburgers came all by themselves, and I needed more than just a sandwich as I hadn’t had a meal for most of the day.
This is not the only restaurant around that can’t make up its mind what it is. Schizophrenic cuisine is hot where I live right now. Lots of places use the word “fusion,” after listing options like Hawaiian-Mexican Creations. Much identifiable cuisine enjoyed by many started out like this with immigrant food customs grafted onto native foodways. But what I’m talking about is not that. I’m talking about what seems to be a moral-aesthetic mandate to mash together disparate things just for the sake of it.
I put the menu back and left the restaurant. Outside, I noticed another pass-through window. In a few weeks you’ll be able to walk up and get a soft-serve ice cream (watch the dangling Christmas lights though).
Why is everything so weird?
"In the 60s people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal. In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined." ~Thomas Szasz
"...obviously this is the sushi-or-hamburger restaurant, not the sushi-or-hamburger-with-fries restaurant and normal people would have known that without asking." lol
A young lady recently told me a similar tale about the Middle Branch Store in East Randolph, recently purchased by an out-of-stater who says she "wants to make it like a city store." The girl told me the prices are so high she can't afford anything.
My mom and her dad shopped at this little General Store in East Randolph in the 1940s, and it has always been there. But now it is weird... Perhaps enough rich people have moved to Transdolph to support it, but I am doubtful -- this side of the ridge (East Randolph, Brookfield and Chelsea) still has some native (not very wealthy) Vermonters who just can't afford it.
As to the foreign food -- I love it. I could eat Indian cuisine every day, all day long -- but I still have to be able to afford it. Our culture is being "systemically" dismantled, at great peril. This is not Martha's Vineyard, and when the world economy implodes, a lot of these elites think we owe them food when they can't even boil an egg and think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.... :)