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In menus and in life, usually less is more
© St. Petersburg Times Maybe resistance to change is a sign of aging. That doesn't make it a bad idea. The other day I stopped at Hungry Harry's Barbecue in Land O'Lakes for lunch and was pleased to see that the menu hadn't changed since the last time I was in there. Likewise, I was glad to see that Johnny's Barbecue in Dade City is still functioning with only minimal changes after Johnny Clower, its founder, died last year. I think I could probably make a pretty good case for a relationship between success and continuity in restaurants, and maybe in life. When I was a kid, there was a chain of restaurants in Florida called Royal Castle. You could get a hamburger (admittedly small) for 15 cents and something awful (but served frosty cold in a glass mug) called Birch Beer. Nobody ever bought one burger there; you bought them in strips, but you could get a pretty filling lunch for 80 cents. I, personally, date the beginning of the decline of Western civilization to the day Royal Castle began serving french fries. Fries were just the first step on a slippery slope. By the time I was 18, the restaurants were serving all different kinds of sandwiches. When I came back from overseas they were serving breakfast and, as I recall from the outlet in Dade City, they started serving chili right before they went belly-up in the mid 1970s. Likewise, a chain of sub shops that I frequent less often than I used to, suddenly began adding to their original list of four or five sandwich choices. Now there are 20 sandwiches on nine types of bread with a choice of four sauces, 11 condiments and 78 vegetables. What used to be a process of saying "gimme a . . ." and mentioning a sandwich is now an exercise in multiple choices that makes BellSouth call-sorting look like a kid's puzzle. And if you give up and just say, "Give me one with everything," someone is sure to ask, "Even peppers?" I once stopped for breakfast at a hotel in Kissimmee where a simple breakfast order turned into an interrogation of "Scrambled or fried?" "Grits or potatoes?" "Home fries or hash browns?" "Sausage or bacon?" "Patty or link?" "Biscuit or toast?" "Wheat, rye or white?" "Tomato or orange juice?" That is, until I, in total exasperation, just said, "Please, cancel my order and give me a cup of coffee" to a server who, with an evil gleam in her eye, asked, "regular or decaf?" Aisles of grocery stores that used to carry four kinds of bath soap, three kinds of laundry detergent and two feminine hygiene products are now stocked with hundreds of items that leave you exhausted with the simplest of shopping tasks. Political candidates who offer everyone everything and usually provide none of what was promised fall into the same category as do companies whose electronic answering devices give you 26 choices, none of which fit your needs, and then offer to let you talk to a human being in return for listening to 45 minutes (on your dime if it's long-distance) of elevator music. I'm not saying that all places that insist on more variety are bad (some consumers demand it), but at Harry's the other day my entire order consisted of "sweet tea, ribs and pork combo, slaw and beans," and I was eating in five minutes. Even though I love gourmet coffee drinks, sometimes I yearn for, and seek out, places where I can say, "coffee, black, please," and go back to my book. Religions used to be simple, before they came along with the cafeteria plan where one can accept or reject what precepts, dictates and interpretations he or she chooses. The multiple-choice system may be bringing more into the collection plates on Sundays (or Sabbaths of choice) but cohesiveness of viewpoint seems to exist more often at the radical extremes than anywhere else. Am I finally turning into an old grouch because I yearn for the days that a good television night was one when Milton Berle was on the only channel in Miami and you didn't need an engineering degree to change channels? Probably. But if you don't like what I have to say, may I offer you the choice of several of my colleagues?
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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Times columns today Jan Glidewell John Romano Elijah Gosier From the Times North Suncoast desks |
