Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [32]
My job may seem good to some of you . . . but I’ve got a tough boss. Several months ago he gave me an order. “Travel anywhere you want in the United States,” he told me. “Eat in a lot of good restaurants on the company . . . and report back to me.”
I took money, credit cards and a lot of bad advice from friends and set out across the country.
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People argue about where the best restaurants are in the United States. Boston, San Francisco and New Orleans have always had good
places. Florida has had some for a long time. New York has a hundred
that would be the best in town anywhere else. But there have been
some changes for the better in places that didn’t used to have any good
restaurants.
Mr. Rooney goes to dinner
The South is getting over Southern cooking, for instance. Places like Cincinnati, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, even South Bend, Indiana, have excellent restaurants. You can get a gourmet meal in Houston, Texas, or Phoenix, Arizona.
There are a few places that puzzle me, though. For instance, I don’t suppose there’s a place in the whole world that grows as much good food as Iowa does. They brag about it. And yet a gourmet tour of Iowa would be a nonstop trip.
The biggest trend is a leveling out that has taken place. It’s harder to find that great little undiscovered place in a small town, but more often than before you can find a restaurant that serves at least acceptable food. The Rotary Club usually meets there.
There’s more dependable mediocrity than there used to be. It isn’t going to be very good, but it isn’t going to be very bad either. And because most of it’s frozen, it’s going to be the same in Maine as it is in Oklahoma. What’s happened to all the good and bad little independent restaurants, of course, is all the big chains and the fast-food places. Many independents have been driven out of business.
There are the big steak chains, for instance. They often serve beef treated with tenderizer and are called something like the Beef and Bourbon or the Steak and Stein. They and the fast-food places bring in billions of dollars a year. Most are owned by big corporations with other interests: Pillsbury owns Burger King, for example.
Hamburgers are the big seller, a lot more American than Mom’s apple pie now because Mom isn’t baking pies much these days. The chicken places have come up fast in the last ten years and there are pizza parlors everywhere. You don’t have to go to Mexico to get a taco.
The biggest and most successful fast-food operation is, obviously, McDonald’s. There are 3,232 of them—and counting. They’ve driven thousands of individually owned diners and cafés out of business. The drive-ins have been victims in a lot of areas.
A typical meal in McDonald’s costs about $ 1.75. The hamburger is good ground meat, the French fries are excellent and the shake is an imitation milkshake made with thickeners to give the impression it’s made with ice cream—which it isn’t.
McDonald’s restaurants are probably a reflection of our national character. They’re fast . . . they’re efficient . . . they make money and they’re clean. If they’re loud and crowded and if the food is wastefully wrapped, packaged, boxed and bagged . . . let’s face it, Americans, that’s us.
There’s nothing really distinctive about American cooking. “American cooking” isn’t even a phrase like “French cooking.” That accounts for why our best restaurants serve someone else’s native dishes.
Italian restaurants are most popular. Thirty-six percent of all Americans who eat out eat in Italian restaurants at one time or another. Thirty-five percent, according to the National Restaurant Association, eat in Chinese restaurants. French restaurants are most popular with people who make more than $25,000 a year.
But we have everything. In the last ten years there’s been a population explosion of Japanese restaurants. They serve steak, shrimp or chicken along with bean