Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [34]
Steinbach: Our pirate ship runs somewhere around six thousand dollars.
Rooney: Gosh, I’ll be darned.
Steinbach: This is our tin goose . . . seating on both wings, seating behind the engine and then down the center of the—
Rooney: The kids get a kick out of this?
Steinbach: Right. They really relate well to something like this.
Out back, it looked like Santa Claus’s workshop. We talked to president Jay Buchbinder.
Rooney: Well, now, wouldn’t something like that make kids stay longer in a restaurant so the restaurant would have a smaller turnover? I mean, is that a factor?
Buchbinder : Well, it might even speed up the process of eating, because if you go in with little children, the children will want to play on the trains, so they might eat faster and then the parents will want to leave more quickly. We’ve even tried to get design involved in the restroom areas where people might say, “Well, gee, they have nice clean restrooms. We’ll stop there because the restrooms are nice and we’ll also buy our food.” So everything goes as a total package situation.
Rooney: You don’t make any little engines for the restrooms or anything?
Buchbinder: There can be little decors in the restroom areas, little train plaques or little car plaques. So when you go into a fast-food operation, it’s like going into a finer restaurant now. They’re giving you every courtesy that you might have in a better restaurant.
Workmen were finishing a new plastic replica of an old airplane to ship to a McDonald’s opening in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. We were curious about how a hamburger would taste eaten in a plastic airplane, so a few weeks later, after it had been installed, we went to Glen Ellyn.
Rooney (to cashier): Same price whether I eat it here or in the airplane?
Cashier: Yes.
Rooney: I guess I’ll eat it in the airplane.
It seems as though everywhere you go they’re trying to take your mind off the food. It’s got so it’s almost as though they were embarrassed to look like a restaurant.
The most successful theme chain is Victoria Station. Just five years ago three young Cornell Hotel School graduates started buying up old boxcars for a few thousand dollars each. Now they own 250 of them and they’re using them in 46 restaurants around the country. In five years, sales went from nothing to $47 million.
The difference between this and the all-American diner is that Victoria Station serves mostly roast beef and steak. And, of course, for cooking steak and roast beef you don’t need a French chef; you need a smart American kid who can cook meat.
They also have a help-yourself salad bar. They’ve become very popular in American restaurants too. You come along and just help yourself to as much of everything as you want. I suspect that people might take a little more lettuce than they’d get if the waiter gave it to them. On the other hand, lettuce is a lot cheaper than help. And it sure saves on the help.
The food is pretty good at Victoria Station, but just as in most other gimmick restaurants, food takes second place.
As a person who likes to eat, I am just vaguely worried about the food business being taken over by entrepreneurs rather than by restaurateurs but even if it isn’t the gourmet restaurants that are making the money, there are still a lot of impractical optimists who keep opening what they hope will be the perfect restaurant.
***
I’m seated at a table at the most expensive restaurant in the United States, the Palace in New York City.
Two of us just dined here. You don’t eat at the Palace; you dine. And I have the check . . . brought on a silver platter. For two people: dinner . . . $179.35.
A lot of expensive restaurants are sneaky with their checks but there’s nothing sneaky about the Palace. They lay it right on the line. Two dinners, $100. Two cocktails at $5 each, $10. A bottle of wine, $25. That was the second cheapest bottle on the menu, by the way.Tax.That all comes to $145.80. Plus 23 percent for service. That’s $33.55 for tips, for a total of $179.35.
Rooney: I