I went out for dinner last night by myself, picking somewhere fairly randomly on 8th, close to the apartment I’ve been borrowing. It was a nice place. Buzzy, not overtly unfriendly, and did very good New Mexican food.
What perturbed me was that I noticed — while lurking outside having a cigarette between courses — their delivery menu featured, amongst other things, T-shirts. The place didn’t seem to be a chain, and yet, it had clothing for sale. Said shirts had the restaurant’s slogan on them (do restaurants need slogans?), and I can’t remember exactly what it was, but basically it was existential self-definition in seven words or fewer, and the caption indicated that such a garment was quite the thing for anyone who was willing to ‘tip it, flip it, and make the world their way.’
Now, I’m from England. Our restaurants don’t come on like that. They don’t feel the need to provide life coaching. They concentrate on providing food. I tried to imagine the above, or something similar, happening in a gastropub in London: me walking in, going up to the bar, and the guy there shouting —
“Yo! Welcome, friend! Are you ready to tip it, flip it, make the world the way you want it?”
‘Well, mainly… I just wanted a beer.’
‘Dude, seriously — tell me you’re going to take this world, scrunch it up in a ball, throw it up in the air and then kick that motherfucker through the goalposts to Successville.’
‘I’ll have some crisps, if that’s what you mean.’
I have trouble even being the second-best I can be, and I can’t see a restaurant — however fine their deconstructed burrito with watercress, avocado and pickled this-that-and-the-other might be — changing that any day soon.
@ememess
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 19, 2009 at 2:47 am
Melissa Dark
Only restaurant slogan/”mission statement” I’ve seen that I liked was: “Cook good food and have a beer after work”. In Australia. Of course.
May 19, 2009 at 3:28 am
ememess
See, that’s a slogan I can believe in.
May 19, 2009 at 3:22 am
Will Humphreys
Tip it, flip it and be the best you can be. You can’t say fairer than that.
May 20, 2009 at 9:24 am
Keith Comber
In the current Parliamentary crisis, I would think the word ‘flip’ is now a no no.
May 29, 2009 at 8:41 am
Andrew Hills
Would be better if every food establishment had to have one and by law it had to be painfully honest. McDonalds: “Making it easier for you to be lazy AND set your kids on the way to obesity at the same time.” The Ivy: “You pay for pretention, not the food”……..Though I think my local chinese wouldn’t come out of it well: “Situated next door to a vets for a reason!”