Nostalgia & Kitsch: A Review of Bob's Big Boy Restaurant

The following is a longer version of my Yelp review of Bob's Big Boy restaurant. A new location opened in my area.

For those of you unfamiliar with the chain, Bob's is a more-or-less typical middle of the road family dining establishment. The franchise has been around in one form or another since the late 1930s. It had its hey-day in the 60s and 70s as one of a dozen or so popular restaurants that appealed to the post-War generation of parents who, in possession of surplus income, found "eating out" to be a novel family entertainment.

Bob's was very appealing to children thanks to its rotund mascot, free comic books, and amble dessert options.

The chain went into decline in the late 80s and eventually declared bankruptcy. Subsequent revivals have seen an explosion of interest such that nearly 500 Big Boy's are now a going concern in North America.

In the following review, I refer to "The Fat Vegetarian." That is my moniker on Yelp. I write all my reviews from a vegetarian perspective. I try to locate vegetarian options at "regular" restaurants.

Pea-Soup Andersens meets Johnny Rockets?

The Fat Vegetarian hasn’t always been a vegetarian, but he’s always been fat. (Except for a brief but appreciated growth spurt in the mid-teen years that produced a rail-thin, Bowie-like vision that made him passable for leading a Roxy Music cover band… but I digress.) The fat begins and, evidently ends, with trips to Bob’s Big Boy, that bastion of family dining from the 1970s. Pappy Parker… Big Boy Combos… milk shakes… strawberry pie… and the infamous hot fudge cake, each were soldiers in the army that overthrew my will power for the better part of the Carter administration. (Equal blame can be laid at the feet of Sambo’s, Denny’s, Spire’s, The Park Pantry, The Parasol, JoJo’s, Norm’s, Alphy’s, and once a year, The Velvet Turtle… all those sundry middle-of-the road chains that sprouted up in suburbia between 1960 and 1980 that served predictable, inoffensive food to Boomers and their babies.) Bob’s was ubiquitous enough in the South Bay of Fat’s youth that you could drive from one location to the other and never have to turn left or right off of Hawthorne boulevard. They have always been an average, but enigmatic establishment. From the red relish to the near-perfect Thousand Island dressing, to the odd, pink glyco-gel they use to bind their strawberry pies, you were never unsure about where you were eating. The franchise, from what I can tell, has been through at least three revival attempts since the closures started in the 1980s. The “Hollywood hipster” revivals came in two phases in the 90s and seemed to coincide with the obnoxious Neo-Swing, doofus crowd converging at the Bob’s on Hollywood boulevard, and the old timey car crowd that, for whatever reason, associated Bob’s with car culture and nostalgia. But nostalgia is a poor business model. Just ask the owners of Ed Debevic’s. There has to be value and something you can’t get anywhere else. The reason Bob’s won’t die is because they use nostalgia to get old timers to visit, but they actually do provide a modestly interesting selection of unpretentious American food standards at a price comparable to the infinitely less interesting Denny’s or Carrows. (Has anyone ever desired their last meal to be catered by Carrows?)The newish location in Northridge (why is it listed as Chatsworth?) is immune to hip and keeps the kitsch to a minimum. It’s location predetermines it to be a utility player in the host of eateries up and down Corbin and Tampa. It’s traditional red and white color scheme partners it perfectly with its neighbor, Target, thus creating that all important “synergy” that businesses seek out. Load up at one, then load up at the other. The lack of hipness suggests that this location may be here to stay, and gauging by the packed house evidenced by a causal drive-by, it looks to have sparked the interest of the locals.

We went around 2:00 PM on a Thursday afternoon. There was plenty of seating.The interior is clean and bright, with lots of white surfaces and red vinyl seats . Chrome appointments accent the purposely-visible dessert station, thus providing the scene a hint of drive-in, “New Frontier” nostalgia without being pushy about it. The menus are falling apart… strange given how recently the joint opened.

From the vegetarian’s perspective, the Bob’s experience in general can be hit or miss. Not all carry veggie patties and most do not list them as an option on the menu. (Burbank being the notable exception.) And if they don’t have said-patties, the options are rather meager. Their grilled cheese sandwich is awful. The bread is never crisp and the cheese is skimpy. That being said, the Northridge location does offer the patty on request and is happy to put it on anything menu item you want. Because I was feeling jaunty I asked for a classic Big Boy combo with the veggie patty. I assumed the waitress would baulk at this idea as the classic Big Boy is a Big Mac-style burger… two patties. (When I have ordered a veggie burger at Burbank, they bring me a single-decker.) But she didn’t even blink, and a few minutes later, I had a double-decker with cheese with lightly cooked veggie and grain patties. Overcooking the veggie patty is usually a concern at restaurants, but here they were perfect. Also, the red relish was present and as tangy and tasty as I remember. I was charged extra for a second slice of cheese, which I thought was a bit cheap. Given the option of fries or onion rings I went with rings. They were fair. But frankly, the sandwich was a lot of food! This meant no room for dessert, but we did get a chance to watch many hot fudge sundaes and shakes being made. The staff looked to be very generous with the fudge sauce. Which is a positive sign.

Our waitress was very attentive. I asked for ice coffee (not on the menu) and she went to great lengths to make sure it was made the way I wanted it. She could have just said “no, we don’t do that” but she made a real effort, which is appreciated.

This Bob’s also has a modest salad bar that doubles as an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. Those options and the dessert intrigue made us curious to return. I suppose that is something nostalgia can’t provide... a future-tense of a place.

Nausea: Bad, bad, news

Having the summer off between semesters has meant, among other things, that I have been actually keeping up with the news and news analysis. But this has not necessarily been a general good for my sense of well-being with regards our democracy.

Locally, the California budget mess has underscored how incredibly spoiled we have become in this state. We want it all, but we don’t want to pay for it. It also highlights the constitutional mess at the heart of all disquiet, specifically, the initiative process that allows citizens of the state to vote in new laws. As a kid, I always defaulted to the assumption that the imitative system was tremendously innovative, and innovation has always been the bragging right the Golden State. But these plebiscites have meant that complex laws relating to the budget have been placed in the hands of the civically illiterate populace who, by all accounts, do all their research the day before they go to vote (based largely on the loops of political ads that run incessantly the 72 hours before election day), or they vote the way their political party mailers tell them to vote.

It also means that the legislation of morality can been made a reality. Hence, proposition 8 makes millions of Californians second class citizens by banning their right to enter into a legally-recognized marriage. Other important issues in recent decades that have also been “put to the vote” have included immigration reform, medical marijuana, criminal sentencing mandates, and auto insurance laws. The result of all this direct legislating has been mixed at best and catastrophic at worst. Prop 13, passed in the 1970s, has undermined the state’s ability to balance the budget and, more tragically, has shattered the public school system. Prop 215 ostensibly opened the door to medical marijuana in the state, but subsequent Federal challenges, including DEA raids, have only underscored how poorly the law was thought out.

In general, it is a good idea to leave specialized work to the experts. Despite how we in the state feel about lawyers in general and legislators in particular, they understand how to craft law . Most citizens, even those who may actually work in the legal field, do not have the time or inclination to research the implications of a law. The citizen, pressed for time, and frankly uninterested in the nuances of state law, will vote with his heart rather than his head. If you doubt this assertion, watch any TV ad for or against a proposition. They appeals are always emotional rather than logical. Sadly, what this usually means is that the better funded campaign wins.

This is why the Founding wigs opted to have a representative, rather than a direct, democracy. The agreement is that I will vote for you because you are the expert. It’s why I pay a doctor to diagnosis my stomach pain, because left to my own judgment, I could very well kill myself. Just because we can vote on-line for who’s hot and who’s not, doesn’t mean we should leave potentially life-altering legislation up to caprice.

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The other issue, and one that I had hoped would have gone far, far away ages ago, is the so-called “birther” contingent congregating along the right-wing fringe. Despite patent, Flat-Earth-variety absurdity of the claims that President Obama was not born in the United States, and despite easily accessible data confirming his Hawaiian birth, and despite even the very conservative WorldNetDaily affirming said American birth, the lunatics in the denier camp continue to make noise. But what is worse than this, is that the noise receives airplay. CNN, MSNBC, and of course, FoxNews have spent hours on air talking about the fact that these people exist, giving over time to footage of a hysterical woman at a Republican event waving her own birth certificate and, far from demanding the president pony up his proof, flatly stated that Obama is in fact Kenyan.

This is not newsworthy. Just because someone in a lunatic asylum thinks they are Napoleon, does not mean Anderson Cooper needs to get his thoughts on the state of French politics, nor does it mean that Keith Olbermann has to spend a ten minute segment “debunking” the lunatic’s story. It is a freak-show story, fit for the Weekly World News, (or perhaps a blog!).

And, of course, it is not only the “birthers,” it’s the socialist-takeover conspiracists, it’s the “Tea Party” dimwits, and the all the other simmering, borderline hate groups that simply want to stir the shit because it provides them with an identity and a way of shielding racists sentiments. But we don’t need to afford them the veneer of legitimacy that comes with national exposure on major news programs. For example, the 9/11 “truthers” are still “out there” looking for the holographic projector that made it look like planes hit the Pentagon, but they receive no mainstream coverage. They, along with the moon landing hoaxers have to make do with shoddy youtube videos and occasional conclaves at the Ramada Inn conference room. There is no real purpose to discussing easily debunked conspiracies. The only people who need to be shown the point-by-point debunking are those on the fence. Who, at this point, “isn’t sure” if Apollo 11 landed on the moon? Those Republican congresspersons who were trailed by a reporter the other day asking if they believed Obama was in fact an American and who then said “I don’t know” or that they “still had questions” don’t really need more information. They are pitching woo with their fringe base. Perhaps segregation era politicians in the South had to cop a similar line, despite their liberal education. George W. Bush probably does not believe in Intelligent Design over Darwinian Evolution, but when asked, he felt he had to say that he “hadn’t made up my mind yet” about Evolution. Why? So he can go back to Texas and glad-hand the yokels at the next BBQ. It’s pure pandering. Which is their problem, but the public discourse should not be dictated by the least educated, least informed, and the least sane. Because, for them, there is not enough evidence on the planet to get them to believe that the African-American President of the United States was born on American soil. Every certificate is a forgery. Every expert is a dupe. Plus, they need to keep believing these nutty things because doing so gives them an identity, a fellowship of like-addle-minded morons. Which, again, is fine for them. I have better things to do, and so should news organizations.

Sufficed to say, Uncle Walter wouldn’t have touched them with a 10 foot boom mic.

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Then, of course, there’s Sarah Palin. She was the former governor of the lightly populated state of Alaska for a few months before she decided it was too much a hassle and quit a year and some change before the end of her term. Presumably, she wasn’t doing too much governing while she was on the road with McCain, and, let’s face it, how much work does anyone do when they come back from a long vacation?

She is like Bush in that she is not intellectually curious or particularly bright. She is inarticulate, but her inarticulateness is differently expressed from W’s. Whereas Walker Bush suffered from chronic malapropisms, semantical gaffs, and transient aphasia (e.g. his famous “… you can’t get fooled again” avowal ), Palin’s speech patterns related to the construction of compound and complex sentences, exhibit a strange, and frankly disturbing tendency to begin on a particular topic and end elsewhere. I say disturbing because it happens enough to lead me to suspect that she thinks she is quite clever. She thinks she is doing the usual bait-and-switch routine that all politicians do when they are asked a tough question. Essentially, if you can’t answer the question in a straightforward manner, then just respond with something in the ballpark of the topic, but leave out the questioners pesky inquiry.

(Why does this strategy seem to work in the American media? The Brits won’t stand for it. At least not Paxman. My thought is that politicians learned a long time ago that news programs don’t want to spend a lot of time on a particular question, and they don’t necessarily want to annoy their guests. So, any answer will do, because probing is just not done. Katie Couric, perhaps because she is Katie Couric, got a chance to “pull a Paxman” on Palin, thus exposing the veep candidate as a fraud and intellectual non-entity. And Jon Stewart had done yeoman’s work in this regard, but why should he have to? He hosts a comedy program!)

So, Palin is, at best, a political lightweight who is well-suited to governing a small, isolated population of anti-government fanatics. The thing is, her newsworthiness ended when her final day in office ended. She no longer has executive power. She can no longer threaten wildlife or spend Federal money on local programs and take credit for it. She should be a non-entity now. A citizen. But, if anything, she is more a draw than ever before. Her not doing stuff was a segment on Olbermann last week. Her bizarre utterances were lampooned on Conan O’Brien, which is fine, but then the news replays Captain Kirk reciting Palin’s garbled verbiage as poetry. It is bad enough that The Daily Show, Leno, and Letterman have become primary news sources for citizens, but what does it mean when supposedly legitimate news programs replay and dissect these ephemeral comedy bits as though the bits were actual news?

Particularly galling is the way progressives salivate over the prospect of Palin continuing on in public life. They want her around to lampoon, to mock, and to make themselves feel better about their intellectual superiority. But this is highly dangerous because it underestimates the power of the fringe and the utility of good marketing. We just finished eight years of a presidency that should never have happened. A dimwitted, C-minus drunkard got into the office because Americans wanted someone they could feel superior to. Americans are inherently anti-intellectual and distrustful of brainpower. They like “folksy” and they like simple. They like Southern accents, even when they are faked (as W’s assuredly was).

(An accent never hurt. Why would someone governing Alaska need to cop a Minnesotan accent? Why would Barak Obama need to drop his “g”s when talking at a Town Hall meeting? )

For the same reason we in California will vote with our emotions when it comes to complex legislative issues, Americans in general will go with the empty smile, the knowing wink, and the insincere lip-bite when they vote for their ruler. The head never enters into it.

For these reasons, it is highly undesirable (if you consider yourself a progressive) to continue to give Palin exposure. Because any exposure is good exposure in a cultural milieu where emotion, marketing, and money are game changers. Success in the Obama years may not assure continued Democratic control in 2012. By all accounts, the Clinton years were wildly (if superficially) successful. That Gore lost may has as much to do with boredom and apathy as it did the machinations of the Florida Secretary of State. The more celebrity status Palin has going into 2012, the more appealing she may be to the same moronic masses who call for Obama’s birth-certificate or for Texas secession.

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These three stories - not to mention the “beer summit” and the endless speculation about the contents of corpus Jacksonia - are, of course, mere symptoms of a profound sickness in our culture. In our race to be egalitarian, we have allowed the crass, vulgar, and boorish to become the taste makers and the discussion facilitators. It is as if at a restaurant the child in his high-chair is made to order for the adults. Well, perhaps we have come to develop a taste for ice cream, cake, and French Fries . But no one is sustained on such a diet.