Outback Steakhouse

My wife and I were visiting another couple, who we met in NYC, and they now live in Joppatown, MD. They are about our age, and they have an adorable 1.5 year little girl.

To celebrate our friend’s birthday, we decided to take him, his family to Outback Steakhouse.

Now having lived in and around NYC for the past five years, I become increasingly worried that I might not be able to adapt to moving back to suburbia. Having grown up in suburbia, it seemed that someday, I would have kids and move back to suburbia, and some day die and get buried in suburbia.

My Outback experience last night reminded be of my fears of the suburban lifestyle.

Once you have a kid, you must either find a sitter or go to a family style restaurant, and hope you kid(s) behave. Outback seems to be about as nice of a restaurant you can go to, and still get a booster seat and crayons for the kids. This makes me think that once we have kids and live in the suburbs, going to Outback will be “As Good as it Gets”. With the exception of on our anniversary, where we hire a sitter, and go to a more upscale restaurant. Not that I care so much about how fancy a restaurant is or isn’t, but I’ve gotten used to being able to eat at some of the world’s best restaurants, and sometimes I just like some good food.

First thing that happens when we go to the Outback, is we call ahead and put our name on the list. Most chain restaurants don’t take reservations, but do let you call ahead. The gal taking our call explained that there was a 60 minute wait, and that it we came to the restaurant in 40 minutes, then we’d only have to wait 20 minutes for our table. I then began to do the math, to figure out what would be the result if we left in 20 minutes instead of 40…

The next step is getting in the car. In suburbia you must drive everywhere. You can’t go to the post office, your church, school, or deli without driving. And you are probably going to have to drive 15-30 minutes to get where you want to go. You can’t hail a cab, take the subway, or walk. Your driving – that’s it, you have no choice. So you drive from you house, to the mall and shopping center where your restaurant is undoubtedly located. This particular Outback had about a dozen spaces in front of the restaurant reserved for people picking up to go orders. So next you must find a parking spot. Generally, malls have huge parking lots that expand toward and infinite horizon in every direction. It’s the goal of every suburbanite to park as close as possible to their destination to minimize the amount of walking required. So you park you nondescript sedan in a parking lot filled with so similar cars that the only way to find you car again it to get an antenna marker, or hope your key-less entries system can guide you back.

Inside these suburban restaurants, you don’t have a maitre’d or captain, but instead, usually three or four girls wearing important looking headsets, like they are helping direct a movie. The kindly search for you name, and then hand you a sort of pager device. The pagers never have much range, and may or may not actually buzz. At a New York restaurant the maitre’d will remember who you are when you check in, and will not give you some sort of strange device that lights up and vibrates when you least expect it.

Eventually, you’ll be shown your table or booth, and your dining experience will begin. As much as I like locally owned and operated restaurants, they’re are some nice things about national chains. For the most part, you know what you can expect even if you’ve never been to this particular restaurant before. You also know that if there is something on the menu that you like, so long as the cooks are sufficiently trained, you should get about the same meal as what you’ve had before. That, and you must hope that your server enters your order into the computer correctly, and brings you the dish that you ordered.

The best part of dining at suburban chain restaurant is celebrating a birthday. When it’s time for dessert, your server will round up a bunch of staff, and they will sing you some birthday song. They will never sing the normal Happy Birthday song, because it’s copyrighted and they don’t have a license for public performance of it. This makes me smile as I think about how stupid our copyright laws tend to be.

Within a few hours of your dining experience, you’ll quickly forget about the restaurant, but maybe you’ll remember the people and the conversations you had at dinner, which is probably the more important part.