Denny's Disasters

The Onion (America's Finest News Source) has provided another pitch-perfect indictment of American life decrying casual dining and cable news; see Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals for America After Visiting Denny's. Courtesy warning: This video includes a few words not suitable for broadcasting over your cubicle wall.

American food has on occasion been praised for its mass appeal, but our odd predilection to combine comestibles with propellants deservedly invites derision from the French and, yes, even the English. Perhaps casual dining restaurants, those indistinguishable iterations of Applebee's, Olive Garden, and TGI Friday's, best capture the American urge to standardize, homogenize, and mediocritize the culinary experience. Among these Denny's stands proud as the forerunners who blanketed America with their version of the neighborhood/all-night roadhouse diner. They might be described as a sanitized edition of an American institution, but they scrubbed out all the charm and let their cleaning skills lapse. However, they are cheap and always open, plus senior citizens get their own discounted menu.

For those Britons who have never been into this restaurant, please conjure up some crude American stereotypes: fluorescent lighting, plastic booths, badly positioned smoking section, food retaining the shape of its container, apathetic waitstaff. Now subtract flavor and fun. The dishes don't require many ingredients, but they still taste like cardboard. Denny's is a place visited out of necessity -- when everything else is closed, because it's affordable, because I had a coupon. It's stationed at the bottom rung of American society, which means either customers are too ignorant to want something better or just unable to start climbing higher.