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Comment by kuhewa | Hacker News Reader

> this class distinctions are also applied at the regional level.

Living in Hawai'i it would strike me how popular CCF was for people that came all that way (typically middle class Americans) and have access to tons of great variety in ethnic places they may not at home, along with local joints that would serve familiar food with the option of local flavour. But some of these comments put it in good context, that it is the familiar and safe choice and has a special or semi-fancy vibe to a large subset of those people.

I don't think I've eaten in one since I was a preteen and may have only been once, but come to think of it, at the time I grew up rural 45 minutes to the nearest small city, eating at cheesecake factory did seem like a special occasion.

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I find this obsession with the "class" of restaurants in the US comical.

Nobody gives a fuck if you go and eat in a "middling" establishment equivalent to CCF in these here parts, even if you're old money. And nobody cares of most other US shibboleths of class.

Whereas in the US it's as if something like CCF or, god forbid, Olive Garden, has leprosy, for some types of "high class" or wanabee so, people.

I'm not sure where you live, but I'm going to guess you are someplace where most restaurants have not discovered they can fire the chefs, buy factory produced food and reheat it with cheap labor. There is a massive quality difference, and so people who like good food will not eat in some places.

When I go to Europe or Asia, I have high confidence I can walk into a random restaurant/cafe and get good food made with high quality fresh ingredients on sight. Of course not every restaurant/cafe is good, but enough are.

>I'm not sure where you live, but I'm going to guess you are someplace where most restaurants have not discovered they can fire the chefs, buy factory produced food and reheat it with cheap labor. There is a massive quality difference, and so people who like good food will not eat in some places.

Europe. I've tried such american restaurants like CCF, and they're not just "reheated factory produced food". Even Olive Garden isn't that (the prepare stuff on-site, contrary to myth). In fact, they're better than many local ones.

I'd say it's less about liking good food than liking to signal class status. The same people have no issue eating shoddily made chinese take-away or in-and-out or total prepackaged factory crap sold in their upclass super market, because those are not associated with a class stigma.

It occurred to me, perhaps a difference is that price point of restaurant isn't full of megachains in Europe? In the land of cookie-cutter strip malls, buying into heavily corporatised consumerism in the presence of more 'authentic' options is responsible for part of the stigma of such places.

In Australia at least where there are some chains for casual/fast food but not so much for restaurants, I haven't sensed this stigma because that dining niche is occupied by the local hotel's restaurant or a pub with low to no pretenses but a decent to quite good meal.

>buying into heavily corporatised consumerism in the presence of more 'authentic' options is responsible for part of the stigma of such places

I'm not sure it's that, since 99% of the consumption of those same snobs are heavily corporatised consumerism. It's just the expensive kind marketed to more affluent suckers. They're for example OK with Starbucks, the kind of "heavily corporatised consumerism", and all kind of BS upscale consumerist brands like Lululemon.

This is also true of (at least parts of) the US. This whole conversation is bizarre to my Midwestern eyes.

Class matters most to those on the precipice of their class distinction. If you're old-money, and your entire social circle is old-money, then you don't view the things you do as being "high class", they're just normal things you do. So it goes with the middle and low classes.

You see the most obsession with class concerns in areas where you have people who are class mobile: There's a lot of nouveau riche and upper-middle class people in tech, because tech has been a massive boom industry. Likewise you see a fair amount of class concern among people falling down the social ladder, such as the generations that grew up within environment of an old-money fortune, but for whatever reason that money was lost.

That's the thing, the person that first responded to me mentioned that money didn't matter, class was an attitude that only certain people in certain areas have.

I feel like everyone is talking in circles just wanting to be right on the internet.

As someone obsessed with Hawaiian food (lived in Vegas most of my life), I just wanted to hit all the local places when I visited. We did eat at Roy’s steakhouse though.

Roys is still local in my book

I kind of laughed because there was one right behind my childhood home in Vegas

Well, it is the ninth island and all :) never been to a location on the mainland, wiki seems to suggest most were not under original ownership, actually were owned by Bloomin Brands for a while who runs several of the concept megachains that would be in TCF's class, so those may not make my arbitrary cut.

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