Hacker News Reader

Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

> ... “The guy that every girl would want.”

> They were soon dating, sharing dinners at Red Lobster

I'm not entirely convinced that dinners at Red Lobster are what "every girl wants".

I'm imagining the bell-curve meme with the guy on the left saying "take her to red lobster", thr guy in the middle saying "if you respect her, put on a tie, give her flowers, and take her to Chez Pierre", and the guy on the right saying "take her to red lobster".

The guy on the right would need a high tolerance for terrible food.

https://slate.com/business/2013/12/red-lobster-s-bad-food-pr...

ITT: people who make a million dollars in a few years or less sneer at working class people enjoying what they can afford to enjoy.

There are plenty of cheap restaurants better than Red Lobster.

See https://slate.com/business/2013/12/red-lobster-s-bad-food-pr...

Two words:

Bottomless.

Shrimp.

Should the third word be bankruptcy?

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Food/red-lobster-eyes-bankruptcy-...

At least this time it wasn't because the Soviets boycotted the Olympics.

They probably selling the bottoms to someone else

I mean, I wouldn't mind being taken out to Red Lobster.

I've come to find too, partners who prefer whatever instead of having very specific expectations for time spent together are more comfortable to be around.

Many of the girls|women in my part of the world would rather go freediving for crayfish and eat them on the beach than hang out in a chain resturant.

https://youtu.be/yk6wa0YcUN0?t=60

Where I grew up, crayfish are freshwater mudbugs; those would be rock lobsters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4QSYx4wVQg .

Also where I grew up, we had a "baseball analogy" for dating, in which running the bases proceeds more or less as follows:

1st base - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_kTor63Ihw

2nd base - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHOo_b6Gn4c

3rd base - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-rB0pHI9fU

home run - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1niTEkP-6eo

So I would say (referring to the diving video!) that fingers in wet crevices and feeling around would be 3rd while sticking spears in and suddenly releasing tension would defo be a home run.

In countries that don't really have baseball as a sport that anyone plays, does the same pattern apply? Are there different analogies, perhaps involving "silly mid ons" or "brexit tackles"?

Aren't you special

Yeah, you know, sometimes HN really surprises me with the stances people have on dating.

I remember reading someone saying literally "it's just not possible to find a good-looking girlfriend before graduating college". I was like, what? This statement offends the whole humanity, and also offends me as a man. And yeah, I care to explain why. It's just basically a more covert way of saying that "all women are, err, for the lack of better term, golddiggers, and all men want a partner who will offer them no more than sex". I sure get the evolutionary take on mate selection but even if one really understands it, one will know that the reality is much more complex that that.

Not particularly .. why do you think that?

As stated above, first dates at resturants, etc aren't for everybody.

No one cares

> He was “funny, romantic, the most sensitive man I’ve ever met,” Wainscott later told the Charlotte Observer. “The guy that every girl would want.”

Then they started having dinners at Red Lobster - presumably that’s what she wanted, and a popular preference? Who cares if other people prefer free diving?

The conversation moved on from TFA, eg:

> I'm not entirely convinced that dinners at Red Lobster are what "every girl wants".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40233023 cares.

Yes, and that commenter sounds like a snobby elitist douchebag.

I know we're not supposed to go for the ad hominem, but I'm honestly not sure that comment warrants anything better.

A coffee or beer can be slammed quickly compared to waiting for and eating a meal.

Sometimes you wanna get out asap.

Reflecting upon this a bit more, perhaps something that helps in our parts of the world is that restaurants are not segmented by price point. For instance, at lunch time everyone goes to the restaurants close by, but apprentices and street workers take the meal of the day, while the office workers order from the menu.

So chain restaurants are really something that typically occur only in the same sorts of areas as big box stores, aiming at a similar demographic.

Haha, definitely. People come in different varieties. Even better you've linked to some evidence confirming that ;)

FWiW that comment of mine has gotten more bounce (up|down votes) than pretty much any other I've made here.

I'm > 60 and gone out on a lot of first dates over the decades, rarely to a resturant or a movie (I mean we have them here in W.Australia but of all the many ways to get to know a person these are not the best choices).

The Miss Manners approach to dating served me well:

All dates have three elements: food, entertainment, and affection. A first date should have plenty of entertainment and only a hint of affection. At some point, the affection becomes the entertainment, but under no circumstances may the food be omitted.

Dating/flirting on a full stomach is more likely to happen than on an empty stomach.

Exhibit A :)

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/business-negotiations/in-b...

Aka the "hungry judge effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect. But it's not like you can only fill your stomach up at a fancy restaurant (neither that you claim that nor that I find it being something bad).

FWIW, the hungry judge effect is almost certainly nonsense.

The original research assumed the case were randomly ordered, and so everyone should have an equal shot at parole—-but they weren’t! Instead, all the cases from one particular prison were heard together, with breaks usually occurring between prisons. Within a prison, cases were arranged by lawyer, with prisoners representing themselves going last. If people without professional representation fare worse (and they do), then…that’s the whole effect. PNAS published a “rebuttal” article where someone actually interviewed court staff who reported this, but it’s been cited like…70 times vs thousands for the original article.

There are other reasons to think the original result wasn’t true too. The “effect” didn’t occur when considering wall-time (i.e., judges were similarly severe at 9:30 and 11:30), only order (first vs last), but you’d expect hunger, blood sugar, etc to track time elapsed.

Sorry for the aside, but the fact that people still cite this drives me nuts.

I don’t know how to interpret this chain — is red lobster not fancy enough? For some reason I thought it was relatively fancy? Certainly not Michelin rated, but still

Without ever having been to one, I'll note that as a European I know Red Lobster only from TV as a stereotypical place used as a joke about the type of places people presented as less sophisticated might consider fancy. It's used that way in Big Bang Theory, for example, though presumably because it is well known enough as at least a place that some people will consider fancy.

TIL I’m not sophisticated lol

(Don’t worry, I’m not offended)

Well, I've not seen one so for what I know it might be a complete mischaracterization anyway :)

But e.g Howard's mom going "Oh, Mr big shot with his Red Lobster": https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5edf85de-e15f-4507-8c70-f1e2a63...

(after rejecting Olive Garden, I think? I might misremember. Olive Garden is another chain I only know of from TV)

lol, as a kid the “date night” restaurants were Chilis, Olive Garden, Applebees, and random mom-n-pop places. I think places like outback, Texas Roadhouse, and red lobster were reserved for “you got a promotion”-esque events. I bet that’s pretty normal for low-middle-class Midwest folks

It's popular with middle class suburban families. So, snobs (who don't realize that's what they are) like to sneer at it to demonstrate their sophistication.

General question: can any chain restaurant be considered "fancy"? In Europe I would say certainly not, not sure about the US though...

Pick a point in the world. Find the area surrounding it within (an arbitrary) 30 minutes of travel by car under typical traffic conditions.

There are many such points in the world where there are no restaurants at all. If there's one restaurant, then it is the fanciest. If there are two or more restaurants, you can rank them. Without recourse to subjective comparisons, we might hypothesize that a restaurant with a higher average cost per main course is fancier than one with a lower cost.

Without actually doing the GIS searches, my contention is that there are quite a large number of points in the US where a Red Lobster can be considered the fanciest restaurant around.

When its competition is tgi Fridays and long John silvers, red lobster starts looking rather fancy. These places not only exist, but are probably most of the towns in America. I've lived in a few

I wouldn't consider Long John Silver's a competitor to Red Lobster. LJS is fast food.

TGI Friday's, sure.

I included it it because in a lot of central American towns those are your only two seafood options. And yes, if its competition is long John silvers, then red lobster might as well be Zuma

I don't see why a restaurant being a chain would automatically exclude it from ever being thought of as "fancy", but I guess it depends on your definition of fancy. Serving high-quality, well-prepared food in a decently high-class environment would be "fancy" to me. Would Fogo de Chão (a $50-$70USD/person Brazilian steakhouse) be considered fancy? Nobu is often also considered a fancy restaurant and is also a chain.

Does a "fancy restaurant" require absolute uniqueness? How do you define a "fancy restaurant"?

To me, "fancy" is about not allowing money-saving measures to have an effect on the taste and quality of the food. The menu is honest. The prawns are actually prawns and not shrimp (They ARE different!). Maine Lobster is actually from Maine and not some cheaper kind. Kobe beef is actually from Japan and not "American style Kobe".

Fancy restaurants create food with flavor, rather than trying to appeal to people with weak palates that can't handle a little garlic and rosemary.

All of this pushes prices up, but fancy restaurants aren't trying to compete on price.

The difference between prawns and shrimp only exists in some regions. The terms have no concrete scientific meaning, they're both vernacular and depending on where you are both or either term may be used for the same critter. I presume you mean that prawns are the bigger ones, but I've bought local caught fresh "shrimp" on South Carolina coast that were nearly as large as lobsters. There's really no consistent widely respected rule for which is which.

From a purely scientific naming, there actually is a difference between shrimp and prawns. They're different sub-orders. Prawns are Dendrobranchiata, while shrimp are Pleocyemata. I'm not sure it makes much culinary difference to me though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrobranchiata

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleocyemata

"True Shrimp" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caridea

It's a tricky one. I'd lean towards no, but there are some chains that push up against it. Often ones that are either small and/or where at least some of their restaurants are not "obviously chain restaurants" and often also employing the "trick" of a small number spread across cities that makes it seem "fancier"

As an example, Aqua has restaurants in New York, Miami, Dubai, London, and Hong Kong. Some of them are branded Aqua, but most are not. So while it's a "chain", it feels fancy, perhaps more so than justified. E.g. their London restaurants are perhaps more flashy / "tourist fancy" w/e.g. two restaurants in the Shard, than "actually" fancy. They're mostly pretty mid-range, maybe upper mid-range for London. I think that's about where you'll get to as a chain. To get above that, you get to the level where you expect the restaurant to at least tell you about their chef by name, whether or not they're actually famous enough for you to recognise it.

Yes. Some places in the US are a sea of chain restaurants so “fancy” is relative. People propose marriage at some chains, which I think indicates they think those chains are fancy.

Additional datapoint: I saw two people get married at a 5.11 retail store.

I'd flip the question the other way around.

Why does becoming a chain automatically disqualify a place as being fancy?

I think people apply a lot of assumptions once the word "chain" has entered the chat. They assume they've entered a race to the bottom on costs to maximize profits, but there are plenty of chains that I would still consider on the fancy side. Fogo de Chao and Ruth's Chris, for example.

I wouldn't call Red Lobster fancy, but I also think it's a perfectly fine restaurant. Certainly decent date material.

Its expensive enough but fairly generic there are probably better choices for the same money everywhere its like giving a gift card for a gift its good but it lacks thought and imagination.

It’s (one of many) pretty yuk chain. In my 20s I probably wouldn’t have minded. Later I’d be internally going “really?” unless it were some area that really didn’t have good alternatives.

Is it about "how clean is the place" or about "how clean is the table while we are/after we are done eating"?

I've been in the US plenty of times, but I'm a burger guy, so I made sure I tried all burger chains and as many (indi) restaurants I could. But I've never been in a Red Lobster. I do understand though that lobster-eating can be messy - thus the bib.

I can also picture that cracking lobster 'body-parts' is not the most romantic setup.

It's not really about either of those things. Some people look down on Red Lobster because it's more middle-class/working-class than they are.

Red Lobster is at the same level as Olive Garden.

The poor think they're fancy. Middle class think they're casual.

Wow, that's a really disgustingly elitist take. Pretty much everything wrong with some types of well-off/wealthy people is summed up in your comment.

While I haven't been to a Red Lobster since I was a kid, that was always a treat back then, and it was one of the nicest places my parents could afford to take us on occasion.

> While I haven't been to a Red Lobster since I was a kid

Why not? Have you become “disgustingly elitist”?

The scenario I responded to didn’t involve family meals with children.

My original comment was referring to nothing other than the fact that the food at Red Lobsters is pretty terrible. It’s not about price - there are plenty of cheap restaurants that serve good food.

See https://slate.com/business/2013/12/red-lobster-s-bad-food-pr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com