For my last night in the states, a friend and I made our first visit to a suburban portland hooters so we could immerse ourselves in yet another wondrous american experience. I had a lot of preconceived notions about the location, its patrons and food and as it turns out, I was only right on one account.
Despite understanding that tackiness was a part of the whole appeal of the place, I wasn't really prepared for how garish the interior of the place really was. The quarter inch thick shellacking on all the rustic trash designs was a throwback to a bad lumberjack showcase at the
PNE over a decade ago and nascar memorabilia littered the suprisingly bright interior.
After a greeting from the waitresses wearing a black variation of the high-waisted short shorts and trademark tanktops, we wandered around briefly trying to find something that looked even halfway comfortable and settled on a wooden table with high stools mainly because nowhere in the entire restaurant looked to have a good seat. TVs showing nascar racing, basketball, boxing and sports news surrounded us and the menu juxtaposed deep over-fried buffalo-sauced everythings next to raw oysters and king crab legs. All the things I knew about food and atmosphere would have pegged Hooters as a failure from the beginning if not for oh so important lowest common denominator; this though is where I was totally off the mark.
We both expected to find an establishment full of men, both young and old but with two unifying traits; a love of seeing women wearing garish tight-fitting outfits and a lack of shame. What we were both surprised to see is how many women and children were in the place. There were a lot of couples and families and one boy who looked no more than 8 years old was celebrating his birthday there with the hooters girls gathering around and singing him a birthday song, complete with clapping and fanfare. Among the women though, many were overweight and a handful were downright obese. Why they would choose to eat at a place that flaunts young busty waitresses baffled me.
Apart from the obese women and the children who graced the place, there was still the expected audience. There was a highschool duo with their flipped up collars who seemed too embarassed to check out the very nice ass attached to the dancing waitress four feet away from them. They averted their eyes and continued on their salads, trying to seem oblivious to the only reason I could figure they came for. The group of three next to us who seemed to be pulling out every trick in the book to keep the waitress at their table, trying to keep a conversation going with any topic they could come up with. A table of lesbians sat near the entrance looking manlier than myself, taking a liking to one of the cuter waitresses at work that night.
Our food came and was actually worse than we expected. While understanding that we were in what is best classified as a sports bar where food was low on the list of priorities, our appetizers had the shit fried out of them, all featuring crusts of saucy breading made to protect the dried out meat inside from your teeth. We could barely tell the chicken strips from the shrimp and it seemed neither could the kitchen considering the stray parts we found in the otherwise distinctly formed piles. Their "world famous" wings bordered near awful though it was amusing to see them offered in a combo alongside a bottle of dom perignon. The philly cheesesteaks we got stood out as being pretty good except for the buns they came on which seemed to have once served as oxy pads for a teenaged giant with excessively oily skin.
We threw a couple more beers into us before heading to our next destination, now able to check another establishment off the "it'd be funny if we went here" list. As I find with most of the places on that list, it was more depressing than funny.
