Under New Management

Once I like a product, it tends to disappear. I don't just mean in the sense that when I take something off of a shelf, it is gone. I get that. That's just physics or something. What I mean is that, after I have purchased the product, and stalk the place for several weeks, beard unkempt and eyes bloodshot and body smelly, no replica materializes. Quaker Toasted Oatmeal Honey Nut flavor? Gone from the shelves! Black Cherry Fresca is gone. Even entire stores vacate the premises if they get wind that I like them. Gone is "My Thai," a Thai restaurant that gave free refills on these incredible Thai teas (I hope all of my free refills didn't put them out of business). And now another restaurant I loved, also Thai, is also kind of gone. "Gone" in the sense that nothing remains but a a pale shadow of a remnant of a faded image of former glory from a bygone age. It is under new management.

In the olden days, there was a sign that said "lunch $4, dinner $5," all you can eat. Now, the sign says, "Lunch $4.99, dinner $5.99." Okay, so they've increased costs by 20-25%. But perhaps the interior will explode in a dazzling array of beauty or something. The old Thai place was filled with beautiful greenery and huge plants--there was so much decoration that seating room was cut in half. There were wall decorations everywhere. There was a rotund Buddha figure who seemed to be foreshadowing the girth of my own belly after dinner. There were plates of different sizes and shapes, forks and items vaguely resembling forks, a soda machine that would usually have two flavors unavailable, and the food table was so crowded that plates of food rested upon other plates. It was a kind of food anarchy, an untamed culinary wilderness. The food, much like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, was unlabelled, so you never knew what you were going to get. The friendly, elderly woman who ran the place was always there and always cooking something up, and it felt really personal.

Now, under new management, the food is nicely labelled: even if the food does not taste like "Pad Thai," you know that's what it's supposed to be, because that's what the label says. There is less diversity of food, but it is all neatly compartmentalized. The greenery is gone, presumably to make room for more customers. The food's not really "bad" ... admittedly not as good as it used to be, but it didn't make me recoil or go "Ugh" or anything ... but the atmosphere is gone. While my wife insists that some of the changes are improvements--for instance, she thinks it's actually better when food is labelled and when the soda flavors are available--there's a part of me that wants to insist that all of the anarchic touches were endearing, or perhaps necessary for the full aesthetic experience. There was something delightfully uncategorizable about the original restaurant. On the one hand, it was dirt cheap, appealing to the pragmatic capitalist cheapo side of me that shops at Wal-Mart. On the other hand, it had ornamentation, with the personality of a "Ma and Pa" type shop that seemed utterly opposed to the Walmartization/Starbuckean ethos of American culture. It appealed to my wallet and to my aesthetic. I suppose all of this panegyric is a little extreme--it is just a restaurant, after all--but it was incredible to find a place that just wasn't concerned with making a lot of money or having huge trains of customers (one thing that always surprised me was just how few customers there were).

I want to drown my sorrows in some black cherry fresca, but there isn't any.