In praise of Friendly’s
Why my favorite spot is neither Waffle House nor TGI Friday’s . . . plus, a history of the “fern bar,” a clip from a Tom Cruise classic, and a novel you must read.
Happy Monday! Happy May!
I’m not sure when in the course of Unorthodox, the podcast I hosted from July 2015 until last week, I coined the tagline “the universe’s leading Jewish podcast,” but it’s been quite a few years now. I ended every episode with “Shalom, friends,” and I meant it, the shalom as much as the friends.
Last Thursday, I gave my last “Shalom, friends.” Many of you have followed me here, to the newsletter. I thank you.
Leaving a podcast I created with two dear friends is tough, even if you’re leaving it to do some amazingly fun projects, like a biography of one of your favorite writers ever. But for those of you who don’t know the podcast, I won’t say much more (it would be boring for you), except that a) I think our best episodes were, in general, the annual conversion episodes, where we told the stories of people who had come to Judaism sometime in adult life (or in one case, in adolescence) (if curious, here is one episode, here is another), and, b) I thought the farewell episode my colleagues did for me, the “Markisode,” as they called it in-house, was just lovely.
The whole Markisode is a wonder, from the surprise appearance by Tori Spelling—it’s right at the top—which blew my mind, to the segment at the end in which I travel with producer Robert Scaramuccia up I-91 to visit my parents, the Friendly’s where I hung out, and my high school, where we found my debate trophies in the old trophy case in Chaffee Hall. I had no idea what Robert was going to do with all that tape, but boy did he make something out of it.
Among other things, he captured a tangent that he seemed to believe was typical Mark, which if true means that I am a total madman. It’s a bit cringey (or as the kids say, adjectivally, “cringe”) to listen to, but hey, I’ll own it. I guess I go off on totally mad tangents in which I spin ill-supported master theories about casual-dining restaurant chains.
Among other things, he captured a tangent that he seemed to believe was typical Mark, which if true means I am a total madman.
If you want to have a listen, tune in at 55:07. Robert begins talking, as I’m driving down I-91 South, somewhere between Windsor and Hartford. He is sitting in the passenger seat and holds an expensive microphone in my face, asking me stuff, like “Do you actually like Friendly’s, or is it just a bit [you do]?” And at 56:52, I deliver this sociological treatise:
You have to remember that Friendly’s started during the Great Depression … The first one was in downtown Springfield. It was a place you could do during the Depression, and get a Big Beef burger or cheeseburger—which by the was was on toast, not a bun—and fries and a cup of coffee for a dime. It was a quality meal at Depression-era prices … It wasn’t an ice cream parlor, it wasn’t a burger joint, it wasn’t a coffee shop. It was all three, in one, with sit-down service, for a good price … It was a wonderful thing they did for the northeast of America.
What you have to remember about a TGI Friday’s or a Ruby Tuesday’s is they came out of a different moment in time. They came out of the fern bar revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s. [To Robert:] You don’t know what a fern bar is. [Robert, agreeing: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”] The term is not used any more. The term is actually before my time. I was five when people stopped using that term.
A fern bar was a restaurant/bar … TGI Friday’s was a New York City establishment … that was basically a family restaurant but that also had a big bar. And in the ’70s they were decorated with ferns. You know, ferns? Like the plants?
You can sort of picture what I am talking about. It’s like, Look how fun we are, we’ve got outdoor ferns, we’ve got plants hanging, we’ve got some cool fun drinks. It makes it more like it’s someone’s pool house, it’s someone’s cabana. It makes it sexier when you have plants. So TGI Friday’s was the original fern bar. The sexual revolution is happening … work happy hours are kind of sexy things. People leave the office, they go to the fern bar, you have three or four drinks after work … You’ve got a freer America.
The TGI Friday’s was the place you went—yes, you could get a burger or fries, like at Friendly’s. But they had a bar there. With plants. And fruity drinks. And so it was a happy hour place. Are you following me?
[Robert, bemused: “Yeah.”]
So it’s a whole different vibe. Going to a Friendly’s is the squarest, most family-oriented thing you can do. You go there with your mom, with your kids, with your aunt Susan … Or a twelve-year-old boy goes there with his buddies. And in some ways—God, this theory is just coming to me right now!—Friendly’s got caught between a lower end, which is McDonald’s, Red Robin …
[here Robert suggests Denny’s, Waffle House]
Exactly! … You’re a fucking genius, Robert … The Cracker Barrel, which is underselling them, the food quality is worse … and then on the upper end, places that sell booze. And Friendly’s was saying, No, we are neither of those … We are a family restaurant. Truly a family restaurant …
And something about America doesn’t want that restaurant right now.
Is this a good theory? I think it is. I struggle to think of another sit-down chain, with table service, that has tried to make it without alcohol. Every other sit-down chain—Bennigan’s, 99, Ruby Tuesday’s, TGI Friday’s—sells booze. Is Olive Garden an exception? Maybe. But Red Lobster—they sell booze. Friendly’s is more about this:
More on the fern bar
I first heard the term “fern bar” in Janet Malcolm’s profile of the artist David Salle. If you want to read more about the fern-bar revolution, which probably jumped the shark with the flair-bartending era chronicled so beautifully in the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail—
—then check out this New Yorker piece, from 2015. An excerpt here:
The revolutionary bar that brought the co-ed cocktail party outside of the home was none other than T.G.I. Friday’s—the original outpost of the international casual-dining chain. Its founder was a young perfume salesman named Alan Stillman, who lived on the Upper East Side and was interested in meeting single women. Stillman told me, in an interview first published on my blog, Edible Geography, that, at the time, the way to pick up girls was, naturally, to go to cocktail parties. “What would happen is that, on Wednesday and Thursday, you’d start collecting information—things like, ‘On Friday night at eight o’clock at 415 East Sixty-third Street, there’s going to be a great party run by three airline stewardesses,’ ” he said. “You built up a cocktail list and you bounced from one place to the other.”
At the time, the Upper East Side was filled with single people; the author Betsy Israel estimates, in “Bachelor Girl,” her 2002 history of single women in New York City in the twentieth century, that nearly eight hundred thousand of them lived on Manhattan’s East Side between Thirtieth and Ninetieth Streets during the nineteen-sixties. (According to Stillman, a building adjacent to what became the first T.G.I. Friday’s housed so many airline stewardesses that it was known as the “Stew Zoo.”) There was a bar next to Stillman’s apartment on First Avenue called the Good Tavern, but the single twenty-something women of the neighborhood never seemed to go there. It was a saloon—still stuck in the gender-segregated drinking culture of the nineteenth century, but without the high-quality cocktails. One night, in early 1965, Stillman was having a drink there after work when he suggested to the bartender that the place could be fixed up and turned into a singles bar. The bartender’s reaction, Stillman said, was, “Why don’t you do it?” Stillman borrowed five thousand dollars from his mother, took over the premises on a short-term lease, and began to redecorate, aiming to make the space welcoming to women.
His new place was brighter and cleaner than your average saloon, and dotted with familiar domestic flourishes: dainty bentwood chairs, framed photos, Tiffany lamps, and, of course, the signature ferns …
And about Red Lobster . . .
You liked that little mention of Red Lobster above? Yeah, you did. Do you know one of the great novels ever is set at a Red Lobster? Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster (2007) is about the last day at a Red Lobster somewhere in Connecticut, in a strip mall off the highway (my guess was a Southington, or a Milford), on its last day in business before the corporate owner shuts it down.
Much like the underrated comedy Superstore, it takes retail culture seriously, exploring the bonds among coworkers who do very un-sexy work. It’s funny, touching, and utterly original.