Food For Thought

Perhaps you saw this piece in the Wall Street Journal about how conservatives and liberals prefer different places to eat.  Of course, you can exaggerate the difference, since even the most "liberal" place--California Pizza Kitchen--has a sizable conservative clientele, while the highly "conservative" Cracker Barrel gets plenty of lefties.

In fact, the main determinant seems to be not the portions of food, but the portions of the country where these franchises are centered.  I mean, it's not as if you go into the leftist places and they have MSNBC on TV instead of sports. The article seems to claim with demographic shifts, new restaurants move in, but is that really for political reasons?

For instance, one place with a huge differential, favoring liberals, is Friendly's.  Now I've been to Friendly's. There's nothing particularly chichi about it--I'm sure it would fit in among conservative country folk as well as liberal city folk. It's just that franchises are found in the Northeast, which these days is mainly liberal (though a few decades ago it wasn't).

But if you were wondering, here are some liberal, conservative and, I guess, moderate places, so now you know where you're supposed to eat:

Liberal:  Macaroni Grill.  Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. P. F. Chang's. The Cheesecake Factory (really?).  Marie Callender's.  Hooters (interesting).

In the middle:  Red Robin.  Mimi's Café.  Olive Garden.  Red Lobster.  Denny's. Big Boy.

Conservative:  Hometown Buffet.  Golden Corral.  Sizzler.  Bob Evans.  Cracker Barrel (okay, this one I can see).