Profoundly disappointed to see that "Stover Bros. Cafe", a restaurant-within-a-store no longer appears to carry the "Southern Fried Donut", a delicious concoction which was a bit like a funnel cake, only a million times better. That got me thinking...when people miss a restaurant, what do they really miss? The décor, the service, or the food? Say you've got a restaurant, a favorite restaurant. One day it burns down and the waitstaff decides to open in a different location with a new name. Perhaps it's a little more or less downscale. But the menu is almost identical, and it's the same guy doing the cooking, so no loss, right?
It's not the same, is it? I mean, the local Maggie Moo's was kicked out of its strip center, and it reopened as "Harolds" elsewhere. The location is a bit smaller, it no longer carries the name, and it serves hot dogs as well, but the ice cream is the same. However, it's very different. Or the Stover Bros. example: it used to be this redneck-ish gas station burger place, now it's all "upscale" and stuff, but it's the same guy working there. I believe the donut was originally named something else. As for a fictional example: in the movie Ratatouille, the old Gaston's restaurant was shut down by the health department, so the main characters create a new restaurant, which served the exact same food (much to the evil food critic-turned- good "small business investor"'s delight).
It also depends on the way you cook it, something unique to an individual. Even if you had an exact recipe (not a clone that someone hypothesized) of, say, Coca-Cola, or Colonel Sander's herbs and spices, it wouldn't taste the same, would it? I know at least two or three local restaurants that changed hands (some closed, some not yet) where the food tasted noticeably worse after the new ownership.
I'm sure that Little Caesar's pizza recipe is standard. Yet I've been to a few Little Caesar's across the country and every one is different, even within the same town. So why is it that way?
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