Dog Eat Dog
Once upon a time, there were two kinds of restaurants: fancy places and joints. The latter category included diners, dinettes, lunch counters, saloons, barbecue pits, chili shacks and so on. Now there are so many different categories and subcategories for dining establishments, I can barely keep them all straight.
Like the difference between “fast food” — McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell — and “fast casual.” A fast-casual restaurant is no-frills, order-at-the-counter and inexpensive but supposedly serves a higher quality of food; the better-known chains in this category include Panera Bread, Chipotle and the Atlanta-based Moe’s Southwest Grill.
There are a couple of local Moe’s franchises out in the suburbs, but the first urban version of the low-priced burrito and taco joint was opened by a trio of partners — Cindy Noland, her brother David and his wife, Nancy — last week in the former Natural Wear space at 435 Westport Road.
The Nolands are planning to open more of their fast-casual cantinas, but only in the heart of the city, competing directly with the McDonald’s-owned Chipotle, which offers similar menu items (“We’re fresher,” Nancy insists) but without a bunch of goofy, trivia-inspired names for its fare. Moe’s offers a Pinky Tuscadero salad, for those who remember that short-lived femme fatale on TV’s Happy Days, and an Art Vandalay burrito named for a recurring Seinfeld gag.
I loathe cutesy names for food items, so I can’t see myself waiting in line at Moe’s for an “Ugly Naked Guy” taco unless an unclad Ken Weatherwax (go ahead and look that up, trivia buffs!) is serving it.
Just around the corner at Relish (4116 Broadway), owner David Rabinovitz didn’t get too clever about naming the hot wieners at his fast-casual joint. A frank doused in chili is simply a chili dog; the same thing with cheese, sour cream and crushed tortilla chips is a taco dog.
But Relish is strictly a big-dog house now that Rabinovitz has stopped serving a plate of miniature hot dogs in cocktail sauce. “No one was ordering them,” he says.
Maybe they would have caught on if he’d given them a funny name, like Wee Willies or Chewy Chilitos. Then a fast-casual place could have succeeded where a fast-food giant supposedly couldn’t: There’s a restaurant-industry rumor that Taco Bell changed the name of its chilito burrito to the more straightforward chili-cheese burrito after complaints that chilito was derogatory Spanish slang — for a small penis.
