Glancing at the travel section of The Washington Post this morning, I suffered a brief moment of panic. In an article about European restaurants where it’s possible for a homesick American to obtain a Thanksgiving dinner, I found a listing for a London eatery called Michael Moore (19 Blandford Street).
Now I knew that the author/filmmaker Moore is unaccountably popular in the UK, but was he celebrated enough to trade on his name by opening a restaurant? A quick bit of Googling revealed that in fact the restaurant is named after its chef and owner, presumably a different person. But from a purely capitalist viewpoint, an eating place run by the American Mr. Moore might be a winner. He has already proven there’s a market for pandering to Europeans’ stereotypes of American life. So how about a similarly-themed restaurant? The walls would be decorated with deer rifles and anti-gun-control bumper stickers. The wait staff would wear cowboy boots and George W. Bush masks. The only items on the menu would be chicken-fried steak and Budweiser, and anyone who tried to order vegetables would be laughed at and called a goddam sissy before getting dragged out and beaten up in the back alley.
Oh, the possibilities…
